Last week I had a short but action packed week at school. April 4th was Tomb Sweeping Day, a holiday similar to Memorial Day, so we had an extra long weekend. Since it was a short week, and it coincided with April Fool's Day, I made the week an extra special one for my students.
On Monday, I decided to play a trick on my students and co-teachers. A few weeks ago, I impulsively bought this blue wig at a market in Beijing, and it came to mind when I was planning an April Fool's prank on my students.
After braiding and pinning my hair, it just barely fit under the wig. I wanted to get to the teacher's office before class without anyone seeing me, so I walked outside the school building and up the opposite staircase, rather than passing all of the classrooms like I normally would. A few students did see me on the way to the office and I got a few shrieks of surprise and lots of double takes. I hadn't mentioned my trick to the other teachers, so when I walked into the office they were also surprised and one of them even thought it was my real hair. Word spread pretty quickly that I was playing this joke, because lots of teachers that I don't even know came to look at me (these weren't English teachers, so they couldn't even talk to me), and tons of students tried coming into the office to see my hair. When I got to my first class, the students started clapping and laughing and cheering. I repeated the trick for all of my morning classes before lending the wig to my friend Alex to so that she could play the same joke on her university class. Chinese people also celebrate April Fool's Day. My friend Ada told me that middle school boys will often write notes to girls they like, and if the girl likes them back, then they're happy, but if the girl doesn't like them back, they just pretend it was an April Fool's joke. And, apparently, students often play jokes on their teachers by telling the teacher that they've come to the wrong class until the teacher gets confused and leaves.
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| My students loved my blue wig, but they loved the camera even more |
On Wednesday, most of my students left early to spend the holiday with their families. I only had to teach one class and it was a beautiful day, so I decided to take my class outside to play games. It was a first grade class with a very low English level, but I thought that they could handle games like London Bridge, Duck Duck Goose and Red Light Green Light. I thought wrong. They were so excited to be outside and with me that they couldn't settle down long enough to learn the rules to any of these games. So mostly we just ran around and laughed.
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| Playing London Bridge |
My class didn't really understand the concept of any of these games. Rather than sitting in a nice circle to play duck duck goose, they all jumped up and down and shouted "Me! Me!" while whoever was "it" wandered around indecisively. Then, without saying either "duck" or "goose," they would tag one of their friends and run crazily away until they felt like sitting down. I tried uploading a video of this but for whatever reason it's not working. As I said, we had fun playing outside, but I don't think I'll be repeating it anytime soon.
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