Tempest7: Blogger

File, Open, My Computer, Folder ... Save

This is my crazy Saturday. The experience was interesting, I had a little trouble finding the school (新界荃灣梨木樹村第二號校舍 or Lei Muk Shu Catholic Primary School), and had to wander around a block to locate it. Each time I get into this situtation, that of being in a complete Chinese surrounding, I have this feeling of being helpless. I had a bit of help at the school where the people picked up the children and came to the classroom. When it came to attendance I was totally lost, really what can I do? I was practicing to ask one of the children to do the attendance for me, but luckily there was always an adult around to help out. Surprisingly the teachers are all about my age it seems. Actually maybe I shouldn't be surprised now that I think about it, I'm getting old.

The proceedure is basically the kids gather in a common area like a large hall or hallway. We go down to have the students line up and we take them to the classroom. Once there we do attendance quickly and the kids log into the computer. I wasn't going to try anything complicated, Raymond gave me some pictures to give to the students to "paint" and I was just going to stick with that. It is pretty rough when the children are teaching the teacher things though. Some of the children were fast and started to ask me if they needed to "儲存". This was a word I wasn't prepared for so the best thing I could do was to say "yes" and see what they did. Oh, it means "save"! So from that point on I learned a new word and also a new instruction to give to the students. The kids are really mouthy though in Hong Kong, they start talking garbage at such a young age. Actually quite a number of times I didn't even understand what they were asking in Chinese. One of the students even asked why my Chinese sounded funny (hahaha). Four hours with the kids. My last class was the largest, with 20 some odd students. I swear we wasted over 30 minutes just trying to log everyone into the computer. I noticed one girl who was in a Brownies uniform. She sat up very straight and lady like, and was very polite and listened to instructions well. Hopefully she will turn out to be a proper lady.

Rushing back to my Webdesign class, everything seemed to go wrong. Computer connections, computers, and even the projector was funny. all the graphics were inverted and we really had to improvise to get it to work properly (i.e. we flipped it upside down and used stacks of paper to play with the height). Surprisingly the class went well even though I was totally unprepared. My grammar class went smoothly though, I think because I've already done this class before. I get the impression that the class likes me so far. Tomorrow is the boat trip, Today actually went smooth so I should be able to get some rest for tomorrow. I can't wait to go wakeboarding and of course to see Karen, Tiff, and Stephanie.

posted by Tempest7 @ 11:00