Fall Carefully

I haven’t posted much from Beijing but I am having a blast and my internet is a nightmare. I am paying for unlimited access BUT I have had the internet guy out here twice already and it works well for like the day that he comes and then it starts to get spotty and unreliable again.

So, class is going well. I am learning how to be a first grade teacher and as it turns out it is kind of tough and really exhausting. I tell everyone that I teach a swarm of first graders because I think that is the best way to describe them. They are like a swarm of bees, cute, in constant motion and ALWAYS making noise. It is especially interesting because the kids don’t understand me. To them I sound like Charlie Brown’s teacher and so they find it very easy to tune me out so that is exactly what they do. They have been given English names to emphasize the “English environment”; problem being I only know their English names and most, if not all, of them can’t recognize their name. So I can say their name a bazillion times and they will never turn around and stop hitting the kid behind them. I have however learned some great techniques let a teacher or a speaker know that you’re bored. One of my favorite includes acting like you died all of a sudden and you just slink out of your chair and fall motionless to the ground and remain there until the pace of the lesson changes to something more exciting. The other one that I think works well is getting out of your chair and going to the back of the room and acting like a frog leaping across the room. This one will usually draw the attention of all the other people in the room that are bored and cause them to join you.

Every day at 10:00 am all the students have to go to one of the courtyards and they do “exercises.” There are a bunch of dances that the PE teachers have taught the kids. They blast music through the loud speakers and the kids are all supposed to do the dance in unison. These are my first graders. They don’t do it as well as the 7th graders but they are getting it.

I teach about 50 of the teachers at the school every Wednesday night and that class is REALLY easy in comparison and actually a lot of fun.


A guy from the branch who speaks really good Mandarin taught me his method for learning new vocabulary and correct sentence structures. It consists of carrying a small notebook and a pen with you wherever you go and writing down new words and the way that people use them. A teacher from my school invited me to go with her to a huge botanical garden in Southern Beijing. It is March and still freezing so this garden was all housed within these huge greenhouses. Having never been much of a flower person, I went more to get more Chinese vocab for my notebook than for the flowers but I was amazed with how beautiful the gardens were. We were there all day and I had a blast with my friend Belinda, her parents, her grandparents, her friend and her friend’s daughter. These were my favorite ones. In Chinese they are called beautiful Butterflies.

This last one is just because well, as China becomes more and more foreigner friendly they are trying to translate a lot of their signs into English. Some times the most entertaining part of a tourist attraction are the translations. This one is one that I liked from the gardens. It says "fall carefully" and is placed over a pool of sludge. What, may I ask, does it mean to "fall carefully?"