the color of its countries

[backdated 7/10 1:59 am]

So, Saturday was my first day in China, but yesterday was my first day teaching. For quite a few reasons, I'm exhausted and not really in the mood to recount it, so I'll make this quick. Just a few points:

My students are seventh graders named Dona, Kathy, Bill, Jason, Isabel (that's Li Lei Lei -- it turned out to be Isabel after all), Dale, Dona, and Pandora. The boys all laughed at Pandora's name, and I tried to defend her but quickly realized that nobody would be likely to understand a hastily-rendered Greek myth without a very careful preface clarifying who the Greeks were and how the story went, so I just settled for assuring everyone it was a very good name. Drew got similarly bogged down trying to explain Noah's Ark, although eventually they got that it was a biblical reference.

Pandora, in any case, turned out to be a hotshot at English -- something I relied heavily upon while explaining activities, but which also became obnoxious when I wanted to call on other students (Dick and Dona were particularly recalcitrant) and she jumped right in instead. Bill was a similar case. I guess I know what it's like to be That Guy in a language class, though, so I'm trying to apply their abilities to the general good without squelching their enthusiasm or making it boring.

"Boring," incidentally, is a favorite word of these kids'. Isabel uses it all the time to either query my feelings or inform me of her own. On one ten minute ride into town, "Do you think is boring to go in car? I think is boring." She has surprised me with it at many other moments when it seems to me that to answer "yes" would be marking myself as a really crappy guest, though I'm eager to establish solidarity with her. I figured that her case was one of enthusiasm to use one of the fairly limited words she knows to describe the situation, but then all the kids in class set in telling me this activity was boring and that game was boring, so maybe they really are just that cynical. Or maybe they're just seventh graders, minus the slight moderating element of native-language politeness.