Pool Party and New Classes

Saturday my friend had a pool party for her birthday at “the gay pool.” It’s a really big pool with some other smaller pools, and it’s really cheap to get in. It’s pretty sweet if you like to swim laps, it has lots of lanes. It’s frequented by mostly gay men, which is why she calls it “the gay pool.” She likes the pool a lot, partly because she feels more comfortable being a foreigner in a bikini around gay men. She and her coworkers sometimes go to the gay pool during their lunch hours from school, and she says that usually a group of foreign women in bikinis is something to stare at, but at the gay pool no one cares. They might glance and think, “Whoa, look at all those foreigners,” but then they turn away. But anyway, they had her Ipod hooked up to the speakers and we just hung out and ate and drank. Well, I didn’t drink, because I had to drive the scooter. I’m responsible! The only problem I had was the mosquitoes. They totally ate me alive! My legs and feet are a mess. The mosquito bites I get here are so much worse than at home. The itchiness is way more intense and the bites swell up and turn freaky colors as they die out. I hate them!!! (Picture: Freaky mosquito bite...you can't really see the purple...)
I had two new classes that morning. One is a K8 level class, which I have for two hours. I’m taking it over from a foreign teacher who quit. Their ages range from probably 10 to 14 and they seem like a good class. A couple of students aren’t too cooperative with activities, but maybe I can fix that. Overall they are lively when we do games and stuff, but they get bored and quiet when we work with the book. That’s fine though. I was afraid they’d be silent and despondent all the time, since it’s Saturday morning, so I’m glad that is not the case. For their "pop quiz" (which is not really a POP quiz, as they know it's coming, but they ACT surprised, which must be why they continue to call them "pop quizzes"...), I had them write five vocab words, and then for the remaining five questions, I told them to tell me five things about themselves (I wouldn't grade that part, of course). I was hoping they'd write something weird, or be a little creative, but they really weren't. Lots of, "I have one sister" and "I like to draw" or "I love to play computer games." One girl wrote completely about ghosts. I like ghosts, I like to draw ghosts, I have a ghost brother and ghost sister. Not sure what that was about...but anyway...

I also have a JK3 class. Don’t even ask me what that is, I don’t know. I think it’s like K3, but they meet more often. Maybe that’s what the “J” means. Like I always say, “I don’t know, I just work here.” I have them for the third hour of their three-hour Saturday morning extravaganza. Accordingly, I’ve been assigned to teach them two pages from the “Reader.” Let me explain. In this class, there are two main books: The Student Book and The Reader (not to be confused with the Kate Winslet movie). The Student Book has all the vocabulary, phonics, and grammar the kids need to learn (the meat of the class) while the Reader is a collection of short stories that you save for the last ten minutes of class. I’ve been assigned to only teach the Reader pages for one hour.

Ha!

I dragged that stuff out as long as I could (17 minutes), but after that, we succumbed to playing games to drill the Student Book material. I didn’t (and don’t) see any other way of filling my third hour. Furthermore, there were only 4 kids there that day, so got through things really quickly. Anyway, I think these classes are fine. I’d rather teach a kids class on Saturday morning than an adults class. If I’m super tired, kids won’t care too much, but adults will care.

So I’m getting a new adult class in a couple weeks…on Saturday. It’s from 2-5:40. Yes, that’s two in the afternoon until nearly six o’clock at night on Saturday. AND it’s four hours. AND it’s at the location at the other end of Taichung. The director gave me a couple days to think about it after he offered it to me (how strange, to be able to CHOOSE a class). He knows it’s on Saturday and it’s a long class. But I decided to take it, even though I’ve got a lot of hours right now, and it would mean I’ll be working six full days a week. (A) I don’t know for how long I’ll have a lot of hours…they could be gone at any second, and (B) I don’t want to be completely out of the adult department. Plus, I should try to make as much money as possible, since I have no idea what the heck will happen when I come back to the States, with all the madness going on over there. And I want to get to Hong Kong at some point while I’m here. And I need to visit my Dad in California for his birthday and my sister in Argentina next fall. So yeah, I need money!

On Friday night I did oral tests for my A1 class. One of the questions was, "Tell me three ways to learn English." This question threw them off a bit, and different students went different routes. Some kids went with where you can learn English, and this one kid's answer was, "I can learn English at school...at home...and...at McDonalds!" I laughed a lot. I accept that answer!