Friday the Thirteenth

Someday I'll know what this picture says. Check out the little dude on the far left.

Here's the view from the 12th floor of our classroom building. There are several river crossings on the university's campus; here we see a foot bridge, a little glorieta, and an ancient bell. I'll get a close up of the ancient bell some other time.

My tantrum is over, not because I "cooled off" or "got some perspective," only because I have bigger fish to fry right now. I'll have a homework tantrum again later, when it's relevant.

Today was review day. There were 14 grammar points to review. We learn all the vocab on our own. After a half hour of review, we chilled out for a half hour, and then our tests came out. Some grammar games, a reading section, a writing section. I did ok, I don't know how well I played the grammar games. I'm really bad at unscrambling characters to form a sentence, mainly because I use my own sentence order. The teachers actually teach us sentence order, but don't really let us write it down.

After the written was done, we chilled out some more, and then were called in for the oral section. The topic I drew was how old people's lesiure activities are different from young people's. I gave a couple of examples, but when they didn't stop me, I went on to say a couple things that old and young people had in common. When they didn't stop me, I said, "is that it?" and the answer was "ke yi..."

In other words, it's over if you want it to be over. Hao le. Now I'm back in my room; me and another dude will interview three chinese people of different ages about their leisure activities. I'm a Spanish teacher, so I know how to get this done: I'll make a survey form and ask them yes/no questions... "do you do tai chi, yes or no? Do you see movies often, yes or no?" That way we can have control over the interview, and it doesn't turn into a long session of listening to someone we don't understand. Don't worry, we'll ask for comments at the end.

Today, I asked another student if she was Korean. She's not, she's Taiwanese, but she said someone else thought she was Korean. Is my Asian American radar in doubt? To save face, I said her hair seemed Korean, and she lit up and said that she goes to a Korean place to get her hair cut. Of course, then I pretended I had this specific superpower, of identifying the ethnicities of people's hair dressers. She was surprised.

I myself am Filipino American, but my hair happens to be cut by Vietnamese people.... That's how I should introduce myself from now on...