Day 66
We went with Gilbert to teach our
elementary age class. It was fun, but I
wonder how much progress the children make when there isn’t much practice going
on during the week. They do have English
classes at school, where they learn to recognize things like fruits and such,
but unless the English teachers are natural English speakers, their
pronunciation is not usually correct. I
think that is what Gilbert wants us to have them learn most. He is very conscience himself of pronouncing
his English correctly. We are
trying. It is fun to work with the
children that age.
After we are done with the two hours of
children, Gilbert sits David and me down for about an hour of Chinese
instruction. We made some progress today
because I can still remember the sentences that we learned. He wanted us to make sure we pronounce the
Chinese words correctly because one small accent sound made the wrong way can
really change what you said. Instead of
asking for something that is good, you may be asking for something that is not
good. David was trying to get the
pronunciation of one word down and the teacher aide, Zinia, that they hired to
work at the school with us and Gilbert’s friends, Leo, started laughing pretty
hard.
They treated us to lunch and on the way
there, we walked by a playground. It
really is more like an outdoor gym with equipment for adults to use that will
strengthen muscles and also work aerobically.
We went over and started using the equipment and there was a grandmother
there with her granddaughter. It was starting
to get pretty cold so she was going to take her in and the granddaughter points
to me and said, “Grandmother” in Chinese!
Zinia said this to me so I had to go over and get to know this little
sweetheart! She as a super cutie and I
would have a picture of her, except my purse was locked in Gilbert’s trunk. After lunch, they drove us to In Zone,
a shopping mall and we got a few things we needed.
David had another football game with his
students this afternoon. When he got
home, we went out in search of more persimmons.
It seems to be the ending of the season for getting them because we
found a lot of mushy ones. We finally
found enough good ones and sampled food from some of the local bakers that were
on the market street. Some of the people
we had purchased vegetables from the other day recognized us and said, “Ni hao.” As we were walking back, we decided to stop
at a restaurant that looked like it had enough pictures for us to decide what
we wanted. It turned out it was
cafeteria style so we could just point to what we wanted.
I made chocolate cake for the potluck dinner
tomorrow.
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