Banking, Washing, and Teaching

5/12/14

Did you ever read The Cat in the Hat Comes Back by Dr. Seuss?  The Cat in the Hat eats cake in the tub and has to clean it up.  He cleans the tub it with a dress, and cleans the dress stain by putting it on the wall, the wall with shoes, and the shoes on the carpet… That’s how I feel when I do laundry here.  I start the washer in the bathroom, then I sweep and mop the balcony so I can hang the clothes out to dry without getting soot all over them.  Then I have to mop the floor inside where I tracked dirt in.  After I wash the clothes I have to clean the shower floor where the dirty water and soap are draining.  Then I mop the floor where the washer usually sits and the rest of the bathroom floor, which is dirty by that time.  When I am finished the whole house has mostly been cleaned.  But I really just started out to do laundry.

My work visa has been processed and I am back at work full time.  I set up my PIN number at the bank where my pay has been deposited and the school, “Web” for short, has given me an ATM card.  I set my account up to pay my electric bill.  The bank employee was a young man, and he spoke English pretty well, uncertain of specific words like “activate” my card, and “transfer,” but he did very well.  He was very humble about it, laughing at himself and saying it was difficult to do it all in English.  I blindly signed all the forms that were completely in Chinese, but I feel quite sure that they are all okay.  Web is a large customer of theirs, so I believe it is all safe.  The young man asked how I knew to set up my electric bill payments, and I said my co-workers (they use the word colleagues here, I’m not sure if it is the UK influence) had told me to do it.  He said I was the first foreigners to do so, and it made me look like I knew a lot about living here. 

My school had a karaoke party last night to promote team building.  There is a K-TV place in the fourth floor of the mall.  It was a lot of fun, a lot of songs in Chinese, but we had a selection of English songs to pick from.  We (the foreign English teachers) sang John Denver songs together, and The Beatles.  The Chinese employees mostly talked in Chinese together, as not all of them know English, and it was fun to mix with everyone in a social setting.

I also taught my first English Literature Social Club yesterday (it’s called English Corner at other schools, and it’s an open format where any students can come).  I had about 20 students and we read Daffodils by William Wordsworth.  I got the idea from English with a Twist Blog by Shanti http://englishwithatwist.com/2014/05/01/a-poem-by-william-wordsworth-a-giant-of-english-literature/ .  The students read through the poem stanza by stanza and we discussed what it meant word by word and line by line.  I went over new vocabulary, and at the end I asked them to write a stanza about a flower.  A couple of the students were really intimidated by it, so I said for them to just pick a flower and make a statement about how they felt about it.  Some of the students wrote quite eloquent stanzas of poetry.  I felt like the whole lesson went very well.

The subject of this series was picked by the school.  I teach 3 Social Clubs a week, with different subjects, and I feel like they have been going pretty well.  I find teaching is an up and down ride.  Sometimes everything works so beautifully, and other times activities fall flat and I feel bad for the students, that I wasn't as effective as I could have been.  But in general, I think it’s going okay.

Happy Teaching,