Apparently it was finally realized that Julie and Ryan's (well Julie's at least) immense talent was being wasted over the last couple of weeks of this semester. The semester officially comes to an end a week from Friday. Students are finishing their exams today (Thursday) and apparently just watch movies and do fun stuff for the last week, however I was previously under the impression that student's didn't come next week so this may be another incorrect interpretation of what was said. Back to Julie and Ryan.
On Tuesday the head English teacher (Ann) came and told Ryan that one of the administrators wanted Julie and him to go the kindergarten to teach at the kindergarten for the remainder of the semester. As Julie and Ryan have become accustom, this information came with the obligatory "I am not sure on the times but I'll get back to you later." At four on Tuesday afternoon she did in fact get back to them with their new schedules; two morning classes and one afternoon co-teaching class each day through Thursday the 24th.
Now all semester Julie and Ryan have taught at said kindergarten for two classes once a week. They would see each class once every three weeks. Furthermore, the level of English spoken by the teachers appears to be about the same as most of the students but it is hard to tell, so determining if these students get any additional English besides Julie and Ryan's lessons is a bit difficult. With the new schedule Julie and Ryan will see every student everyday for the next week. Also, the free time for our main characters is sufficiently diminished as lesson planning for the age level and class time has re-entered the picture. Poor Ryan will have to cut back on watching Quantum Leap, Oh boy! (Inside joke alert.)
Ryan had developed a nice schedule of catching up on the most important events of the day (if you are similarly deluded to believe the FSU football and basketball news are included in the most important events of the day) and then spending a few hours in the private pilot app learning how to fly. What will he come up with to do next? Julie maybe more inclined to get back to work as she had been scouring the internet in search of her next career move, rebuilding a wardrobe, and planning for next semester. It seems Ryan is a bit more adept at dealing with a lot of free time (shocking!).
Hope this finds you well and let me know how the third person came off (annoying, error prone, etc are acceptable responses, just so long as they're honest)
All the best
Wednesday, January 16, 2013
Tuesday, January 15, 2013
BAD air
Hello Folks,
I hope everyone had a good weekend. So the air in Beijing is a bit smoggy. The last few days have been record breaking bad. see article for more info: Beijing Air Quality On a scale from 1 to 500, the air quality was 755 on Saturday and we have heard that either 1-25 or 1-50 is consider healthy. I will never look at a bright blue sky the same again. I used to take a bright blue sky for granted, never again. Right now the air quality is 182 still not good but much better than Saturday. I saw one of the English teachers wearing a mask yesterday and she offered to get us some. One of the other teachers said they don't really help. I figure they can't hurt so there may be some pictures to come with me sporting a cool looking medical mask.
Despite the smog, we ventured into the city. It's really neat living in a growing city, new things pop up all the time. We knew there was a new subway line that opened (line 6) about 3 weeks ago. It runs parallel to the line that we take into the city (line 1). Line 1 was the first line to be built so it the oldest and busiest. We found out from a fellow teacher that there is a new express bus to the city. We took the express bus and it ended up taking us to the end of line 6. Not as close to the center of the city we expected but it was nice to ride on a new bus and new subway line that is not as crowded as line 1. There are about 15 lines in the city and most of them are pretty crowded. There is a saying in Chinese that I will attempt to translate: when you get on the subway, you must turn into a picture. There have been times we have felt as flat as a picture. I have wanted to take a picture of how crowded it is but we are unable to get the camera out because it's so crowded.
So back to Saturday. With it being National Pizza month, I decided I wanted pizza for lunch. We had looked up a restaurant, "Annie's." We were pretty hungry when we got to Annie's. We ordered Annie's pizza which was kinda like meat lovers. We forgot that Chinese sausage is not very good. It kinda looks like hotdog but tastes nothing like a hotdog. Everything else on the pizza was good so we just picked it off. They brought us bread and butter. I love bread and butter and they had warm butter. I think it's the first time I have had warm butter in 4 months so it was awesome. I was quite exciting to find the restaurant we were looking for. This doesn't seem to happen very often.
Next off to the Temple of Heaven. There are some picture of this that I need to download. Hopefully, I will remember soon.
Sunday I decided I wanted to try Malaysian food. I kept accidentally calling it Mongolian food so Ryan and I had quite a few laughs about it. Well, it wasn't meant to be. We never found the place so we went to a near by mall and ate some Korean food which we wanted to try anyway.
After that, we were off to the National Museum of Natural History. It was a pretty cool museum but we were not able to read much. Only a few things were translated into English. Anyone can enjoy animals, dinosaurs and fish. So we had a pretty nice time except it was located in between about 2 subway lines so we had quite the hike to get to it.
Monday was back to work...sorta. We haven't been doing any teaching as of late. We were told today that we will begin teaching one class of kindergarten each day starting tomorrow. I am looking forward to having a little something to do.
We had heard that the water cube from the 2008 Olympics has been turned into a water park. Check out some pictures: Water Cube I can't wait to go, I think it looks pretty neat and I feel as excited as a little kid when I think about going. Now we have something fun to do on the next bad air quality day.
Well, that's all folks, have a great week.
Julie
I hope everyone had a good weekend. So the air in Beijing is a bit smoggy. The last few days have been record breaking bad. see article for more info: Beijing Air Quality On a scale from 1 to 500, the air quality was 755 on Saturday and we have heard that either 1-25 or 1-50 is consider healthy. I will never look at a bright blue sky the same again. I used to take a bright blue sky for granted, never again. Right now the air quality is 182 still not good but much better than Saturday. I saw one of the English teachers wearing a mask yesterday and she offered to get us some. One of the other teachers said they don't really help. I figure they can't hurt so there may be some pictures to come with me sporting a cool looking medical mask.
Despite the smog, we ventured into the city. It's really neat living in a growing city, new things pop up all the time. We knew there was a new subway line that opened (line 6) about 3 weeks ago. It runs parallel to the line that we take into the city (line 1). Line 1 was the first line to be built so it the oldest and busiest. We found out from a fellow teacher that there is a new express bus to the city. We took the express bus and it ended up taking us to the end of line 6. Not as close to the center of the city we expected but it was nice to ride on a new bus and new subway line that is not as crowded as line 1. There are about 15 lines in the city and most of them are pretty crowded. There is a saying in Chinese that I will attempt to translate: when you get on the subway, you must turn into a picture. There have been times we have felt as flat as a picture. I have wanted to take a picture of how crowded it is but we are unable to get the camera out because it's so crowded.
So back to Saturday. With it being National Pizza month, I decided I wanted pizza for lunch. We had looked up a restaurant, "Annie's." We were pretty hungry when we got to Annie's. We ordered Annie's pizza which was kinda like meat lovers. We forgot that Chinese sausage is not very good. It kinda looks like hotdog but tastes nothing like a hotdog. Everything else on the pizza was good so we just picked it off. They brought us bread and butter. I love bread and butter and they had warm butter. I think it's the first time I have had warm butter in 4 months so it was awesome. I was quite exciting to find the restaurant we were looking for. This doesn't seem to happen very often.
Next off to the Temple of Heaven. There are some picture of this that I need to download. Hopefully, I will remember soon.
Sunday I decided I wanted to try Malaysian food. I kept accidentally calling it Mongolian food so Ryan and I had quite a few laughs about it. Well, it wasn't meant to be. We never found the place so we went to a near by mall and ate some Korean food which we wanted to try anyway.
After that, we were off to the National Museum of Natural History. It was a pretty cool museum but we were not able to read much. Only a few things were translated into English. Anyone can enjoy animals, dinosaurs and fish. So we had a pretty nice time except it was located in between about 2 subway lines so we had quite the hike to get to it.
Monday was back to work...sorta. We haven't been doing any teaching as of late. We were told today that we will begin teaching one class of kindergarten each day starting tomorrow. I am looking forward to having a little something to do.
We had heard that the water cube from the 2008 Olympics has been turned into a water park. Check out some pictures: Water Cube I can't wait to go, I think it looks pretty neat and I feel as excited as a little kid when I think about going. Now we have something fun to do on the next bad air quality day.
Well, that's all folks, have a great week.
Julie
Friday, January 11, 2013
20 minutes of work this week
This morning Ryan and I finished up our hard week of work. Since Monday, we each taught for a total of 20 minutes each. We were told we wouldn't be teaching this week because the students have to get ready for exams. We teach 2 kindergarten classes on Friday and since they don't have exams, we went to go teach. The teachers at the kindergarten don't speak English so it's always a little difficult to figure out what is going on. They seemed pretty surprised to see us but I got started teaching. My class was about half the size it normally is with about 10 students. Ryan said they had to find a class for him to teach. After my class was over, they kept trying to tell me I could leave. When I finally figured this out, I went out to find Ryan and he had also come to the same conclusion.
Everyone (teachers and students) around us seem to be all stressed out and very busy with exams. Then there is me and Ryan, we are twiddling our thumbs. The only thing we have been asked to do is prepare a presentation on the differences between Chinese and American schools. And we don't really know how that is going to work so we have some ideas together but are kinda waiting at this point to see who our translator will be and if we will have powerpoint access before we can complete the presentation. We also worked on a 20 second video that our placement company requested for recruiting. That was pretty fun but you can't say much in 20 seconds.
Even though we only taught on Friday, we got the feeling we are still expected to be here in the office since they are good at telling us when we can leave.
There has been reading, catching up on TV shows, working out, planning the weekend ahead and our trip to Thailand... and walks to the local store so Ryan can buy a Coke Zero. That about sums up our week. We will try to do some exciting things this weekend. It is pizza month so Ryan and I will be celebrating tomorrow.
I hope everyone has a great weekend,
Julie
Everyone (teachers and students) around us seem to be all stressed out and very busy with exams. Then there is me and Ryan, we are twiddling our thumbs. The only thing we have been asked to do is prepare a presentation on the differences between Chinese and American schools. And we don't really know how that is going to work so we have some ideas together but are kinda waiting at this point to see who our translator will be and if we will have powerpoint access before we can complete the presentation. We also worked on a 20 second video that our placement company requested for recruiting. That was pretty fun but you can't say much in 20 seconds.
Even though we only taught on Friday, we got the feeling we are still expected to be here in the office since they are good at telling us when we can leave.
There has been reading, catching up on TV shows, working out, planning the weekend ahead and our trip to Thailand... and walks to the local store so Ryan can buy a Coke Zero. That about sums up our week. We will try to do some exciting things this weekend. It is pizza month so Ryan and I will be celebrating tomorrow.
I hope everyone has a great weekend,
Julie
Monday, January 7, 2013
... another surprise.
As you have probably heard (or read) our daily schedules and plans have been a bit inconsistent of late. First our New Year party turned out to be an over-night affair. That was a good surprise. Then on the proceeding Monday everyone at our school disappeared and after the rapture scare had passed we took the unexpected day off as a bonus. We got back to work on Friday.
Finally things are back to normal as we wrap up the last three weeks of our first semester. Then Friday afternoon we were informed that our Saturday and Sunday had become a Thursday and Wednesday. We went to our branch schools on Saturday/Thursday and then while we were eating our breakfast on Sunday/Wednesday one of our fellow English teachers told us that our leader (this is the most common wording used to describe the principal) had decided that today (Sunday/Wednesday) would be our last day teaching for this semester. What?!?
Well it turns out the school calendar is a little different than we had assumed, assumed being the key word. It was explained that we only had two weeks of school remaining as there is a teacher work week prior to the beginning of our winter break. That meant that the students only had two weeks before winter break began (not three).
Secondly, as you may have heard, tests are a pretty big deal here. Prior to winter break all the students have their end-of-semester exams. Earlier this semester Julie and I were given a day off while the students were taking mid-terms. There is such an emphasis placed on these final exams that the week prior to exam week is used entirely for review and preparation. Additionally, from what we've been told our fellow teachers pay is directly affected by the students scores and from what I can (again) assume this is more of the stick than the carrot: if they (students) don't do well you get paid less.
So if you take away the teacher work week and the exam week and the test prep week then all this adds up to Julie and I with a bunch of free time on our hands today and for the coming weeks. The exception(s) may be our kindergarten classes which we teach on Friday mornings. Again I assume but they could really have final exams, could they? : )
We were told that we should prepare a presentation on the differences in primary education between the United States and China. As we have never taught in the US and it's been a little while since either of us were in a primary grad classroom Stateside, we have some research to do. If anyone would like to provide us with some information that would be great, but we certainly have the time to find out what the internet has to say on the subject.
Happy Monday!
Ryan
Finally things are back to normal as we wrap up the last three weeks of our first semester. Then Friday afternoon we were informed that our Saturday and Sunday had become a Thursday and Wednesday. We went to our branch schools on Saturday/Thursday and then while we were eating our breakfast on Sunday/Wednesday one of our fellow English teachers told us that our leader (this is the most common wording used to describe the principal) had decided that today (Sunday/Wednesday) would be our last day teaching for this semester. What?!?
Well it turns out the school calendar is a little different than we had assumed, assumed being the key word. It was explained that we only had two weeks of school remaining as there is a teacher work week prior to the beginning of our winter break. That meant that the students only had two weeks before winter break began (not three).
Secondly, as you may have heard, tests are a pretty big deal here. Prior to winter break all the students have their end-of-semester exams. Earlier this semester Julie and I were given a day off while the students were taking mid-terms. There is such an emphasis placed on these final exams that the week prior to exam week is used entirely for review and preparation. Additionally, from what we've been told our fellow teachers pay is directly affected by the students scores and from what I can (again) assume this is more of the stick than the carrot: if they (students) don't do well you get paid less.
So if you take away the teacher work week and the exam week and the test prep week then all this adds up to Julie and I with a bunch of free time on our hands today and for the coming weeks. The exception(s) may be our kindergarten classes which we teach on Friday mornings. Again I assume but they could really have final exams, could they? : )
We were told that we should prepare a presentation on the differences in primary education between the United States and China. As we have never taught in the US and it's been a little while since either of us were in a primary grad classroom Stateside, we have some research to do. If anyone would like to provide us with some information that would be great, but we certainly have the time to find out what the internet has to say on the subject.
Happy Monday!
Ryan
Friday, January 4, 2013
Another surprise... this one not so good
With the beginning of 2013, Ryan and I were greeted with sore throats and coughs. Not too bad but just bad enough so we wanted to lay in bed and watch TV. I'm glad we bought food to prepare in our room so we didn't have to venture out into the cold as much. Well, we ended up going out at least once a day. Cabin fever got us too. We also needed to buy a DVD player. Ryan's computer's DVD player only likes boy movies. Ryan and I have bought about a dozen movies and his DVD player only likes to play the movies Ryan picked out. We tested the movies in the teachers office to make sure they work and then off to the Wu-Mart. Also I think it's about time for us to take advantage of the 42 inch TV in our apartment. All the TV channels here are in Chinese so we have been watching TV on the internet.
Friday morning come around and back to school for us. We are still a little under the weather so the only thing getting me out of bed this morning was knowing I only had one day of teaching and would be able to take it easy over the weekend. Ryan and I did think it was weird that school would be open for only one day before the weekend but hey we're in China and we just go with the flow. Teaching went well today. I tried a new game with the kindergarten classes. I was also glad I had lots of videos for my 1st grade class because my voice wasn't up for talking too much but made it through and ready to relax for the afternoon and maybe do a little lesson planning to catch up. Well, as soon I got back to the teacher's office after teaching I was informed that we will have classes on Saturday and Sunday. We will be following the Thursday and Wednesday schedule for those days (my 2 hardest days). There was some confusion about us teaching tomorrow since Thursday we are at the branch schools but we did find out that yes indeed we will be teaching tomorrow. I sadly informed Ryan of this information when he returned to the office. Well, we just had 4 days off so I guess we shouldn't be complaining. We did ask a while back if we would be teaching anymore weekends and were told no but oh well, what do you do? I was told that tomorrow and Thursday will be the last time we go to the branch school this semester (which ends at the end of January). So I'm not sure if Ryan and I will have another project to do during that time or not. In the meantime, I will assume we will have Thursday off to rest and relax. :o) Once we found out we were teaching, I needed to hit the lesson planning. I was not prepared for Thursday teaching. Luckily I had an idea for grade 3 and 4 and, Ryan had a lesson I could use for grade 5 and 6, and for grade 2 I will use my grade 1 lesson from today. Ryan and I started making flashcards about 10 til 5. I think we made them in record time. (I can't believe we have job where drawing in part of the job description). I decided it's probably better we didn't know we were teaching this weekend or we would have dreaded it during our holiday break.
All this talk about Thursday reminded me of a weird observation that Ryan and I have witnessed for the past 8 weeks. 8 weeks ago, we were driven to the branch school and we saw a truck with a flat tire in the middle of an intersection. Not a super busy road but it's a 4 lane road with a decent amount of traffic. We didn't think anything of it (thinking that it must have happen recently) until I saw the truck on the way home from school that afternoon. The next week the truck was there. The weekend after that, the truck was still there. By week 5 or 6, there were 2 flat tires of the truck. Is the truck still there? Ask us tomorrow?
Well, off to relaxing for the rest of the night. I guess we won't be heading into the city this weekend. We usually celebrate international food day on the weekends so everyone please eat some delicious international food for us. I like anything cheesy especially pizza and Mexican. Feel free to take a picture and send me. :o)
Hope you all have a fun weekend.
Julie
Wednesday, January 2, 2013
Happy New Year
Happy 2013. I hope everyone is enjoying the start to the new year. As mentioned in the previous blog, we had an early start to our New Years celebration. Since school was closed, we headed out to the city a little earlier than expected so Ryan did some research and found a nice pizza place to eat at. Well, we found the pizza place but it was closed; they only serve dinner. Just like always, things don't go as planned but we just come up with option B. Next door from the pizza joint was a restaurant that looked nice so we went in. They had a very large menu and lots of things that looked good (and some things that did not). Ryan ordered the duck with orange. I think duck looks like little turkeys. It was great. It tasted like left over Christmas or Thanksgiving ham.
After our short nap we tried to find the hotel restaurant but they were closed for New Years Eve. We weren't that hungry from our afternoon hotdog and thought there were going to be snacks at the brewery for the party so we just hung out at the hotel bar because we didn't want to venture out into the cold anymore than we had to. Have we mentioned that it's cold here?
We have had a pretty lazy day today. Ryan watched football. I have been painting. We made a trip to Wu-mart for lunch and shopping for necessities. We had rice, veggies, beef or chicken, and salads at a restaurant that shares spaces with Dairy Queen. It's my new favorite place near us to eat; I think because the food isn't covered in oil. I decided that since we had figured out how to use the hotplate in our room, I wanted to taken advantage of the International food section at Wu-mart. We bought pasta and Hunt's tomato sauce. I hope it turns out good. I bought enough for 4 meals. I don't plan on going outside for a while :o).
Ryan has been sleeping for a while so I think I will go wake him up.
Have a great start to the new year.
Julie
Sunday, December 30, 2012
Happy New Year's Eve and surprise!!!
After a relaxing Sunday that followed the school New Year's party Julie and I rolled out of bed this morning ready for our day of work then running off to the city to celebrate New Year's Eve. We are going to have January 1st, 2nd and 3rd off for the New Year holiday and Julie and I were making jokes about how nice it would be to have today off as well. All the same Monday's are an easy day, I had spent part of last night in the office getting my lessons finalized and I would always trade a day of work on a Monday for a Thursday off (Thursday's are when we go to our branch school and can be interesting.).
After the morning routine was complete we headed downstairs to get our breakfast. For breakfast we walk down to the teachers dinning hall which is located on the ground floor at the opposite corner of the building from our dorm. Now that we are in winter, it is dark at breakfast time and if we are lucky the thermometer has hit 0. Due to the dark and the cold it is not unusual to walk down the steps toward the dinning hall for breakfast and not hear a sound. I credit this to: 1) the door to the dinning hall from the stairs stays shut to keep in the body heat of the dinners, 2) everyone eats in what we've affectionately coined as Chinese style, as fast as possible not wasting time for idle chit chat and 3) from what I can assume most people have only been awake for about a half hour and just aren't that lively come breakfast time.
A side note on eating Chinese style, I have never been known to eat slowly until I came to China. Julie and I are almost always the last ones to finish at lunch time. (At breakfast we eat pretty fast because it's cold and well we have found Chinese breakfast food to be life sustaining and that's about it.) When it comes to lunch a lot of people take naps after they eat so that seems to be a good explanation for the speed eating. Dinner, especially on special occasions, tends to break from this trend. This eating Chinese style is especially impressive due to the fact that it seems as if Julie and I are out eaten at nearly every occasion. Our co-workers, for the most part, must have incredible metabolisms.
Where was I, oh yeah, walking down the stairs to breakfast and it was cold and dark and quiet. The closer we got to the door the more frequent our jokes about a day off came and then we got to the door and it was very dark and very quiet - no one was there. At first we thought maybe we set our alarm clock for the wrong time but no it was five after seven and this place should be bustling, but not a single non-US citizen was present. We are going to start joking about having day's off more often.
That brings us to now. We will text our boss this morning and confirm our new suspicion which is that our days off are actually the 31st, 1st and 2nd. If it is day off there is no need to bother her so early in the morning. Julie and I will be enjoying our surprise day off and wishing everyone a safe and happy new year's eve.
Now the next big surprise will be if Julie and I can stay awake until midnight!
-Ryan
After the morning routine was complete we headed downstairs to get our breakfast. For breakfast we walk down to the teachers dinning hall which is located on the ground floor at the opposite corner of the building from our dorm. Now that we are in winter, it is dark at breakfast time and if we are lucky the thermometer has hit 0. Due to the dark and the cold it is not unusual to walk down the steps toward the dinning hall for breakfast and not hear a sound. I credit this to: 1) the door to the dinning hall from the stairs stays shut to keep in the body heat of the dinners, 2) everyone eats in what we've affectionately coined as Chinese style, as fast as possible not wasting time for idle chit chat and 3) from what I can assume most people have only been awake for about a half hour and just aren't that lively come breakfast time.
A side note on eating Chinese style, I have never been known to eat slowly until I came to China. Julie and I are almost always the last ones to finish at lunch time. (At breakfast we eat pretty fast because it's cold and well we have found Chinese breakfast food to be life sustaining and that's about it.) When it comes to lunch a lot of people take naps after they eat so that seems to be a good explanation for the speed eating. Dinner, especially on special occasions, tends to break from this trend. This eating Chinese style is especially impressive due to the fact that it seems as if Julie and I are out eaten at nearly every occasion. Our co-workers, for the most part, must have incredible metabolisms.
Where was I, oh yeah, walking down the stairs to breakfast and it was cold and dark and quiet. The closer we got to the door the more frequent our jokes about a day off came and then we got to the door and it was very dark and very quiet - no one was there. At first we thought maybe we set our alarm clock for the wrong time but no it was five after seven and this place should be bustling, but not a single non-US citizen was present. We are going to start joking about having day's off more often.
That brings us to now. We will text our boss this morning and confirm our new suspicion which is that our days off are actually the 31st, 1st and 2nd. If it is day off there is no need to bother her so early in the morning. Julie and I will be enjoying our surprise day off and wishing everyone a safe and happy new year's eve.
Now the next big surprise will be if Julie and I can stay awake until midnight!
-Ryan
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