Day 50
David left for his class and I did laundry,
dishes and school class work. We met Eva
at the teacher’s restaurant on campus and she helped us learn how to order dishes
from there. Until we learn to read some Chinese,
we are just going to have to be guessing at what we are getting. We sat and talked for a long time. She took us to the office to see if we could
get permission to rearrange our classes for the weekend that we want to go on
the tour there with the other BYU teachers.
They will give us the permission because they believe that anything we
do to better understand China; will help us in teaching our students here. I agree.
Now I just have to find out when we can get those classes rearranged for…
That took most of the afternoon and we Eva
had said she would drive us to Walmart so we could get some things there and we
would take the bus home. Traffic was
very congested and it was taking a long time to get there, when David received a
call from the Gilbert, who had talked to us the other day about doing a
Saturday class for a school they are doing in their complex. It is an after-school and Saturday
program. They wanted to take us out to
dinner and then show us the classroom and meet the students. Dinner was nice and we went to the school and
all of a sudden, they are asking us to teach the kids! One little girl knew a fair amount of English
for a seven year old, but the rest were still on the basics of “hello”, “My
name is…” I decided to start out with “Head,
Shoulders, Knees and Toes.” That went
over well. What to do next? Um…. “Wheels
on the Bus”!! Okay, that took another
five minutes. Gilbert spent time
explaining in Chinese what we were saying in the song. (Another three minutes…) We decided to introduce ourselves since it
seemed they wanted us to take over more.
Then they wanted the children to have English names, so those that didn’t
have them, we helped give them to them.
I was a little taken aback because I thought that was something the
parents should do, but they seemed pleased with the names we gave them. One girl’s name sounded a lot like Susan, so
that is what we gave as her name.
Another sounded more like “Lowell”, but after the experience I had in
class yesterday with a tongue twister that had the name Lowell in it, I was
reluctant to give a six year old that name to wrestle with, so we came up with
Louis, which seemed slightly easier…
After about a half hour to forty-five
minutes, they decide that we would do and we weren’t really prepared to just
come in off the top of our head and do much more than that, that they could
send the kids home and then take us home.
It was fun to work with the children those ages, they are the ages I
enjoy the most, but I was glad to not be put on the spot any longer.
Then it was back home to try and get as
much school work done to be ready for tomorrow as we could before we crawled
into bed.
BTW:
the temps are getting quite cool and still no heat in the building. They said they would be testing it on October
15, but we don’t think that happened…
1 comment:
Actually they did test it I found out today, but they won't be turning the heat on until Nov. 15th! So we just put up with it until then. It doesn't get as cold as home at night though, so we'll survive.
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