Another Week Finished

After a nice little break in Qingdao it was quite hard to face up to the prospect of returning to work, but on sunday I planned my lesson and spent a few hours with one of the chinese teachers to get the vocab all sorted and I was looking forward to it. The lesson was on Jobs- Ni Baba Zuo Shenme Gongzuo - What job does your father do? We looked at a list of jobs vocab in english and chinese and then moved on to the children saying what jobs there parents do, what that actually involves them doing (they struggled with this and just tended to say what they enjoyed doing outside of work) , how long they have done the job for and do they enjoy the job. I then got 2 from each table to stand up and read their answers to the class.

This left about 10 minutes so we moved on to what jobs they want to do when they are older. I gave them a list of fantasy jobs such as football player,moviestar, singer and astronaut and I told them that when I was younger I wanted to be a football player. However, most of them still chose mundane jobs such as teachers and managers. Think that shows how serious the children are and how much they want to make their parents proud.

The lessons were all good. Thursday lunch time sat with Dave I said the words "I've really enjoyed teaching this week, it's gone really well". Thursday afternoon I had my last two classes of the week and they were terrible so I was back to indifferent again! I need to try and think of a way of sorting out those last two classes which doesnt include violence but does stopped me from giving myself a massive headache for two hours.

Sorry for the lack of postings for this week but China appears to banned Blogger again. Whilst we can still get on to post things via a back door, we cannot view or read our blogs or anyone elses blogs at all. I was waiting to see whether this would sort its self out before posting as its always nice to have a look at the finished article, but it might be this way for some time now.

Its getting colder by the day, have had to resort to using the warm air setting on the air con and have now got a thicker duvet. You know its cold when the kids are coming to your lessons in Long Johns! I don't actually think its that bad and have still been wearing shorts and t-shirts most of the time but its a bit worrying that it can take such a sudden drop and one only wonders quite how cold it is going to get.

My Chinese phone is completely broken now so will have to purchase another one, not ideal considering the money shortage Dave and i are both going through. The phone resulted in me oversleeping and missing one of my lessons - it doubles as my alarm clock. But it worked out OK as instead of teaching 2 classes of 30 for 40 minutes, I just taught one big class of 60 for 40 minutes. If I could do that everytime I would only have 11 classes! Might be worth Investigating!

Another thing is starting to worry me. I appear to picked up a stalker. This girl is 17 and not one of my students (i teach 13 year olds) but she occaisonally just turns up at my lessons. This week she came at one break time, the one where I had overslept and missed my class and I was running around frantically trying to sort it out. She had a gift for me. I'm used to recieving little presents everynow and again- posters,stickers, chocolate etc are all readily accepted- but not this time. She had a little ginger kitten. The conversation went like this:
"Charlie, I have this kitten and my mum will not let me have it, So I want to give it to you"
"I can't have that"
"Why?"
"I will kill it"
"Haha, will you take it?"
"No seriously, I have nowhere to keep it and I will probably kill it. Thanks though"
"OK sorry to disturb you, the email you gave me was wrong"
"No it wasn't" (I had given her a fake address)
"Yes it was it doesn't work, can I have the correct one"
So I gave up and gave her my email and now receive emails from her, which I am trying to ignore.

This weekend should be interesting. The Americans, being Americans, love Halloween so we are having a Halloween party-costumes and all. Given my current appearance and lack of any haircut for some considerable amount of time, I'm biting the bullet and going as the easiest possible thing for me: Harry Potter. All I have to do is put on a shirt and tie and a scarf and I'm sorted. Embarrasing Photo's will be up next week. Hopefully Blogger will be sorted by then.

Take Care

Charlie