Woke up at 7:00 with a tiny headache, so tried to sleep it off a bit so stayed in bed until 7:30. Hurried to get ready and scurried accross the road to school. Headache grew and grew throughout my first lesson and then felt really, really sick. Migrane. :(
Usually my migranes only end one way. Vomitting. This would not be cool in front of the kids or the parents. I just had to focus on what I was doing.
This got much harder when I started playing games with one of my C6 classes. The various games would have punishments / dares, and all the kids skewed the games so that I'd be the one having to perform said dares... naturally. In the first game, my team consisiting of me and the only other 2 guys in the room just kept getting picked on. The "punishment" was an increasing number of repetitions of PE exercises. They asked me to do P.E. exercises from home. So I ended up doing a handstand against the wall and doing vertical pressups, then some clap-pressups. The kids loved it, my head didn't. Then the kids made me sing... so I chose Frere Jaques as most English nursery rhymes are dumb. Then I had to show off a "talent" so I did a Karate Kata, and finally they wanted to see me dance (they'd been asking since the start, but I'd kept them at bay with karate and singing.) I said I'd dance if someone else did first, so one kid went in the middle of the floor and pulled a break-dancing freeze. So I just did another freeze and returned to my seat. I wouldn't call it dancing, but the were appeased, and I was left with the surreality that I'd just had a mini dance-off in the middle of a Chinese classroom.
Coming to lunch I swore I was gonna throw up. At lunch I ran down the road and got myself a ice cream sunday from McDonalds. Mmmmmmm... it hit the spot. The brain freeze overtook the headache, and as the brain freeze went away, I was left feeling much better.
Finished at 3pm, came home, its now 4:20pm... don't know what I'm gonna do this evening. My stomache is still iffy, but I don't know if thats just because I haven't eaten. The only thing I've had today was that ice cream. I'll let you know how it goes.
The teaching sounds so much fun. How do you get over the language barrier though? Do you have someone helping you translate, or do you just have to learn chinese yourself?
Well a Happy belated Valentine's day to you. Glad to hear you're really loving it out there. I personally don't think there's anything in the world more rewarding than teaching - keep up the good work.
The new car's stunning btw and the paperwork for a private reg should be coming through the post any day now.
Keep taking lots of pictures! H x
@Kay; Regarding the language barrier, we have Chinese teachers who speak really good English. They sit in all the lower classes, and the higher classes speak good enough English to not really need a CT.
The CTs can realy make or break what you're trying to do. Thankfully everyone so far has been super awesome, and made teaching a breeze. :)
We need to chit-chat soon!
-x-
@Hayley; and a happy belated Valentine's day to you! I'm gonna go scurry off to Facebook in the hope that you have pics of the new car on there!
-x-