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.


I tried to plan as many activities as possible that didn't involve me talking, but unfortunately, most of that planning led me to games and YouTube clips. I decided that at least in music class this week, we could slack off a little bit and watch Fantasia. 

Fantasia was the only thing that successfully quieted my 4th graders so far this week without my hoarse attempts at yelling. Somehow they all managed to be enthralled by such a tiny tiny screen. Look at them being so well behaved and cute.

In other news this week, I started my project to get glasses for the kids with bad vision. I noticed that a lot of my sixth graders are having trouble seeing the board, so I proposed this project to our team, and I was very happy to receive everyone's support. Chen laoshi, the retired local teacher who helps us organize things in Xi'an, should be connecting us with a former student who will help bring eye doctors out to our village. In the meantime, it is my job this week and next week to test every student's vision, to see who should be examined once the real optometrists get here. (You may remember back in elementary school when they sent you to the nurse to check your vision and hearing, and then the nurse told you whether or not you needed to go to see an optometrist. I function as the school nurse in this situation.) I got through all of the 6th graders today. I am amazed that some of them were able to survive school this far with such awful vision. But luckily, it was a minority of students who had abysmal test results.

My bedroom/office has been transformed into an eye clinic. They use the "cascading E chart" here, since you can't be certain whether or not someone will know the English alphabet. 

The eye chart I bought came with this awesome vegetable banner/meter stick. It actually came in handy when I was setting up my pseudo-clinic, since I realized I had no way of measuring where 5 meters away from the door was. 

The 6th graders did okay on their tests. Not well, but okay. The class average was a 65.1%. That seems incredibly awful to me, but I need to remind myself that I attended 16 years of schools in which the students were all above average. The class, on average, (barely) passed! And there were a bunch of star students who got Mickey Mouse stickers.
Things to work on for the next unit:
-writing (We're going to start practicing on the white boards that I made for them out of laminated white paper. I stole that idea from Abby.)
-sentences structures
-understanding confusing test questions

I haven't graded the 4th graders' tests yet. I'm afraid. And it was open notebook.