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I write this sitting in the Year 10 teachers' office at school, having spent the last 10 minutes listening to all the other teachers laughing about mine and Nicole's Chinese names and discussing whether we could understand them. Things have quietened down now and we are being serenaded by one guy who keeps wandering in and out singing really, REALLY loudly to himself. For some reason there are about 12 students in here too, not working or anything, just... sitting, relaxing. But sorry, I've distracted myself. I only really wanted to talk about Halloween, and how we've celebrated the occasion here in China...
All of our lessons this week have been Halloween-themed: I've taught Juniors the names of all different sorts of monsters and, amongst other things, had them competing at the board to draw the best zombie, vampire, skeleton etc. With Seniors I've tried to explain, with lots of help from chalk diagrams on the board, some of the traditions and activities associated with Halloween: trick-or-treating, decorating houses, wearing costumes, making jack-o-lanterns. Unfortunately my laptop won't connect to the projectors here, so the students had to crowd around to see the pictures I'd collected for them, but I they loved seeing pictures of jack-o-lanterns and Halloween costumes in particular. Today, as it's actual Halloween, I decided to up my game with some more... interactive classroom activities. The first of these was a competition to see who could best mummify one of their classmates using only two rolls of toilet paper; the second was apple-bobbing. All credit for both of these ideas goes to Beth and Cat, who told me about them via Skype!
Anyway, today's Halloween excitement started properly during lunchtime, when a group of girls from one of Nicole's classes turned up at our door to trick-or-treat us. The only sweets on the premises were my Werthers Originals and there was no way I was sharing those, so they ended up giving us sweets instead. Result! Then I pottered off to my first class of the day, 207, who are absolutely lovely. When I reached the classroom, they'd written "Halloween is coming!" in pretty red letters across the board and drawn a pumpkin. Later, whilst the rest of the class was copying down vocab from the board, two girls crept to the front and presented me with huge colourful lollipops. This triggered a flow of students, mostly girls but a couple of boys (who were laughed at and teased loudly by the rest of the class), all coming to the front to give me lollipops, candycanes and other little sweets. It was the cutest thing ever, I absolutely adore them all now! They all enjoyed the various games I'd prepared for them, so I rode out of the room on a wave of cheers which was brilliant. I then had to fight my way down the stairs past another class I'm pretty sure I don't teach, all of whom wanted hugs and wouldn't let me past until they'd received one. Several of the girls also seized the opportunity the hug offered to whisper, "you look beautiful today!" in my ear which I guess is nice, if a little creepy.
My next class today were the ones I said were awful last week. I wasn't looking forward to going, thinking they were going to but a massive downer on my so-far-fabulous day, but I was accompanied most of the way by boys from another class, who ran around me in circles shouting variously: "Good afternoon Ella!" "Hello, teacher Ella!" "Have a happy day, teacher!" which was lovely, and they turned out not to be that bad. They were still obscenely noisy, but this time it was an enthusiastic noisy: howling when I taught them "werewolf", throwing themselves across desks to mime sucking each others blood, 'playing dead' on their desks (death spasms included)... well, I thought, at least they're engaging with the vocabulary. I also nearly died in a stampede of waving arms and cries of "teacher, pick me!", "please, look at me!", "let me try!" when I asked for volunteers to play the drawing game. I managed to get them all back to their seats - fear of a Mufasa-style death lending my voice the necessary extra volume - and the game progressed pretty well. I did have to intervene to rub off the penises one boy kept adding to everyone else's drawings of zombies, but apart from that everything else went to plan.
Seniors today were also brilliant: they gasped and laughed at all the appropriate points when I showed them pictures of Halloween houses and costumes, and we spent the rest of the lesson making mummies and apple bobbing. There was a slight flooding issue when one boy plunged his entire head into the bucket of water, but because Seniors are lovely they fixed it all themselves as well as emptying the bucket for me at the end of the lesson.
I better wind this up now, as Nicole is waiting to check her facebook (which we can only access via my laptop) and we're in the middle of a Skype conversation with a very drunk Beth and Cat. Pip pip!
xxx
PS. Lots of photos from today in the "Teaching" album!
- comments
Bela Lugosi What a great tonic for grisly, drizzly day. Cheering to know that zombies, mummies and werewolves are so universally popular. BTW - Piaget was a psychologist specialising in child development so you had one grade A smart arse with that one. And I love 105s drawings.
Jo The tardy pumpkin and last minute sweets this year was not our finest Halloween effort here in Ilkley - but you have done us proud! Printed this off at work and read it on the train home and you made my halloween. XX