april fool's day shenanigans

"I call shenanigans!"

Did anyone get pranked or pull any awesome pranks? I love April Fool's Day and trickery. My dad is an awesome prankster. He's even gone so far as to dress up like a woman in order to play a prank on the employees at the flower shop my parents own. His pranks are always super elaborate, y'know, getting strangers involved and what not.

Luckily, I'm in a different time zone than pretty much everyone in my life (other than my Chinese friends), so I used that to my advantage since it was April Fool's Day in Shanghai but not in the United States. I changed my Facebook status to "is officially staying in China another year to teach!! :D"

To be fair, I over-exaggerated my excitement with double exclamation points AND a crazy happy face emoticon, but tons of people still got duped! Within seconds of posting it I got a bunch of comments saying "srsly?! congrats!" and so forth. Bahahaha. I love it. It was the only successful April Fool's Day prank I've ever pulled.

Thank you everyone for believing my unbelievable status update. Like, really? Staying to teach? I've got to get back to the real world, people. And Trader Joe's. I really miss that store.

it's friday! and sunny!

Ahhh. Friday. How I love thee.

I only teach two periods on Friday and it's my 8th graders who are still young enough to care about school and their grades so they actually listen and *gasp* want to learn. It's such a refreshing way to end the week and start the weekend.

I enjoyed the sun and temporarily non-smog filled sky (a rarity, to be sure) and went for a long walk on the other, much cooler side of Shanghai. I found a DVD store called Sonic Boom that sells DVDs for a buck less than I can get them in Pudong where I live, so they were only $1.50! Total score, right? I bought 5 randoms DVDs, including Breakfast at Tiffany's since I have a poster on my wall from the film yet have never watched it. I also bought the first season of Greek.

Someone asked me today how many DVDs I've bought since I've been in China. The short answer = too much. But, well, I'll let this LOLcat speak for me:


see more Lolcats and funny pictures

dating made easy, robot style

We just read a short story in my 10th grade English class about a house in the future that is controlled by a bunch of different robots, each having their own specific jobs (like mice-shaped robots that vacuum). The English level of my 10th graders is very low, so in order for them to understand a story we usually have to read it a few times, I'll make them summarize it in small groups, and then I'll give them a writing assignment that somehow relates. For this story, I had each student make up their own robot. They had to give it a name and describe what their robot does for them. We still have 5 robot presentations to do tomorrow, but of the presentations today this was by far my favorite (all grammar mistakes are original, not typos):

I got a robot his name is Lorenzo. Lorenzo is come from America, he can speak Chinese very well. I bought him from Kobe, he's a friend of mine, he is a basketball player. He has plenty of robots at home and Lorenzo is his favorite one but he doesn't use Lorenzo anymore. So he sold it to me. I bought him by 100 dollars. If you want to buy robots, tell me. I will phone him and try to give you one.

His job is finding beautiful girls and take pictures with them and ask their phone number, when he bring numbers to me, I can choose the one I like most and I can chat with her. Lorenzo is very cool and he is the only one robot which is hiphop style, that's why I bought it, because he is same as me. When he go out, he is always wearing a hat and Nike shoes and a chain, his left hand has a phone, and his right hand has a camera. That's his weapon. The place where I tell him to go is People's Square, there are many many beautiful girls there. If he saw one, he will first ask her cellphone number. Just like this, "Can you give me your number?" After that, he will take picture with her. Sometimes there are also some girls don't want to give numbers. If the thing like this happens, I will tell Lorenzo to give up. That's my Lorenzo. My robot.

Sometimes has some boys bully him then his alert will turn on and tell me immediately. So I can come to that place and beat them to save my cute Lorenzo. That's why he likes me so much because I treat him just like my best friend. And just because of this, Lorenzo does his job very well.


I think the hilarity of buying a dating robot from Kobe Bryant was lost on my class, but I was cracking up. I also really like my student's depiction of his robot's "bling" in his drawing. Keep it classy, Shanghai.

rain and lesson plans

Holy crap. It's been raining here for two weeks straight. How is that even possible? Isn't there a limited amount of fresh water in the world? I don't understand it and I also hate it.

When it's raining I have no motivation to do anything but stay in my room and watch movies, which is fine for a couple of days, but by day 9 you start getting cabin fever. The lethargy brought on by the bad weather (I get into a funk if I can't be outside ever) combined with whatever bug I picked up in Cambodia and never completely kicked culminated last week to make for a very sick Strawberry. So sick, in fact, that I called in sick to work.

They don't have substitute teachers in China, so if a teacher is sick the kids just run amok. Which is pretty much what they do even when a teacher is present, so it doesn't really matter much. I thought my kids might have gotten bored or something since I missed two teaching periods back to back, but when I apologized for being sick the next day they couldn't stop excitedly shouting about how much fun they had without me there. It made me feel really important.

I actually don't really care. I know my kids like me because I bring them snacks and let them eat in class, which is so un-Chinese of me. Most of their teachers are super strict, so I'm like a breath of fresh air 4 days a week since I'm a total push over. You guys aren't ready for the quiz? Fine, ok, we can do it tomorrow.

My favorite thing about teaching is I can teach these kids about WHATEVER I want. For my 8th and 10th grade literature classes I have a textbook to use and choose stories from, but I'm not limited to it and can supplement readings with fun movies or activities (like Madagascar 2, for instance).

For my 12th grade essay writing class I don't even have a book, so I pretty much get to do whatever the hell I want, which includes lessons on Ugg wearing in the United States (yes it is true that girls wear them with skirts in the summer), LOLcats (it's this great website with cats that have their own language and use really bad grammar), and pogs (they were these round big coin like things that people collected and traded for fun). Technically it's an essay writing class, but since all my 12th graders have major senioritis and never come to school/do their homework, it's pretty much become American pop culture 101. This semester we're trying a writing workshop style class and tomorrow the first series of short stories are due. I'm hoping at least one student turns something in. Oh who am I kidding, I'm hoping at least one person actually shows up to class.

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!