Primary school.

This past weekend Joe and I got the oppertunity to teach at a few primary schools around the county and city. Joe was bused all the way to a rural county school and I was at a city one. It was saturday and these kids were made to go to these extra classes kinda like summer camp. I think basically it gives them something to do. The school I went to was sort of a trade school. all the kids were learning there own little things. In one class they were learning regular dance, in another fan dance and then also music. You could hear the traditional chinese instruments playing in the back ground, too bad i would never know if they were any good or not. The insturments kinda all sound like cats at night. ha ha
Well teaching went well my first class was 9 year olds. They were easy enough to handle and still wanted to learn english enough that they were interested and didnt act up. Its always a good day when you dont have disipline problems. The next class was the same and went well. In each class I taught about the body. I had a huge picture of a man and they labeled him, then we sang head shoulders knees and toes and played simon says. Its crazy when I taught my juniors at my own school this same lesson, this lesson was the whole period. but when I taught it to these smaller kids it went so fast i had to improve new things and games.
My third class was little little kids, like 6 or 7. ( again I must emphasis that in china kids ages are different a 3 year old in america in a chinese 5 year old. small bodies) So the first thing I asked all the kids to do was stand up say there name , where they are from , and what is there favorite fruit. Really simple because these questions are pounded into them in regular school. ask any little chinese kid on the street there name they will tell you and then when you ask them how they are they have the programed answer "fine thanks and you" So these questions should have been easy. Well they were really confused and that when I knew i would have a problem. How could i teach them the body when they barelly can say there names. Before we went on this little adventure the lady that gave us the job said well i think they are in kindergarden. well my students ranged from kindergarden till middle school, my last class was 11-13 years olds. Oh well i made the best of it and with a chinese teachers help we got through all the games and song with no problem. In each class I taught about 15-20 kids, a nice small number since i normally teach 65 in one high school classroom. Its was really funny to see how the students acted. In the older kids class there were little clicks starting. You could tell all the boys were too scared to talk to the girls and the girls being only 1 year older were not interested in even looking at the boys. The girls were at least already 4 inches taller then any one boy in the class. It was kinda funny.
Joe said he mostly taught smaller kids, but in one class he said there was a boy that just ran up every 5 minutes and punched Joe square in the "you know where", He said it happened like 20 times that lesson and he couldnt figure out why this kid thought it was so funny. We have so many chinese teaching bloopers!!

Gao Kao: well our friend billy got his test results back from the entrance exam. He said he didnt do as well as he wanted. He then explained to us that the numbering system on the test figures out what your major will be in college. So if you do well in one area you can be a certain job. He said he didnt have the grades to go into journalism ( his dream was to work for discovery channel) So now he will do international trade. Which we said was defiently good for him, because this kid could talk your ear off.