Monday, March 23, 2009

Aspirations of the young Chinese

Think that Andy's class is the only one worth a blog post? Dead wrong! Ok, it's true that Andy's students can express themselves at a level beyond mine. He gets lots more students cursing in new and inventive ways, whereas my kids' most complex sentence so far was "Miss Kitty, are you fat?" Even though my students' English is much worse, their minds are still pretty interesting.

I was teaching my second graders about jobs recently, and we were all pretty sick of trying to drill the words "factory worker" into their heads. I tried to mix it up a little bit, and I told them to draw a picture of what they wanted to be when they grew up, then write a sentence explaining why they wanted that job. Most kids wrote that they wanted to be an English teacher because they like English (aw!), or that they wanted to be a clerk because their parents were clerks (hm...), but this student, named Lemon, had the only picture worth collecting:
Plenty of the pictures were slightly violent, but this one was the most complex. At first I thought he wanted to be a US army soldier, but he pointed out that the cannon next to the tank was Chinese. Only then did I notice the Japanese bomber! Here's the future according to Lemon the second-grader: him and the US joining up to smash Japan! I was mostly relieved that he didn't envision China bombing America, or vice versa, so I gave him a high-five and moved on.

5 comments:

Unknown said...

You should have given him a high five for having an awesome name too.

Are there things you miss from the states? Does Andy have antiperspirant?

Unknown said...

wow, that drawing seems complex for a 2nd grader. I went to a 2nd grade class room last week to teach kids about neuroscience (it was brain awareness week), and most of the students told me brains came from God (christ...)!

keep up the good work!

Unknown said...

There are so many things I miss about America. I think I'm a lot more homesick than Andy, especially the more stressed out I get. I just imagine sitting in the sun in Big Jim's front room, eating Zooey-provided Pringles and watching Jeopardy... ahh... At least they do have Pringles here, but no Zooey to buy them for me!

Andy seems to have enough deodorant. You can find it in Hong Kong anyway, so we're set for when he runs out.

What can you teach 2nd graders about neuroscience? That sounds even more painful than trying to get Chinese 2nd graders to pronounce "problem" correctly. Yeah but that picture was way more complex than most of them - mostly they just copied the example I provided.

Anonymous said...

carrot leaf tank eater flagf. five nine keer gun

Unknown said...

aw kitty, I miss big jim sometimes too, even though I'm only in Michigan!

we brought human brain specimens into classrooms and pointed out major structures. Pretty much convince them to wear bike helmets so they don't have brain damage if they fall. It was definitely difficult, but still lots of fun!