Christmas Tree and a Roadrunner

We have finished 2 weeks of teaching and have already developed such a love for our students.  Here are some of our favorite stories:

For my writing classes I prepared a PowerPoint lesson on sentence structure.   In class we were discussing complete sentences vs. fragments.  One of the students said, “This example is not a fragment.  It is imperative.”  Me:  "We will discuss this later during the semester.”  I had no idea what he was talking about!  So, I have spent some time this week reviewing grammar rules.

We are loving our food experiences more and more.  We love going to the cafeteria with a couple of students and telling them to order something for us.  Every time it has been so much better than when we choose.   We tell them we like everything, but not too spicy for me.   My favorite so far is an eggplant/meat dish cooked in a ceramic pot with crispy rice.  One of Doug's favorites is a rice burger which is a tasty concoction of meat inside of rice rolled up between seaweed.  

Highlight experience:  A boy came into the classroom and I said hello to him.  I really didn’t think much of it.  When he came up to give his introduction he said, “I didn’t sleep last night because I was so excited to have Mrs. Brown for a teacher because I have never had a foreign teacher before.  When I entered the classroom, she said hello to me.  I was just so scared to answer hello back to her.  I am so shameful.   I humbly ask for her forgiveness and want to tell her I am sorry.”   He was so sincere and I honestly got choked up.     

A few stories from Doug:

The students are so innocent, naïve, delightful and fun.  They warned us at our BYU

training that the students are so quiet and it will take a month for them to warm up and participate.  Wrong!  So far they are generally scared to speak English with us, but after we spent some time with them and made them understand that they have to make mistakes to learn a language, they participated well with both Cindy’s classes and my classes. Playing 20 questions was a highlight.  I chose President Xi, the president of China as the person I was thinking of.  Some classes would guess him in about 8 questions. They would just explode with excitement when they would guess him.  They were so pleased and excited that I chose a Chinese person.  I have to say I was a little hesitant about how I would relate to mostly male engineering students.  I found them to be so interesting and fun and the girls are a joy to teach also. After we taught our six classes, I reflected on the students Thursday night and I was astounded at how much love I already feel for them. 

I taught the gospel doctrine lesson today in Sunday school.  I used the following story from one of my classes.   There is a boy named Logan who struggles more than the rest of the class with speaking and understanding English.  We were doing a “finish the story” activity where I start a scary story and then the next person makes up a continuation of the story and so on.  Generally the students did great and the story was hilarious.  The third person added a tiger in the story. Logan was the fifth student and he had a completely confused look on his face.  Finally he said, “I don’t understand.  What happened to tiger?”  The students exploded with laughter and we laughed for 30 seconds.  Finally they explained it to him in Chinese. I used it in my lesson to discuss how sometimes when we are struggling with things in our lives we go to church and everybody is acting like they have got everything under control and it makes us feel even more like we are not good enough to even be there. All of us go through “ I don’t get it. What happened to tiger” times in our lives and we need to remember that there are always people at church going through those times.

We also discussed Amos 6:1 and being “at ease in Zion”.  I used a quote from George McDonald “God is easy to please but hard to satisfy” and we discussed what that means.  Elder Stanley Ellis of the Seventy came to our stake conference several years ago and he talked about how well our stake was doing in so many areas and then he said that what he said is a dangerous thing because we then hear that and we can become “at ease in Zion”.  I likened it to my English students and said that every time they open their mouths and speak English, I am pleased with them but as soon as they do that, I am not satisfied and I want them to speak again and again. God is pleased when we take the smallest baby step towards him no matter what we may be doing in our lives but as soon as we take that baby step, He wants us to take another baby step or a giant step and keep moving towards him.

 We started a voluntary English learning group called English Corner.  We had over 50 kids come and we played charades, blackboard word races, “I Never”, Fruit Basket and ended with Mingle.  We bought Snicker bars for dessert.  Three of our fellow BYU teachers went with us and helped, which was a great thing because there were so many kids.  The students had a wonderful time and especially loved Mingle.  I don’t have the skill in English to properly describe it.  We did get kicked out of the building during Mingle because we were too noisy and we had to finish it outside.  I may still get in trouble for the noise! The “I never” game was such a hoot.  Half of the time they would jump up and move even though they had never done it. They love to laugh at each other but it never seems to be in a mean way and the person never seems to be offended.

We are loving everything about our experience here.  We miss everybody from home but we are not missing working at our jobs we had before! We figured out yesterday that we have spent 10% of our time here already.