Yesterday at work we had a birthday cake for Grace, one of the teachers. It was a very western looking birthday cake, and we sang happy birthday in English. Somehow this made the fact that we all dug into the cake with chopsticks seem all the more alien, somehow. Odd, the things that strike me as alien here.
I've been working pretty hard Monday and today… I'm feeling like I need to put more prep time in, to be a better teacher. Some classes go very well, and others, not so well. With some classes I seem trapped in a spiral: students don't do their work, come unprepared, so I "crack down," giving more homework, checking things more, and this quickly becomes profoundly frustrating for both sides. I need to work on not getting caught in these loops. But that's a minority of classes. Most of my classes are quite fun, for the most part, and the students are engaged at some level or another. And with this new schedule, I have pretty fun classes at the end of my daily run, each day. So this is nice.