There's a lot of cuteness in my life

I've been making more of an effort recently to get up and get to school early so I have some buffer time to prepare before my classes start. One pleasant side effect of this was that I discovered that there's a school dance competition that takes place first period (not all year long, just recently). The day I happened upon it was the day that all of the 2nd grade classes were competing against each other. Each class had its own little dance, and all of the students had costumes that they apparently had made themselves out of household materials. Behold:

Garbage bag skirts decorated with stickers! Little white hats that are really just upside-down paper bowls! Giant plastic blue bow ties! Socks with faces drawn on them worn on the hands! To me, this class easily took the cake in the costume department.

This class was less coordinated in their dress...the girls in the first row have leis, the boys in the second row have cowboy hats with flowers on them, and the children in the back rows have large cardboard fish strapped to their foreheads. The first two rows also have garbage-bag loincloths (blue for boys and pink for girls, of course). Also note that some kids in the back row have brooms, which they danced with during the performance. You can't say they aren't resourceful!

Also in the performance vein, this past Tuesday my Little Angels class was scheduled to perform a song in English on the morning TV show that is broadcast to the whole school. We voted in class to sing "Boss of Me," the Malcom in the Middle theme song, and I made some posters for them to hold up during the instrumental break in the song. We held a quick extra practice session the day before the performance, and things were good. On the day of the performance, the kids were really nervous, and they couldn't get our music to work until the very very last minute before we went on! Despite their anxiety, the kids did a really great job, and the gal who taped the performance said she would get me a copy...we'll see if that really happens.

I had kind of forgotten the possibility that the kids might be nervous about performing, because at this point in my life, I've been in enough performances that I don't really get nervous about being in front of an audience. That's why I said yes when AIT (the American Institute in Taiwan) asked me to give a talk on American Campus Culture at the American Shelf, a special section of the Baoju Library. I didn't exactly know what I was supposed to do, but I've had pretty good luck with agreeing to do things where I don't exactly know what I'm doing (how do you think I ended up teaching English in Taiwan?) and then sort of figuring it out as I go along. They told me to send my talking points to the translator beforehand so he could prepare, which was good because it ensured that I actually prepared my talk before the last minute. The talk was on Wednesday, and it was an interesting time. I don't mind public speaking, but I've never had a translator before...it's kind of weird, because the audience doesn't react to what you're saying at the same time as you actually say it. Except the one guy with really good English who laughed riotously at anything that was vaguely funny. I loved that guy. Eric the translator was really sweet, too...he made everything I said sound so much better (and, you know, so much more Chinese). The best part was when I was talking about eating on campus and I mentioned the concept of the "freshman 15." For their reference, I said that 15 pounds was about 6 or 7 kg. When Eric translated, this turned into "6.8 kilograms." He was not kidding about preparing himself beforehand. A number of other times, I noticed that things from my notes that I had forgotten to actually say made their way into the Chinese translation. Eric, you are the man. At the end, we had a Q & A session, and they gave me oranges. It was a good time.

One of the reasons that I haven't posted much recently is that a lot of things haven't been that exciting...in school I spent the better part of the past 2 weeks doing English Village stuff, which was a little bit lame. First I had to teach my students a dialogue about a hotel, and the next week I had to go pretend to be the hotel receptionist and act out the dialogue with them. The only good part was the fact that they had to perform the dialogue in groups of 4, which gave me a little room to mess around with them. Example:

Me: "What kind of room would you like?"
4 students, in unison: "A double, please."
Me: "But you have four people! A double is only for two!"

A lot of students were boggled by this deviation from the dialogue, but some of them gave me some good, inventive answers. Many changed their request to 2 doubles, some told me "it's okay, we are so small" or "he will sleep on the floor," but my absolute favorite was the kid who told me he wanted "a fourple." Not quite, kid, but points for effort. And for cuteness!

On the subject of cuteness...as you may recall, earlier this semester I taught the English Angels to do Y.M.C.A. My dad had been digitizing some of our old home videos, and he found a video of me doing Y.M.C.A. at a wedding when I'm about 7 years old, so he sent it to me. I took it into school on Thursday and showed the Little Angels, and they couldn't believe that the small fuzzy blonde person was me. There was a lot of "Teacher, so cute!" and "Teacher, that is YOU???" Many students also wanted to know about the little boy running across the screen, and were amazed when I explained that it was my little brother, who is now thiiiiis tall, and has a beard! Experience small Rebekah and Luke for yourself:


In other news, today I managed to buy a pair of pants that, in spite of being Taiwanese, still manage to a) actually fit me and b) not have a single rhinestone on them!!! I know, I couldn't believe it either.