Jack the Monster

Okay, so it’s Sunday right now and I’m finally getting this update written up. First week of teaching overrrr! So far, so good? No blood, right?

It’s been an interesting week! Almost all my lesson plans are finished for this week, but we also start ELE (which is like, supplement teaching for the high school English classes) this week, so we’ll see how that goes on top of our classes.

Funny little story about my favorite monster, Jack. Jack is the kid I was calling Jason in my last update. There is a Jason in the class, but the first day, we didn’t have nametags and Nicole (their home teacher) was a bit confused on their names that day. So Jason is actually Jack and he’s a little monster.

He’s messing around wiiiith… I think it was Ted and suddenly his chair just falls forward. I stop what I’m doing to go make sure he’s okay and everything and he just curls up in this ball, his face all scrunched up and whimpering, even when I get him back in his chair. I’m worried, you know, because it was a pretty loud crash, so I’m just asking him “Are you okay, are you okay?”

After about half a minute of this, he looks up at me and just smirks.

LITTLE MONSTER, HOW DARE YOU. u___u;;

He is still my favorite.

On the last two days, we got our evals done. For the first month, we get evals twice a week and after that it’s once a week.

Guys, I bombed so bad. I know I’m new and we’re all struggling to adjust to teaching and dealing with eight kids in a class and everything, but I swear, the classes Kim sat in on were the WORST. It was Nicole’s class (so the one with Jack) and the first three days, they were amazing. One of my better classes, every time.

Then they all turned into MONSTERS. I have no words for it! I mean, none of them were super… terrible, they were just all over the place and they wouldn’t pay attention and they’d get into fights and one of them is apparently slow in the head or something and he wouldn’t behave to SAVE MY FRIGGIN’ LIFE and it was just bad, bad, BAD.

Ahem.

So yeah, wasn’t thrilled with that. I wasn’t the only one struggling, but it’s just… ugh. On top of that, all the books that were supposed to be in our supplies, so I have to figure out how to get Drama done without books (and in training I went through, that's the one thing I heard about Drama. Always have a book with pictures). Such is my life. Ahahaha.

Anyway, we went to… Nanchueng(?) yesterday! Just to restock on some supplies and some of the other girls wanted to go shopping for clothes and things like that. We had awesome dumplings and I also discovered the best street vendor snack EVER.

Candy covered strawberries. They were AMAZING. It was just fresh strawberries coated in hard candy mixture, like what I used to make lollipops way back when. Just a light coating to make them all stick together but still easy to bite off… Ah, so good, so good. I loved it. Nicole and I also bought some strawberries and grapes (50 US cents a carton for the strawberries, it was awesome) because the one thing we lack in our diet is fruit of any sort. I’m happy. ^^

We found the boxing club on Friday night! It was pretty awesome to watch, even if I have no idea how it works or anything. It was fun to see which ones were better and why and stuff and the nice thing about it was that they actually ignored us. 8D;; Made me happy.

Tim says that after we settle in with teaching and ELE, he’ll help us join some classes and things like that. We don’t actually see Tim a whole ton, because he’s working a lot, but we hang out with Angel all the time. But Angel’s more into the hang out, girl time and food... I want to learn kung-fu, nabit. D: So we’ll see. It’d help if I woke up to at least go take walks when the rest of our teaching group goes on runs, but me and Nicole are horrible with waking up in the morning… well, not horrible. I’m always up around 7, but still.

Ashley had this idea where on our 11 day vacation, we’d see if we could get a group of the senior ELE students to go with us on our trip (the one that I’m not sure if I’m going on, but anyway). We’re going to run it by Casey, one of the English teachers here, before submitting it to Tim and the school, but it’d be lots of fun! We’d be able to continue helping them with English and they’d be there to help translate. Win-win situation, no?

I really need to take more pictures… I just keep thinking that I’ll be here for four months, why rush? Anyway, I really will get all those pictures from Hong Kong resized and sent out.

We have skype credits, so hopefully we’ll be able to tune in later today for Church!