Respect / Michael Jackson (again)

Well, I'd like to be the first to tell you that all the rumors that Chinese students are incredibly respectful is a bunch of bull-plop. 3 or 4 of my classes are terrible! And this is coming after my experience as a sub. Now, I haven't had any really bad encounters with students yet, but I can see that a few are on the horizon (I think that I'm going to have to make examples of a few students to get the rest back in line.) The problem is the language barrier - the bad students just pretend not to understand me. For example, in one class I asked two disruptive students to leave the room (there isn't a principal or an office or anything like that). They just sat there and stared at me until someone translated for me. Then one tried to haul the other one out bodily. I ended up letting them stay because it was like a comedy of errors.

Today half of my classes made fun of my laugh. Ok, I know that my laugh sounds funny, and by now I'm pretty used to other people's reactions. But this was like a circus show, it was ridiculous. It wasn't a big deal except for the fact that I couldn't get one of the classes to settle down after that. Don't worry - I got my chance to laugh at them. Some of the attention desperate kids were showing these karate moves as they explained something about the Olympics, and I was so surprised that I started laughing in the middle of class. Fortunately, now I know that they've never heard an American laugh before, so I'm going to control myself from now on.

Tonight is English Corner again. I sort of dread it because, unlike the classes, I can't just teach something and then give them stuff to work on. Instead I have to be a one-man show for an hour (usually Josh and I split up so that we don't have to cram all the kids into one area.) Well, after Tuesday's experience with Michael Jackson, I decided not to give up too easily. Tonight I found a nice little YouTube video with the lyrics for the Jackson 5 ABC song. They said they wanted to learn a song, so I hope this works. Of course, it doesn't help that the internet is so slow right now that I still haven't been able to download the whole song.

All right, I've still got stuff to do before English Corner at 6:00, so I'm gonna go. I know, I still haven't put up the other stuff, but I'll do my best. I am planning on taking more pictures, too, but it's been so rainy that I don't think it's worth it right now.