Update

I think its time to fill the rest of you in on whats been going on here. I have enjoyed my time in China very much and I will always look back on it with a smile on my face. I will also have to come back some time, because I still haven't made it to the Great Wall.
     The thing is I don't really like teaching. It has been a struggle for me to get out of bed in the mornings, because I'm not looking forward to the day. I was also told before I came that not knowing Chinese really wasn't a big deal and you don't really need to know it if you are working in an international school. I beg to differ at least in my case. One of my favorite things about Europe was being able to talk to people and be involved in the community to a certain extent. I can't do that here. I would describe not knowing Chinese as just surviving here, but I don't want to just survive I want to thrive!
     So I have made up my mind to come and I am at peace with the idea. I have talked to the airline and I have a ticket. Then talking with one of my best friends last night she told me that her lymph nodes are potentially cancerous. I believe God was preparing me to hear that. He knew that I would want to be home with her for this. There are no such things a coincidences.
     So I will be landing in Tulsa Wednesday evening if all of my flights go as planned. I wish it had ended a little differently, but right now all I want to to is come home.

9.16.10

We have been going over the body and I read Eric Carle’s book “From Head to Toe” today. It was so much fun. His pictures wowed them. I had to wait a good minute to read the page, because they were so excited about the pictures. There is an animal on each page and you go over a body part, the first page is a penguin and you turn your head, a monkey and you wave your arms. Well one of the pages is a donkey and he kicks his legs and the picture has a girl kicking her legs behind her. In one of my classes they got really into the book and were doing this action and it was so funny to see all 35 of them kicking their leg just like the picture. I wish that I had a camera, but just know that they looked great. We have also been singing “Head and shoulders knees and toes” and it is by far their favorite song we have sung. I think it is because of the motions. You aren’t just using your hands, but you get to move your whole body. I do have to say though that the girl that sings has a really high voice and I can’t sing anyways, but to try and sing with her is impossible. I’m going to have to remember next time to find singers that I can sing with. I just mouth the words when she goes that high.

The book with the young ones was to much. I would have thought they would have gotten a little more, but oh well. Life goes on and we sing our song.

     I went exploring with Helen to a new part of town this evening. It is more what I would call downtown. There are a lot of shops and big hotels. I didn’t take my camera, but this places needs some pictures, especially at night. I would compare it to Vegas. I’ve never been to Vegas, but I’ve watched enough CSI that I’m pretty confident in saying this. There were neon lights all over the place and tons of people everywhere. One of the places we went to is called Walking Street. It is one of the few places in Zhongshan that cars aren’t allowed on, which is really nice. Walking Street is basically a strip mall, but a little more classy. It is the part of town that a lot of Europeans inhabited a back in the day. I’m not really sure how far back, but I would say about 100 years ago. The buildings along the Walking Street look like they could be from Europe. It is quite a difference from the rest of the city, because the rest of the city has this weird tile on the outside. If you look at the picture of the Primary School that is what most of the buildings look like, but not on Walking Street. They are more elegant and stucoed-ish.

     There is a McDonalds on the end of Walking Street and as me and Helen got closer we saw a group of people standing around right outside of the McD’s. Then we noticed a few police motorcycles and I peered into the circle and there were two guys sitting on the ground. It looked almost like they had stolen something from the McD’s because the policeman was holding a McD’s bag. Then I noticed that both men had their thumbs zip-tied together. Instead of handcuffs the Chinese law enforcement uses zip-ties.

     Me and Helen took a rickshaw back to our apartments. It is really fun to ride in these things, you really get to see a lot of the city this way. I highly recommend it! We passed one of the parks and there were loads of people out dancing and playing badminton. The parks all of “playground” equipment, but I see more adults using it as exercise equipment than I have little kids playing on it.  

9.15.10

     As I walk to the Kindergarten every morning there are a wide variety of people that I see. Some I am starting to recognize, because I see them everyday. There is one older woman inparticular that refuses to smile at me. Most people at least nod their head back. But she scowls at me, the complete opposite of most people. The other day she was in conversation with her friends and as I walked past I smiled and nodded like I do everyday and she stopped talking, looked at me and then scowled as I walked past. One day she will smile back : )

     This week in the afternoons with my L2 kids we are making paper lanterns in celebration of the coming Mid-Autumn Festival. The festival is basically to worship the moon. So with these lanterns my first group of kids I seriously overestimated their ability to use scissors. They needed to cut out the border of the lantern on the dark solid line. Unfortunately, they all cut on the dotted line about an inch below the solid line, then insisted on mutilating the rest of the paper. They all had puzzles by the end of class. There was only one girl that walked away with what the lantern should have looked like and two other girls that we were able to salvage enough so it looked like a lantern. From then on out I had the borders pre-cut, so all they had to do was color and then make a few basic cuts and I helped glue it in a circle. The other classes have been much more successful. One of my classes kept trying to include me in their conversation. However, my lack of Chinese made this very difficult. I needed to know a little so that I knew they weren’t bad mouthing me.

     On Tuesdays and Wednesday the school offers a Yoga class for the teachers and I went Wednesday last week and Tuesday and Wednesday this week. I’ve just come from the Wednesday class and that Chinese instructor had us in a few positions that I wasn’t really sure were possible at first. I’m going to be sore or something in the morning. I’m hoping that by the end of the term I will be a little more flexible though. The class itself is pretty enjoyable. The instructor is really nice, but doesn’t speak any English, so if I’m doing something wrong she comes over and gently pushes my body into the right position. I’m sure as soon as me and Helen walk in she is like, “great the stiff foreigners are back,” because those Chinese teachers are much more flexible than either one of us. But she just smiles and helps us out. 

     Some days I think that I really want to come home where life is comfortable and easy. I wouldn't have any real struggles except deciding what to have for dinner. But then I think about the amazing opportunity I have been given and all of things I will learn this year and experiences I will have and people I have met and will meet. It is only a year and everything at home will still be there when I get back. I have to keep reminding myself of that. I do get to come home, I'm not here forever. This year will really make me appreciate life back in America. I look forward to seeing what is next. 

More Pictures

This is the gate to the Primary School Gate. This is where I live and I have to walk through the gate back and forth every day. The guards are all really nice and say hello to me as I go back and forth.

This is the front of the Primary School 

After climbing 5 flights of stairs this is the hallway that leads to my apartment.  There is a basketball court on the floor below. The lock on the gated door never works and I spend about ten minutes trying to get the key to go in the lock.

This is the view from my bedroom window. You can see the basketball court below. 

There are two guys that love playing basketball.  They are there almost every evening. I checked to see if they could see in my room, but my windows are tinted so they can't during the day. And yes my window has bars.

This is a little park right outside of the Primary School gates. In the evenings there are a group of grandmas that come out and do some form of exercise. I may come and join them one evening. 

This is the front of the Kindergarten. It is about a 5 min walk from the Primary School. 

I discussed mooncakes in my last blog and thought a picture would do better than my description. Here you can see the nice yolk in the middle. 

Teacher's Day

     Today was Teacher’s Day. I got a carnation from one of the moms and the school gave all of the teachers Mooncakes. I was told by a few of the teachers that the moon cakes we got are sweet, good and contain an egg yoke. There are other types of moon cakes, some have meat in the middle and are salt and some have nuts and are sweet, but ours have egg yokes. So at lunch I started eating my moon cake thinking that when they said egg yoke, they meant that the yoke was mixed into the filling. There is a breadish outside and then sweet bean paste on the inside. So I’m eating and then all of a sudden I look down and I see this bright orange matter peaking out of the bean paste. I nibbled around it and discovered it was the egg yoke. And I mean the yoke. They had baked just a hunk of egg yoke into the middle of the moon cake. Not mixed in, just whole. The yoke isn’t sweetened, so if you don’t want a nice bite of almost bitterness, don’t take a large chunk of the yoke, it doesn’t end well.

     We sang “If your happy and you know it” in my N2 classes and just singing and doing silly motions keeps them really entertained.

     I’ve been teaching the kids high fives and they love it. It is our new favorite thing. They all want to give high fives as they leave the classroom. Yoda even gave me a high five. He looked at my hand like he was contemplating the deeper meaning of a hand, but then slowly gave me a high five. He smiled afterwards and gave me a small wave and then went back to his normal expression of not quite a scowl, but a deep concentration of the meaning of life.

     I received a few basic supplies from the school today such as a few glue sticks, a few child safe scissors, a stapler and 12 boxes of colored pencils and a small sharpener. I was so excited about the colored pencils, because I had been using my markers with the kids in the afternoon and one of my tables is covered in all different colors now. I figured pencils where also better than crayons, because they would melt in my classroom over the weekend without the air conditioner. So I open up one of the boxes to get it ready for my afternoon kids only to find that the pencils weren't sharpened and the only sharpener they had given me was a small inch long thing. So now I have 144 colored pencils that need sharpening and only a small sharpener for them all. I know what I'm getting at Fu Mart this weekend : ) Oh and all of the pencils say Made in China on them. How fitting.

     Today was my last day to roll mats! Hooray! One of my groups was so restless, they could tell it was Friday, so I let them just play and goof off with the mats after we had rolled them up. I showed them that they could look through the whole in the middle of the roll and they thought it was fun and we waved at each other through the wholes. Then one of the boys started using the mat to 'shoot' his friend. They started a small war in my classroom. Once shooting each other wasn't fun anymore they both turned their guns on me. I played along and had a very dramatic death. They came over to see if I was ok and I jumped up at them and they giggled with joy and ran away. We did this at least 5 more times until I had to take them back to class. 

A traditional Lion Dance. These guys danced/jumped around on the poles. It was impressive to watch them work so well together.

This is the skyline of Zhongshan from the south. 

This is the skyline from the north-ish

Thoughts

I’ve forgotten to mention that I went to dinner with an American couple. I met them at the Bible Study I went to on Sunday. They are from Arkansas and Tennessee and have been living in China for the past three years. I went to their apartment Tuesday and they grilled hamburgers on their balcony. It was such a good meal and they are a great couple to spend time with. They are a great contact to know.

     I shaved my legs this morning for the second time since I’ve been here and I’m going to have to figure out how to use distilled safe drinking water to shave, because my legs itched so bad I almost couldn’t stand it. They don’t do that normally so I have to believe it is from shaving and then the water getting in my pores. I can’t drink the water that comes out of my faucet I have to buy water or I’ve got one of those kettles that boils water and I can drink it once it has been boiled. It makes me wonder if I started mixing in a tiny bit of faucet water with my safe water if in a year you can be acclimated to the water enough that I could have small drinks out of the faucet. I may begin a new experiment.

     The weather here is tropical and humid. As in I start sweating the instant I step outside even though the temperature is in the low 80s. It has got me thinking about the hardness of my bed and tile floors everywhere. These are for hygienic reasons. If there was carpet or a soft squashy bed they would mold or be perpetually wet all the time. The bed has to be hard to stay dry and the floor has to be tile to stay clean.

     Something God has been showing me since I’ve been here is how much He is in everything. I spend a good portion of my morning in prayer and I notice how much better my day goes. I feel better and at peace about everything that happens. I know He has me here for a reason and I’m beginning to wonder if Kindergarten is just a side job. It is what got me to China, but not my real focus. 

9.9.10

 Last night I went to yoga with a few of the Chinese teachers and Helen. It was a lot of fun to get to spend time with some of the other teachers. Afterwards I worked on a few of my lesson plans and went to bed with it raining. Around 2:30 I woke up to the loudest clap of thunder I have ever heard. My entire apartment shook! The thunder might as well have been inside my apartment. Then all of the alarms on the bikes and cars went off. This repeated about 5 times before the storm moved on.

     This morning I did ‘morning exercise’ with the kids. The teachers have choreographed basic movements to a few songs and the children ‘exercise’ each morning. It was funny, because I didn’t know the motions any better than the kids, so we were all in the same boat together.

     There are definitely good days and bad days. Some of my lessons I think are great, but they don't go as well as I would have thought and some of the ones that I’m not so thrilled about go over really well. I taught my L2 classes the Cha, Cha Slide and it wasn’t quite as good as I thought. They really enjoyed it, but it was a little harder for them to follow than I thought it would be. I needed the words to be just a hair slower. We will sing it again for the next few days and see if it gets a little better. My N1 kids I had an umbrella and a kite so we could learn about the weather and it was good. I let them play with the stuff and it went over well. The most shocking part of the day was when we did big/small. I had them stand up and we stretched out our arms wide for big and the hunched down for small and they loved popping back up to be big! It was the highlight of the lesson. I never would have guessed.

     For me, my favorite part was when Yoda waved good-bye to me. He has just given me this scowl up until now, but he gave me a small wave. And he participated a little in big/small. He normally just looks at me like I’m the most ridiculous person he has ever met.

     In the afternoons I see the L2 students again. There are three classes and each class sends me 7 kids for twenty minutes. So I have three twenty minute classes and I see each of the L2 students once each week. I have a four week rotation for these afternoon classes. Week one is Montessori, week two arts and crafts, week three imagination theme and week four centers. So this week has been Montessori and the objective is for each student to be able to roll up a mat and then walk around it. Someone has either taught these kids this already or they are born with the natural ability to roll a mat perfectly, because I've had four days worth of kids and not a single one of them has had any problems rolling a mat what so ever. This means that we are finished with the lesson in about 5 minutes at most. I've been setting up the mats as an obstacle course and letting them run around them until they get tired and then we color. I've got a wall full of kindergarten drawings now and my room looks a little more used/homey. 

9.7.10

     I've come to the realization that teaching isn't something I want to do for the rest of my life. I think this year will be enough. I also don't think it would matter what grade it was, teaching just isn't my calling. I enjoy seeing the kids and giving high fives, but doing pretty much the same thing seven times in a row can get a little boring for me. It is a little bit of a challenge to see what they will like and what the kids want to do and what they can do. That does keep it a little more exciting for me. I'm just going to have to try new things and see what works and what doesn't.
     I have one kid in my N1D class that looks like a young Yoda. His ears almost come to a point and the stick out just right and he's eyes look so serious and like he is almost mad, but not quite, because he is thinking about whether he should be mad or not. I love seeing this kid stare at me from the bus each morning, I want to make faces back at him as he stares at me.

9.6.10

  Today was a very successful day in Kindergarten. I had more than enough things planned for all of my classes. L2 we did a word/letter match and they loved it! I had Aa, Bb, Cc, Dd and Jj, Kk, Ll, Mm written on the board and then I had a picture of an apple, bird, cat, dog, jacket, kite, lion and monkey. I would hold up on of the flashcards with a picture/word on it and ask them which letter it went with. I would hold it in front of the wrong letter and they would get so excited, because that was not the right letter. When I would hold the word in front of the right one they gave me a definite “yes”. We had so much fun. N1 having a lot of little things to do was perfect. We were constantly changing, so they never really got fidgety. My second to last class, however, was really, really quiet. It was almost creepy. I couldn’t get them to say anything. So I was trying to get them to say the color red and I just happened to have a red ball. So instead of getting the entire class to say red, I asked each of them individually to say read and when they did I then handed them the ball. Then they got to throw it back to me. This went over really well. I was glad to have a few smiles as they tossed it back. My last class is taught by a girl that just graduated with a Financial Accounting degree, she is in the same boat as me, but I think her class may be my favorite. They don’t know a lot of words, so they are excited to learn. Sometimes when they get really excited they just yell. It is really pretty funny, but then we calm them back down and they will say what I want them to. We just have to get our yells out.

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This afternoon was good as well. I had seven kids for twenty minutes from my L2 A,B,C classes. I rolled a mat and then they showed me that they could roll the mat. Then we all walked around the mat. I really haven’t figured out the point to this, but I’m told to teach it and so I do. After we finished rolling out mats I had cut pieces of paper in half and I let them draw pictures and I have hung them on the wall. It adds just a little something to have kid drawings up.

After the kids left I sat down on the mat next to my books and looked over my lesson plans for tomorrow and I had about ten minutes before I had to go down and stand at the gate to wave good-bye to the kids and I laid down. One of the worker ladies came in just as I had fallen asleep and I think I startled her more than she startled me. I don’t think she thought I was in my room. It was a good thing she came in though, because I would have slept for a while.

Overall a good day. I’m just taking it one day at a time. 

9.4.10

I’ve recovered a little from my disasters N1 classes. I think the problem is that I was focusing on one thing a day, but we need to do lots of little things each day, but repeat those things throughout the week. Instead of just doing a on Monday we do a, 1 and red on Monday and then add b, 2, blue on Tuesday. That way we are repeating, but adding new things.

     I spent a great evening and afternoon with Femke and Helen. We had a girls night/afternoon. Last night we had dinner and then a movie. The dinner was great and the movie really cheesy. The Expendables was good if you are looking for an action movie with not much else. We did get a good laugh out of it though.

     This afternoon we went to one of the coffee shops and talked for hours. It was really nice, because I learned a lot about them. They also asked me some great questions about Christianity and I hope I gave them answers they needed to hear. They seemed to really consider what I said, so that was encouraging. We then went to one of the streets in Zhongshan that is a market, a mile worth of tents. We had tea in a little shop on the road as well. It was great, because it was a side of Zhongshan I hadn’t seen yet.

     I just checked my bank statement and I took out 1000yuen and it was only $149. I was expecting a much worse exchange rate, b/c that is pretty close to what I got from the bank at home. And My bank only charged $1 or it would have only been $148. At home I have a $2 charge for using a none Liberty Federal ATM. So that was a good surprise. 

9.5.10 Sunday

This morning was great. I went to a Bible Study with Christine and a few other foreigners. Most of them were a little older and some even had kids, but it was so nice to have a small group of Christian friends. I also have to remember that I would be classified more as a young adult and not a college kid anymore. I’m beyond that stage of life even if I am only 22. One of the couples has even invited me to dinner! So Tuesday I will get a western meal. They are from Arkansas and Tennessee. I can’t wait. And they were all so nice and I can’t wait till next week.

     This afternoon I did a little exploring/shopping. I bought a few things all by myself and the language barrier wasn’t even that bad. We figured it out in the end. I may have paid a little more for the things, because I bought them in a store and not at a market, but I did it by myself.  I also bought some juice at a little juice bar and one of the guys there could speak English. It seemed so strange that he could speak English, but was working at a local juice shop and not at a bigger/better job. Oh, well it helped me out. I’m also getting pretty good at b

9.3.10

Rock, paper, scissors went over smoothly for my older kids (L2) yesterday, but I realized very quickly that it wouldn’t work for the younger ones (N1). This put me with nothing to do. I tried to wing it by talking about the letter Aa, but there is only so much you can do and it only took 5 minutes at most.

     What I learned about games is that they are great except for the fact that the rules are in English and they don’t know English. Even the basic concept of rock, paper, scissors was hard, b/c they don’t know enough English for the game to make sense. This puts me at a loss for what to do with little kids when all the games I know take to much explanation. 

9.1.10

     First day of Kindergarten

     To start the day off I stood in front of the gate and said “Good Morning” to everyone who walked up. It was about a thirty minute ordeal and there was no breeze. Even at 8:30 in the morning you know you are in the tropics. All of the kids wear uniforms. They are white with either blue trim for the boys or pink trim for the girls. They also have a uniform for PE. This uniform is also white, but it has red trim regardless of whether the kid is a boy or girl. The Kindergarten teachers have to change over 30 kids in and out of the uniforms. 

This morning I didn’t have my normal class and I won’t have my normal classes this afternoon either. So I’m pretty much free for the day. I’ve not been given very clear directions about tomorrow either. What I did do today is go and visit all of my class. It was very apparent the teachers that discipline their students versus the ones who don’t. It will make for a very diverse range of teaching. I’m nervous and the anticipation of starting real classes is not helping. I’m ready to start to see if I will sink or swim. I’m treading water, so neither right now.