let the teaching begin

I don't want to jinx myself since I haven't had my 12th graders yet, so I'll refrain from making any generalizations about the students until after my class with the older kids tomorrow morning. But let's just say that I survived, so that's something.

I introduced myself briefly to the 12th graders today before my school had a big welcoming ceremony for the entire international division. It all happened so fast I can't really make any kind of judgments about them, except that there are some native-born Americans in the class. And they at least seemed to think I was cute, even if they didn't care about what I was saying.

I fibbed a little and said I was San Francisco since most Chinese people know where that is, and really, I'm close enough.

During the welcoming ceremony they called out the name of each foreign teacher and we had to stand up and sort of wave to the auditorium. All the students clapped after each teacher stood up, but they totally started hooting and hollering for me. It was kind of embarrassing, but I have to admit, it was mostly flattering.

I swear, it's all about the blond hair here. It totally sets me apart from 95% of the Americans. I'm hoping to use it to my advantage in my classrooms. Y'know, the boys think I'm cute so they'll be more inclined to behave better because they want to impress me. Either that, or they'll be total monsters as a way of "getting my attention".

My eighth graders were pretty nice, and paid attention most of the time. There's 9 of them and 3 of them know absolutely no English, which I wasn't prepared for. I'm not exactly sure how I'm going to lesson plan for such a wide range of English comprehension (extremely limited to fluent). We'll see how it goes.

We played a fun icebreaking game at the beginning of class. I had each person choose a food that started with the same first letter as their name, then we stood in a circle and each person had to introduce themselves in a clock-wise fashion, with each person having to say the names of the person (or people) that went before them. It was a great way to learn everyone's names really fast.

I find it so much easier to remember names if I associate them with something else. Lettuce Lisa...who could forget that? My favorite was Spaghetti Sean. Or Caramel Cindy. I don't know! The food choices were all so cute!