School Starts (for real)

This won't be too long a post because it is late and I am exhausted, but today was my first day of teaching and it was crazy. Folks, I have a real job. It is difficult for me to think about. It's the start of a new school year, and I'm on the other side of the desk than usual.

When I had talked to Patty earlier about preparing activities for the first day, she told me not
to worry about it, and that I could just introduce myself. Well, I did introduce myself, but I also discovered after that that I was going to be teaching the rest of the lesson for that day as well. Hahahahah. While I did this, Patty was doing some kind of work at her desk. Fabulous. The first two classes were not the most effective English classes of all time, but by the third one I changed the activity a little bit, and it worked a lot better. It was still tricky, because there's a handful of kids who had a lot of trouble keeping up, so I'll have to think of good ways to help them catch up without embarrassing them.

In general, the students are really cute and funny and I like them a lot. There was one girl with pretty green glasses who I kept coincidentally making eye contact with, and every time it happened she would give me this enigmatic little smile. After class, the students left, but a few minutes later she came back with two hot dogs and gave one to me. A lot of the other ETAs have been receiving lots of welcome presents from their schools, and I haven't really (I think because my school is so giant - 3000 students! - that I am less of a big deal), but it warmed my heart to get a hot dog from a 5th grader. She was so cute. On the other side of things, I have a couple of very naughty boys in my classes who make things rather interesting. Patty asked me to make English names for the kids who don't have them, and I told her I'd think some up tonight, but there was one boy who I didn't even have to think about. As soon as she told me that he needed an English name, I promptly decided (based on my immediate impression of his behavior/personality) to name him Kevin. Kreher relatives should understand.

A Call for Input: If you have any good names in mind that are nice and not too hard to pronounce, feel free to leave them in the comments. Maybe if you are very good I will name a Taiwanese child after you. One of my students wrote that her English name is "Cow," so probably most anything that you think up will be better than that.

Oh, I forgot! After my last class, one boy came up and asked me where I was from. Impressed that he was brave enough to practice his English with me, I replied, "America." "What state?" he asked. I told him New Jersey, and he replied that he was from Pennsylvania, and had just moved back to Taiwan. It turns out that he had spent the past 3 years living in Carlisle, PA - shout out to the Gilmores! - and his English is probably better than his Chinese. During this exchange, a whole posse of kids crowded around and gaped at their classmate having a conversation in English with the teacher. When it was over, the other boys dragged him off in a fit of giggles. It was pretty amusing.