Dumpling Day

Today is dumpling day in the cafeteria, and I thought I would take the extra free time to update my blog with some short school related anecdotes.

 This week I have been playing Jeopardy with my older classes, and one of the categories was Questions About the Teacher.  I got a few very interesting answers.  The question "What's my name?"got the following answers: Teacher, Michael Jackson, Kitty, Meinu (Beautiful Woman in Chinese), and Monkey.  When I asked my third graders where I was from, they replied "Chinada" which I can only imagine is a hilarious hybrid of China and Canada.  And when I asked "How old am I?" I got a few very distressing answers.  I mean, do I really look like I'm 37? My co-teachers just sat in the back and laughed the whole time.

  For a long time I have been wondering whether my first graders understood that I was teaching them a different language.  They almost always speak to me in Chinese when I come to their class, no matter how much I shake my head and repeat "I don't know." One example of this was when I was trying to teach food vocabulary.  Even though I had them repeat the word "rice" tons of times, when I held up a picture of rice they still shouted "mifan" triumphantly, all absolutely certain that it was the right answer.  Last week one student even asked me, in Chinese, whether I was Chinese or foreign. But today there was a breakthrough when some of my first graders began teaching me Chinese words for fruit and laughing hysterically whenever I repeated them. 

   Celine Dion was on the Spring Festival Gala on TV this year, and one of my students must have really enjoyed her performance because every time I see him he asks me, "Who is Celine Dion?" and then when I say she's a singer he says, "Me too!"

   And in other news, my Chinese friend Ada just got engaged, and my parents will be in China tomorrow!