Little Anecdotes from the Weekend

One of my favorite moments from this past weekend was in one of my older classes. Our target vocabulary for the weekend was careers. To begin the class, I had the class of five get into two groups, a boys' team and a girls' team. I gave them a sheet of paper with all the letters on the alphabet and they had to "race" to write down as many careers that they could remember. The girls read their list first and they worked hard to get at least one or two careers written down that started with almost every letter. The boys took a different approach

A: African footballer

B: Baseball Player

C: Computer Programmer, China Footballer

D: Doctor

E: Egyptian Footballer

F: French Footballer

G:

H:

I: Indian Footballer

J: Jordan Footballer

K: Knight, Korean Footballer

L: Los Angelos Footballer

M: Mars Footballer

N: Nigerian Footballer

O: Orlando Footballer

P: Panda Vet

Q:

R:

S: Sweden Footballer

T: Thailand Footballer

U:

V:

W: Waiter

X:

Y: Yunnan Province Footballer

Z: Zookeeper

I totally lost it at Mars Footballer and Sweden Footballer, and of course, ending it with zookeeper. It was just brilliant. The two boys were just giggling through it. I am glad they have each other in that class!

Saturday night after I went to the gym, I was on a mission to buy flowers and plants for the two teachers that are leaving our school, Claire and Stephanie, and the two new teachers, Sue and Sabrina. I was able to say "that, two" to the shopkeeper! That's progress, people! I went home and designed some Roddy-tastic "Good-bye" and "Hello" cards.

Yesterday, at work was good. Sabrina is going to be co-teaching a few of my classes so she shadowed me a bit. I was happy that my small stars were on their best behavior for me! I had a parent teacher meeting for one of my older classes that composed of all young women. All the parents want me to teach a novel in the class when it starts it's new term in about a month. I'm going to be busy trying to find something that is both interesting and mature enough and at their reading level.

Last night, we had a Christmas, Western New Year, Chinese New Year, Good-bye, Welcome party at a Japanese restaurant where we had our previous Director of Studies leaving-do party. We were put in the exact same room that we were in last June. They cook the food right in front of you and they even show off some of their knife flinging capabilities. It was all meat until they cooked up some mushrooms and Stephanie helped me order some pumpkin soup. The company was rather interesting. Everyone shared kind words for Stephanie and Claire, and were all welcoming to Sue and Sabrina. However, their was a lot of sake being poured ( I learned I really don't like Sake from our last outing, so I passed on that experience) and people got rather emotional. Our school's head manager, John, suggested we all go around the table to ask a question. A few of the questions were just fun and funny, but some got rather uncomfortable for a large crowd with lots of translation needed. It was quite a memorable evening!

Today at work with interesting. Everyone was either nursing a hangover or just tired from long night after a 11 hour work day. I have found a lite rock station on the Internet that I enjoy listening to in a classroom by myself as I graded papers this afternoon.

Go Ducks!