Wow! It's amazing to see that I didn't blog at all during June. Since the last time I posted,
-I've started grad school.
-I finished my third year of teaching.
-I celebrated by second anniversary.
-I've watched High School Musical
-I've bough Austin two soccer balls, one of which was eaten by a dog and the other of which was punctured by a nail within the first 2 hours of him owning it.
I'm loving grad school, and teaching was really good too. We're excited, however to move across town to teach at a local college next month. I'll be teaching 3 sections of spoken English and 4 sections of American literature (ah, what to do with the assumption that because I'm American, I should know anything at all about American literature!). No, really, I remember loving it in high school, so I'll spend the summer brushing up and I'll be good to go.
We're coming to the close of our second year living in China. I'm learning a lot and have been challenged in lots of ways lately. I've seen my fear of engaging with people, my fear of awkward moments, my extreme selfishness & hesitancy to love anyone but myself, a certain ethnocentricity and pride that I've come to hate, and I've seen a need for change. And so slowly, I'm learning to engage more and more, to stop what I'm doing to spend time with somebody, to truly come to love the people around me, to see things through the eyes of love and be broken.
Someone asked me the other day what I missed about America. Just for fun, here's my list in no particular order:
1. Cereal
2. Dishwasher
3. The appreciation of funny, sarcastic comments
4. Events to get really dressed up for
5. Community
6. Canned vegetables
I think that's mostly it. And yet, none of those things are enough to send me packing right now. I love living here, and there are actually a whole lot of things about China that I'm sure I will grieve the loss of whenever it's time to head for the hills... But that's a post for another day.
So I cut open a watermelon the other day and found this beautiful swirl-shaped design. Are watermelons always like that? I thought this was super cool!
With the recent rain, we found some interesting creatures on campus. The first is a HUGE worm. That thing is next to Austin's size 11 shoe, and it just keeps going!
Austin also found a whole bunch of tiny frogs. They're smaller than most of the insects around here, and definitely smaller than a fingertip! Unfortunately, they hop so slowly that most of them are crushed around the school grounds.
I wanted to buy a purple pen. I also wanted to buy a green pen. The pen section of the local stationary store is crazy... Just baskets and baskets of pens alongside enough scrap paper to try them all. The problem is that the color of the pen's exterior doesn't correlate with the color of the ink. Thus, I faced a day at the pen store, furiously scribbling swirls onto test paper.
In the end, though, I settled for this little pen, a pen that took me right back to the days of elementary school. Seven colors. One pen. Limitless fun.
I'm not normally one to let my heart bleed over all the internet, but I'm having a not-so-hot weekend. I've just felt so incredibly anti-social and awkward the past few days, like I don't want to talk with or be with anyone, and it makes me feel so purposeless. I feel like I don't even have it in me to be super smiley or make small talk or anything.
Today we had some people over for lunch. Our house was super duper messy, which already had me stressed out, so I ran around and cleaned it, then I got to cooking. Well, I got the tomato soup going on the gas grill, the single heating unit in our kitchen that works. Five minutes later, I noticed it wasn't getting warm. The gas was out, and the guests were due to arrive any minute. In a hurry, I grabbed our old, functions-about-30-percent-of-the-time dolphin hot pad. Luckily, it turned on. Unluckily, when I lifted the huge pot of tomato soup to move it from the gas grill to the hot pad, one of the handles snapped off and tomato soup went everywhere-- the walls, over all the clean dishes, the floor. There was still enough left to heat up, except that I was distracted by how badly everything was going and I forgot about and burned the soup. (I was talented enough at this point to be doing two things at once: burning the soup and burning the toasted cheese sandwiches. Awesome.)
By this point, I wasn't really in the mood to be super social with our lunch guests and I felt like a total loser, so I just hung out and ate some of the burned soup and cleaned some stuff while Austin hung out with them.
I guess sometimes I don't really understand why I feel down. I mean, I think about my life and it's really pretty great. I live in a beautiful country and experience really interesting things every day. I have an amazing & supportive husband and best friend, who amazingly enough just about never has a bad day, or at least never has a bad attitude about it. I have hilarious sisters and some of the greatest parents I know, including a few new ones I inherited two years ago. And there are really a million other reasons for celebrating. Life is good, and most of the time I love it. I guess it was just one of those days.
I received this book for my birthday about 8 months ago, and I guess I've been a little too daunted by this almost-600 page read to pick it up and get down to business. Last week, however, Austin and I picked up the movie "The Informant" at a movie shop and I decided I'd better read the book before I watch the movie. (Maybe a lingering habit instilled by my second grade teacher.)
So two days ago I started reading and have become so interested in this book. It's a true story involving the FBI, scandal within a company, and, of course, an informant. But it reads like a masterfully crafted novel with suspense, intrigue, and the occasional surprise.
And so, I love this book. I am glad for every one of the pages in this long, long, but very interesting read. I think I want it to to last forever.
I have 19 classes. 3 are advanced. 12 are average. 4 are low.
Some teachers don't really enjoy teaching the low classes, and while at times their laziness and lack of participation definitely bother me, I quite enjoy playing games with them. They don't think that games are beneath them; in fact, they get really excited, super competitive, and entirely wrapped up in what's going on (if they can understand).
This week, we practiced some useful words for giving directions, then practiced giving directions using a mini-map with basic places in a make-believe town. During the last 10 minutes of a class, we played a game.
I whipped out a blindfold ("hey Besssany, is that one of your headbands?") and asked for 2 volunteers. They were a little hesitant to volunteer because their English is really very poor and they can't say most things, but finally, two kids volunteered. I asked one of them to go outside the classroom and put on the blindfold. Then I hid 2 pieces of candy, and the other student had to use English words to guide the blindfolded student to the candy.
They got really, really into it, and I had tons of volunteers after the first round. In the beginning I had to re-enforce that they could not just tell their friend in Chinese whose desk the candy was at, but it wasn't a problem in this class. All the students wanted to help their friends find the candy, and if anyone dared to speak English, there were a few self-appointed referees who repetitively shouted at them, "NO CHI-NEE-SUH! ONLY EN-GAH-LISH!"
I'm ashamed. To have been a student of Elementary Education, to have been an elementary school teacher, and to just now be discovering some of the funniest children's literature there is.
I recently borrowed and read the Diary of a Wimpy Kid books and laughed so hard. These books are filled with the make-believe journal entries of a wimpy kid. Funny stories, hilarious pictures. Definitely a fast and entertaining read for all ages.
Language has been really rough the past year and a half or so. Coming over here, Austin and I decided (there wasn't really a discussion; our decision was automatic and assumed on both of our parts) that we'd do all of our language studies together, and that we'd pick it up as we talked with people around town.
It has been tough for a few reasons. (1) Most people around town speak a dialect rather than the language's standard form, which is what we're learning. (2) People in our small town haven't seen many foreigners (if any!) before, and they're not really accustomed to slowing down their speech or trying to use simple language as we would do with new language learners in America. (3) Some people just look at us and assume we won't be able to speak to them, so they seem to make little effort to talk with us. (4) The pointing, the staring, the laughing and poking fun at us, the list goes on and my confidence does not.
It has been particularly slow-going for me. I love structure. I love organization. I love having a designated amount of information to study at a designated time. So... it has been a pleasure to switch gears from studying random conversational odds and ends from pages in a notebook to using a flashcard program a friend recently introduced to me: Anki. It works like this: I enter the information I want to learn, and it decides when to test me on it. As I quiz over each card, I can select whether it was difficult, good, easy, or whether I need a quick review of it in another minute or two, and the program organizes the cards into an algorithm that helps me remember them.
It's free. It's easy to use. I love it. And alas, my study break is over.
