Morning in China

Today and yesterday the sky was, I almost don't want to say it because I think I'll jinx it, a little blue. Even when it is blue though there's this permanent haze that settles around the edges. I'm actually starting to enjoy my longer class more then my others, not because it's easier or even because the students are better, but just because it's different. I'm already bored of my lesson plan for this week and I have to do it three more times tomorrow. By the last class I'm really just half asleep as I go through it. I know exactly what I'll say and what the students will do, and while I guess boredom is a more pleasant emotion then terror, that's only marginally true. Tomorrow for example I'll go in and have them play a version of the old game show $64,000 Pyramid. I'll have them get up and try to get there various groups to say a few words I have written on some paper by describing them. Some students will be good at it, others will barley be able to stand up there and will need constant prodding, while others will just point to a piece of papers instead of trying to say something like, "what you write on." Then I'll have them try to come up with words in certain categories without repeating themselves, not a bad vocabulary game, for some reason the category "things you use in school" works while the category, "things you find in a city" doesn't. Then they'll be a break followed by a spelling bee type event and maybe having some of them tell me what they want to do when they finish school. Then I'll go do that twice more that day and again Thursday morning. One thing I really like about this job is that I can still sort of keep student hours, not the students here mind you who consider 9am to be sleeping in, but US student hours. Only three days a week do I have to actually get up before 7am and go do some work. I used to skip a lot of classes in the mornings at school. I'd always mean to go but it was just too easy to flip over and hit snooze. But I had no idea how much harder it is to teach a class at 8am then it is to take one.