Day 198 – Power Out!

A huge windstorm came up last night and left us without power.  It came on for a little bit close to morning, but when I got up to get my shower, there was no light in the bathroom and hence, no hot water.  We wondered what to do for breakfast and I was wondering if there was electricity elsewhere on the campus.  I started getting ready without the shower.  David wondered if the circuit breaker had been bumped off when the power came back on in a surge, but that wasn’t it.  Just as I was deciding what to do for my classes if there wasn’t any electricity in the classroom, the power came back on.  Still no shower because it would have been at least a half hour before there would have been enough hot water to shower with. 

I was a little unsure about my lesson plans today.  I had tried to plan, but nothing felt right and I didn’t have time to come up with what I really wanted to do, so I was rather “flying by the seat of my pants” today.  I had prepared a Boys vs Girls game, where they see a picture and the first one who comes up with the name of the picture gets a point.  That took the first hour.  Then I showed the movie Kites and had them talk about memories they have of grandparents or loved ones.  There were some tears.  It all turned out pretty well.

My second class on Tuesday’s is only 30 students and I always seem to get things done faster with that group, so I had to come up with something more for them.  I had read the plans for another game that I decided to try.  I had them get into teams of six students (normally I put them in groups, but I decided to try this method today).  They had to pick a name for their team (that was harder than I thought it would be; it’s not in the realm of things they are used to doing).  Then I gave them a letter of the alphabet and they had to come up with a sentence, as a team, that had as many words starting with that letter as they could.  The sentence needed to make sense.  It was hilarious!  These kids can get very competitive.  The team that had the second shortest sentence was the one that won!  So much fun!

I had a lot of work to do this afternoon and David was feeling sorry for me, so he took a lot of papers and corrected them for me, so I could enter scores.  He doesn’t have as much to do this semester because he can repeat all of his lesson plans from last semester and his classes are smaller (30-35 compared to 30 to 51 for me) and I have to make up new lesson plans for all my freshman classes.

David mopped the floors this morning and then he hopped on one of the buses that we wanted to see where it went to and rode it to the end and back.  It looks like a bus we will use in the future when we want to go to Da Ming Lake.