The First Two Years of Conquering the Tundra

The main element of my kids class is fairy tales.  Cynthia, the Chinese teacher that I work with, picked out a ton of well-known stories for the kids to read, learn, and recite.  I've had to spend a lot of time reading and re-editing these stories, though, in order to remove useless, antiquated language and replace it with words the kids might actually need to use at some point.  One thing that Cynthia was really keen on is having the students perform one of the fairy tales. 

This Monday, the kids will perform Cinderella.  I think the parents will come, but I'm really not sure about that.  Each student has a part;  Amy, the best student of the group, is the narrator with something like two pages of dialog to memorize; basically every other student has two or three lines.  They're all small actors.  Seriously, like 3 feet tall.

On Thursday, we let them create masks to wear during their performance, I'm sure they needed a break from all that incredibly interesting and enlightening Cinderella/Goldilocks/Princess v. Pea talk we'd been having over the past few days.  With the masks on, they all look like Michael Jackson's kids while I looked like an out of work, gay super hero.

You might notice that some of the pictures overlap.  That was intentional.  I used the Diana and only wound the film 2/3 of the way I should have.  The idea was to create one long, connected set of images.  You can view the long version at China in 12 Frames.

                         

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My only work this summer, save two one-hour American Culture classes with some MBA students, is two weeks of kids classes.  I just finished the first week and it went pretty well.  I always get a little anxious about teaching children but it usually ends up being fun and way more entertaining than teaching college students.  In my experience, kids always way more interested in learning than my college students.  Most of them try to respond to every question I ask, regardless of if they're sure of the right answer or not.  It helps that many of them have a good handle on English, about half of them have better listening and speaking skills than the MBA students who will go to America in less than a month.  It also helps that kids love me.  I've never treated children like children.  I don't speak down to them or go apeshit when they get an answer right and clap and praise them like they're my dog who just brought me the shoe I was looking for.  I talk to them like they're people.  They also like to pet my hairy arms and beard, so I've got that going for me.

Most of our class is centered around fairy tales.  We talk about a different tale each day; we'll read the story, go over vocabulary words, play games and sometimes I'll have them act out the parts.  We've done the Princess and the Pea, Cinderella, and Goldilocks so far.  Friday, we made western food including baked beans, garlic bread, deviled eggs, pizza, and chips and salsa.  Actually, we only actually made the deviled eggs and garlic bread.  The rest of it was just store bought or delivered.

A lot more preparation goes into kids classes though.  With my college students, I can plan for a discussion or sometimes we'll go off on a tangent that will take up the entire class.  With the kids classes, I usually have to plan every minute.  This summer I lucked out because Cythina, the Chinese teacher that works with me during class and helps explain things, had the whole two weeks planned in advance with another foreign teacher.  When that dude (read: douche bag) basically quit the night before classes were to start, I was called in to pinch-teach, so most of it was set up for me.

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