Thursday again

(Sorry - Both yesterday and today, I hit the enter button after typing in the title. That sent my blog before I typed any message. In the subject area, this one, you can type Enter all you want and all you get is a new line.)

Here I sit waiting for my next class to start. I think that I will be embarrassed. My teaching partner, who has my AM class in the PM, has challenged me to a sing-off. We each agreed to choose a college fight song and see who does better. She chose the Arizona U song and I picked Anchors Aweigh, the Navy song. Her PM class, (my AM class) practices every day and, as our rooms are across the hall from one another, I hear her students really yelling. My PM class, (her AM class) is about 50% female and is very quiet. I hope that they really let loose this PM, especially when they end the singning part and yell, "BEAT ARMY!!" We'll see, and I have been fooled by Chinese students before. Their ompetitive nature could surprise me.

I handed out the Alaskan pins Sandy Burd sent to me for the students. There were several kinds: the Alaskan flag, the state of Alaska, the state flower touch-me-not, a moose and a walrus.
The students loved them nd immediately started to trade one nother so that each student would get theone he wanted.

I worked with the menus that I brought from home. I have about 50 of the, of all types of restaurants. I did this yesterday PM and it was successful with the other clss, so why not redo it.

I also broke the class into goups of 4 and 5 students and asked them to decide, as a group, the 5 most important news items in China in 2008. There were pretty consistant answers that included: the earthquake, Olympics, snow storm and flood at the spring festival, Tibet, Taiwan,
gas shortage, grain shortage, US economy and the Yuan appreciation. The first four were on everyones top five, perhaps in different order, with the others spotty in the top five. It was interesting and led to fine discussion abuot newspapers, TV other media. I'll repeat the exercise this PM.

I have given some of your IDs (from those who hve given me specific permission to do so) and told the students that they MUST put Hello from Wuhan in the subject line or risk the recipients deleting before reading.

Love you all.