Wow, let me just begin by saying that today has been like the longest day ever. It’s my first official day working with the kids. I got up at 6:30 for breakfast, which was again 馒头, but hey, what can I do, it’s free food, and it’s what the kids here eat. Classes started at 8am sharp, and with my 初一第三班，I had math for the first two periods.
Right away, the math teacher introduced me to the class. In fact, she actually had me teach math in Chinese...which turned out to be somewhat of a disaster, considering my limited Chinese vocabulary of math terms. They were learning how to set up inequalities word problems related to money interest rates. The math teacher literally handed me a math textbook and said, teach them example problems 1 and 2, so I had like 5 minutes of prep time. The first example that I was supposed to show them went terribly wrong. For the longest time, I could not figure out what the problem was asking so I couldn’t set up an equation. Also, my Chinese writing sucks so the kids spent awhile just watching me struggle to copy the problem on the blackboard. I tried to follow the teacher’s hints and prompted them to work through the problem. After awhile, I realized that I had failed and requested for the teacher to come up and take over. During the time that she was explaining the first example, I had sufficient time to look over the second example and familiarize myself with the given conditions. Sure enough, I felt that the second problem went a lot better. I was able to guide them through the setup and clearly explain the solution, only two problems…one, the students had the answer solution too so I don’t know if they actually knew how to solve the problem or they were just reading off their books; two, I had not clearly setup the problem like the teacher had intended for it to be done so she had to briefly re-explain using the correct Chinese math setup. I later learned that the same teacher teaches a couple other math classes, but after me, she stopped offering for us to teach the class, because she realized what a scrub I was, haha.
I spent the rest of the morning and afternoon with the kids in class. Their school day is torturous, much longer than a normal school day in the U.S. I sat through 2 math periods, 1 English period, 1 biology period, 1 Chinese period, and 3 rest periods. Their English class involved learning through phonetics. It went pretty slow but very class interactive so we only made it through 3 actual vocabulary words. I thought the biology class was really interesting. A lot of the stuff that they’re learning I was not exposed to until high school biology. Finally, the Chinese class was very intense. It took me awhile to understand the 古文 that they were reading. My only excuse was that I moved to the U.S. when I was eight so my Chinese level is still that of a second grader. Oh well, I guess I should watch more Chinese and Korean soaps!
Later today, I played street basketball with some eighth graders. We faired a lot better against them than the other day playing against the teachers, so we’re either improving or just not playing people of the right age group. I’d like to think it’s the first. Anyways, it was a lot of fun. One funny thing did happen though. One of the guys from Duke (DLo) ripped his shorts somehow, as if he did the splits. It was freaking hilarious!
Finally, the last thing I want to mention today was learning how to play Settlers, aka Catan. I believe it’s a German board game, but yeah, it was really fun and addictive. One game lasted like two hours! People got angry, vengeful, frustrated, laughed their heads off, and some had really bad luck… All in all, it was a really cool game. I think more people should try it!
P.S. The food here is really salty and lacking meat…. I feel like I’m becoming vegan… primary diet includes rice and 馒头. Bleh… and you wonder why kids are malnutritioned… they’re living on 6 yuan for 3 meals for godsake!!! Someone help them!
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