A Typical Wednesday --Nina

Life here is full of extreme emotions that fluctuate depending on how our kids decide to act in any given class. Here is an example of what a day can be like at Yongfeng, as seen through the lens of my emotional highs and lows. 

Low: At 7:00, the lovely 4th grader, Cally, banged on my door to wake me up, just to give me a marker she forgot to hand in yesterday. Good morning! Time to get dressed so that fewer than three of my students (and no 6th grade boys) see me in my pajamas today. It’s always a good day when that happens.

Cally

High: Eating breakfast to the cheerful sounds of the morning exercise routine.

Neutral: I spent first and second period grading the homework that my HW monitors dropped off this morning, as well as making sure all of my flashcards, markers, speakers, and notes were ready for my morning classes.

High: 2nd grade English class! We totally conquered “I like to eat, eat, eat apples and bananas” today, even the hand motions that go along with each vowel sound. They are just the cutest. We celebrate the end of each class with a rollercoaster cheer. I'm sad to say that I don't have many pictures of the second graders, since I only have them once a week, but I'd like to show you their cuteness, so I'm using some of June's pictures from last year. For more awesome pictures of Yongfeng from June: http://thank9stars.tumblr.com/archive/2012/5

So cute!

So snotty!

It's hard not to love these guys. 

Low: 4^th grade music. The 4^th graders cannot handle relocating to the music room for class. They seem to forget that they’re still in class, even though there are no desks in front of them, and their stools become multicolored. They managed to sit through and enjoy our music appreciation mini-lesson about gamelan music. (But I swear they were more enthralled by the KFC commercial that came before the clip than they were the gamelan. Ooo fried chicken...) BUT, then, when I asked them to move their stools into a circle so that we could play a game, chaos ensued. Apparently moving stools into circles is not a life skill that my lovely 4^th graders have acquired yet. What followed was a crazy mess, no game, a full minute of class silence before I would let them go to lunch, and a serious, private chat with one of the boys, after class. He had refused to enter the circle, and kept trying to mess up the minute of silence, in a horribly rude, snarky way. After our conversation, I meant to send him to his homeroom teacher, but he started crying and told me his mom would beat him if he missed lunch for disciplinary reasons. Oh. Okay. We compromised that he would talk to his homeroom teacher after lunch.

High: A delicious, but rushed lunch of spinach noodles topped with beef, carrot, and potato stew. Such a good change from our normal routine of plain noodles and cabbage!

High: Being waved at and happily greeted by a pack of 4^th grade girls as they came back from lunch.

Low: Then they followed me into the teachers’ bathroom, and happily waited right outside of my stall while still attempting to talk to me because they wanted to play.

High: They were so insistent on waiting for me because they had brought me beautiful flower bouquets from their farms/yards!

Today's flower yield

Fridays' flowers

More flowers from last week. Thank you 4th grade girls! (You'll notice that these are a bit sloppier than the other days. That's because I arranged them in my glasses, not the girls. They really do a beautiful job.)

High: The first meeting of the Yongfeng Percussion Ensemble! (We’re working on a name, but it took me long enough to figure out a proper way of saying “percussion ensemble” in Chinese, so we’re sticking with this for now.) I was a little anxious about this meeting, since it again involved putting a bunch of 4^th graders into the music room, but it went wonderfully. (It is an audition-only group, so it’s pretty legit. It’s possible that everyone who auditioned got in, but they don’t need to know that. They were clearly very proud of themselves for making it into this prestigious ensemble.) It turns out that 19 kids are much easier to deal with than 34. They loved the clip from STOMP that I showed them and did a great job brainstorming what objects from our lives we could use as instruments. Then, we played some group rhythm games, which were a big hit. And they can keep a reasonably steady beat! Yay! As we headed back to their classroom, they all kept picking up random objects and showing me what noises they could make with them. Great success. (Except it got a bit grating as I was attempting to set up for English class.)

Low: 4^th grade English. While the 4^th graders did manage to settle down after lunch, the majority of them just weren’t too into paying attention in class today. Even what I thought was a fun activity of making our own flashcards and using them in a game, was a flop. Thank goodness for Cally (my wake-up call this morning) and her loud and proud voice when participating in class. At least she thought it was fun learning how to say “Time for breakfast! Drink some milk!” (I don’t choose the curriculum.)

High: 6^th grade science. Something about the warm weather and science falling after gym class made the 6^th graders so quiet today! Jimmy wasn’t shouting things at random, and Paul managed to stay in his seat! We were learning about genetic engineering in food, and I think they all enjoyed the news articles I printed out for them about man-made meat and oil-producing plants. And, I decided to relive the glory days of my 8^th grade research project on genetic engineering in food. During my oral presentation, I had brought in chocolate covered strawberries, to demonstrate a fruit that is usually quite tiny, but that humans have bred to be gigantic. I bought big strawberries in Xi’an this weekend to demonstrate the same thing to the 6^th graders. Even without the chocolate, as soon as I opened the Tupperware, they were cheering in excitement about the prospect of eating a strawberry. Trying doing that with an American 6^th grade class.

Jimmy! By far my most disruptive student, but he's incredibly lovable and actually hilarious, unlike many of our other class clowns. 

Low: 4^th grade science. This lesson actually went very well! We were learning about gravity and the moon’s rotation around the earth, so there were fun experiments to be done involving “racing gravity” to catch things before they fall to the ground, and putting ping-pong balls or water in a cup and swinging it around in circles, noting that the things don’t fall out, even when the cup is upside down (like how the moon doesn’t fall on the earth). So, everyone was having a good time. But, at one point, Nate, the adorable boy with braces, ran out of his seat to tell me about how he needed to sweep when class was over, and I couldn’t hold them there after class, like I did after music class. (I had just said that we weren’t going to go outside to play with the water in our cups until everyone handed in their ping-pong balls.) This came after he had already asked me twice that day about when class was over and what time it was. These are very frustrating questions to be asked, when you’d like to think that your classes are fun and students are not constantly waiting for them to be over. It had been a long day, and he was breaking a lot of rules by doing that. I snapped at him, “Only I decide when class is over, you do not get to demand things like that!” I was very close to his face, and he is a very sensitive, adorable little child. He cannot handle conflict well. So, he spent the rest of the period crying. I felt like a horrible horrible person. I spent the rest of the period talking to him about how I shouldn’t have been so mean, and apologizing, while also making sure the other kids weren’t dumping water on each others’ heads. I’m hoping he still doesn’t think I’m a scary monster tomorrow morning. That will break my heart.

High: There was going to be a teachers’ meeting after school (we’re never clear on the times or agendas of these things), but it was cancelled. Abby and I got to have our daily sharing session, about the things that went wrong and right in our days. I was still very shaken up about the Nate situation, so she helped me put that in perspective.

High: Xena and Cindy came to play in my room before going home (it was 5:30 already, by the way, and they were still at school). We attempted to make our Slinkies walk down the stairs, with no success, unfortunately. Then we played Trouble, with more success.

Cindy, with her fox scarf. Such a cutie. 

Xena! The two of them are best friends, since they don't live in Yongfeng, but in a neighboring village, and they have to get a ride home together everyday.

High: Dinner! I always look forward to meals, however repetitive they may be. At least tonight we had vermicelli noodles, in addition to the usual cauliflower, cabbage, carrots, and gruel.

High: One of the other teachers at our school found an accordion in a random pile of boxes and decided that I should have it.

High: Abby and I went on a successful quest for ice cream in our village.

Low: My new door (the cause of the cement storm of last week) has already broken, so it couldn’t close today. One of the bolts somehow got bent and refused to go back in the door. One of our deans spent half an hour trying to fix it, and he managed just to jam it into the doorframe permanently. Oh well, didn’t need that bolt anyway. At least I can close my door.

High: Our weekly conference call with the Yongfeng team.

Low: Our internet decided to die in the middle of the call. It’s still not back. I’m writing this in Word and will post it tomorrow morning. 

Happy Hump Day everyone! I promise to post again soon with updates about the story behind my iPhone's recovery, and also last week's puberty lesson in 6th grade science class!