Grading

Grading can be a huge pain. No matter how fast you were, it just takes a lot of time to get through 110 things--whatever those things are. What amazes me though is how willing students are to help out with it. I have students do a lot of my grading for me, and it's awesome. What boggles my mind is I don't give them any sort of reward or anything, but they're so excited to do it. Students complaining because you ran out of things for them to grade for you can really turn a rough day around.

SNICKERMEAL

I'm back! This semester has been incredibly busy, but class is still going well.

One of the things that I've found hard about living out here is eating enough food, especially protein. You just don't tend to eat big hunks of meat as often as you might in the states. When I first came out here, I lost about thirty pounds within two months (I was a little chubby) just because of the change of diet. And, while being skinny is great, I still need more calories and protein if I want to be able to work out and actually have energy afterwards, and so I have invented SNICKERMEAL.

To create SNICKERMEAL, you will need:
A big bowl of oatmeal
A silly amount of peanut butter
One handful of almonds
Two bananas
One scoop of protein powder
A few tablespoons of sugar
A big chopped up snickers bar.*

Put all of those things together. Eat it. It's over 1000 calories of awesome.


*If you have access to both American and Chinese Snickers bar, you should use a Chinese one. They're not as tasty, so you should save the better flavored American snickers for eating on its own afterwards.

Vacation!

For Mid-Autumn Festival I got to go up to the north of Yunnan with a good group of other TFC teachers to go hiking near Meili Xue Shan http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meili_Xue_Shan, a mountain in the north of Yunnan. It was really cool, but getting there was scary. The roads up north are very narrow, mostly dirt, and right next to huge cliffs that don't have any sort of guardrail. I think everybody was convinced that they were going to die--I certainly was. It was some really sketchy driving, and I'm glad to be back. Apart from being sketchy it was also really far away, so we had to spend a lot of time in buses, which meant that if you made the bad decision to look outside of the bus, the entire time you'd be stressing about your imminent demise.

The hiking was awesome. We did three days of hiking, and it was really fun. The mountains were picturesque, and the valleys and landscape was epic. It was stunning, and hiking was awesome. I don't have hiking boots in China, so I mostly hiked in my sandals, which amused a great number of Chinese hikers.

On the way up, we stopped in Shangrila, so we had a day to eat delicious food, and bike around. I just really like being able to say that I went to Shangrila....

Anyways, here are some pics!

From biking around in Shangrila

From an earlier trip to Shangrila. This big structures are everywhere, and they're used to dry out crops. This was on the way to Napa Lake

Ready to go hiking

A pic from the hike

Soccer, Sickness, Sadness, and Something Else

So far, this year has been a lot better than last year, despite the added workload. Having some experience, and knowing the curriculum really makes a huge difference, and not worrying about the kids' grades really takes a lot of the stress away. Sadly, this past week I've been a little sick, and with two classes that means that a huge amount of tests and homework has built up into a heavy and terrifying stack of sadness (see below). 

This past weekend we headed down to Dali for a professional development conference (about 5 hours closer than the conferences we had to go to last year) and got to meet all the rest of the new fellows, which was sweet! Good food and good people is an awesome combination. 

Being in Dali also meant that I had a chance to buy soccer balls for the girls' team that I want to start. Girls never seem to get a chance to play basketball or ping pong, so I really want them to have the chance to experience a sport, and all the awesome things that that can teach. Our field is really overgrown, and there's some construction going on right now, so I'm not entirely sure when I'll be able to start it, but I'm really looking forward to it.

In other unrelated news, there were a couple of relatively big earthquakes in my province, but they were pretty far away from where all the TFC fellows are, so everybody is safe and sound. 

Sadness.

Class 83

This year, I'm teaching two bans, one of which is a little more trouble than the other. Jarlene, my co-fellow, came to observe me the other day, and took some awesome pictures! In lieu of writing stuff, and out of an interest to go eat lunch, here they are:

A shot of most of the 56 students in the class. 

I have no idea what I'm doing here, but it looks pretty stupid:

an accurate depiction of how I look the entire class

Helping a weaker student with his notes. 

Class Thus Far

So, I'm currently on my second day of class (OK, that's a lie, but I wrote this when I was on my second day of class, so it totally counts), and I'm really excited about how things are going already. I've got a much better idea of what I need to be doing in the classroom, and getting started out on the right foot is going to make such a difference this year. Kids aren't going to want to give up at the beginning because they're convinced it's too hard, and both my classes seem like they're pretty on top of their game.

The other exciting thing is that I've got kids who were taught by other TFC fellows (Tim, Laura, Sasha) so those kids are pretty excited about English, and already know a decent amount. It's going to be fun to talk with them about how their former students are doing, and I think they're going to do great. One girl, Rachel, whom Sasha taught, has already really impressed me by greeting me, asking how I was doing, and being able to tell me her name in English. That's a lot, and it's awesome that she's being brave on the first day. 

The schedule is manageable as well. While I'm spending a lot more time in the classroom, I don't need to do as much prep work as I did last year. Grading is going to be tough, but I'll hopefully be able to come up with a system that has students doing some of the work, or, alternatively, I just won't have a life. 

Sleeping in Train Stations

So, on my trip back to my little town from the states, my flight from Beijing to Kunming (the capital of Yunnan, my province) got delayed, so we got in at around 2a.m. which was apparently a pretty regular time for flights to get in. Buses were still running by the time everyone got their checked bags, and there were plenty of flights that were just getting in then. Rather than get a hotel room, I decided to just hang out at the train station until the morning so I could get on the train back to Heqing, and I was really surprised when I got to the train station how many other people had made the exact same decision as I did. There were sleeping people everywhere! People just stretched out on cardboard or newspapers and conked out all over the station. I ended up deciding that, because I was foreign and travelling alone, it would probably be foolish to sleep, so I just hung out in a 24 hour dicos (kind of similar to KFC) with a whole bunch of other people, none of whom, it seemed, had actually ordered any food. 

My train left at 10am the next morning, and by the time I got to my town, I'd been awake for about 48 hours straight, other than the 2 hrs that I managed to catch on the international flight over. I was pretty dead, but I managed to rally myself, and after hibernating for about 12 hours, I headed to Shangrila with some friends, and got to spend more time on a cramped bus. 

The entire time I was travelling, I was carrying around a bag that had books that I brought back to study....it was a little heavy:

I believe I've said before that my bed it only about five feet long, and a little hard, but here are two pictures showing it. 

Headed to Shangrila on a sleeper bus (during the day)