The Osama Anticlimax

I was a busy beaver all day today. I had three classes at a branch in Jonglhi, a town about 15 minutes from where I live in Taoyuan. They all went relatively well, though admittedly I had about the easiest students in the world to try to teach.

Little Osama was out today. But I did ask about the name, and apparently, the staff had already impressed upon his parents that this was a name that would do him no good. But poor little Osama, apparently, is stubborn and determined to stick with the name. I expect that in a few years, when he's older, he'll see reason and stop insisting on being called the same name as a terrorist.

My students really were incredibly easy today. Mostly I did review, with a couple of listening sections at the end. I'm beginning to realize that the classes have a fairly standardized format that doesn't allow for much creativity. Ah, well. At least that makes planning easier. I don't have to reinvent the wheel all the time. All I really have to do is come up with games, mostly of the racing variety, for students to do in class.

It's amazing how much better behaved the students are than any set I would likely encounter in the States. For instance, in one class today, I had the boys play the girls at forming past tenses of verbs on the board (NOT an attempt to encourage sex chauvanism...this was just the way the students had chosen to seat themselves, and I look advantage of it for easier team formation). At one point, I made a mistake and accidentally awarded a point to the boys that should have gone to the girls. The boys, not the girls, were the ones to protest. I can't imagine any group of male students doing this in the States. I hate to be hard on my sex and my country, but so it is.

In any event, tomorrow I not only have a trip to Hong Kong, I have a new private student at the CE01 level--the very first elementary level. I really don't know what to do with a private student at this level. So much of what you do with the kids' classes is have them compete and run races and things of that sort. Hmm...this will require some serious thought.