The Silent Optometrist --Nina

This week has been a bit rough for me, since I lost my voice on Monday and haven't gotten it back since. I had a minor cold over the weekend, and I was expecting to be all better this week, but a lingering sore throat mixed with speaking in a teacher voice all day turned into serious hoarseness/laryngitis problems. At this point, my tactic has been to keep pushing my voice to its limit in class everyday, so that I can at least be heard over the roar of little voices. This is clearly not a sustainable life plan, but I'm hoping not to talk all weekend, so that I can recover for Monday. Abby and I are working out a sign language system.

Teacher's Day --Nina

Teacher's day is a big deal here. In America, I'm not sure if anyone really acknowledges its existence, but it's celebrated here at every school. That sounds very sweet and all, but it's actually a very strange phenomenon. Here's how it went at Yongfeng: Classes proceeded like normal until 11am, at which point all of the teachers left their classrooms unattended for an hour to go to the Teacher's Day Meeting. (I'm still not sure what was going on in those classrooms for an hour. There was definitely a lot of screaming.) In the meeting room, we encountered various local government officials, who proceeded to give lengthy speeches about the value of teachers. Then, each teacher was expected to give a brief speech. (Mine was a lot of mumbling about being new here, and about how I'm confused by this holiday since we don't really have it in America.)

The first week --Nina

As you can imagine, there is a lot going on here, since we just started school on Saturday. So many posters and tracking systems to make, so many names to learn! So, that is my excuse for not posting in such a long time.