Remember me? I'm your blanket!

So I think it's safe to say that Autumn has arrived.  It's been cooler this past week, by which I mean it's totally comfortable to be outside in a t-shirt and pants.  No sweating.  A little breezy.  Nice.  The only downside is that now the school is too cold because the "air con" is still going strong.  Luckily I have a sweater there.  But I finally had to get my blanket down out of the closet and start using it a couple nights ago.  I've been fine with just a top sheet for the last month and a half - almost forgot was a blanket was like. 

As you've probably noticed by my lame blogging schedule, I'm swamped this week.  Between test writing, planning for the upcoming English Festival, and trying to get all my classes up to speed for the rest of the semester, I'm functioning in zombie mode much of the day.  But I've been trying to do some fun things too.  Had a massage tonight, for instance.  The masseuse, Jaja, came to my house this time.  She was recommended by a fellow teacher and I am going to get on her regular schedule.  I usually go for Deep Tissue, which is Jay's specialty and really helps my bad shoulder, but I didn't specify anything to her today.  I just wanted to get a sense of her style.  From what I could tell, it was kind of a mix of Thai, Myofascial Release and Swedish.  Part of Thai massage involves pulling and moving the client's body around to stretch it.  She put me in the pose above (cobra) and it felt incredible.  I wish someone would do that to me for like an hour.  Every day.  For the rest of my life.  :)

I also took a few minutes to look over my Cantonese book from Monica.  As many of you know, Chinese is a tonal language.  Cantonese has 6 main tones, as shown above.  What this means is, the same word (in theses examples Si or Foo) can have 6 different meanings depending on the tone.  I find it interesting to speculate on how the words were chosen, especially for the bottom example.  :)  What it also means is that learning Cantonese is going to be really hard.  So since no one seems to be making the class happen, I think I'll just try to line up a tutor once a week to go through this book with me.  In my spare time. 

My other highlight today was my Level 0 class.  I was feeling kind of annoyed at them for not learning their vocab list well enough and I had to teach them a grammar lesson today for the first time.  I taught a grammar lesson during my student teaching practicum and it was horrible.  The students didn't have the background knowledge to understand what I was explaining so it was a huge frustrating mess.  So I was kind of dreading today, but it went very well!  Luckily most of our students are already very good at grammar and teaching it is probably the best way for me to learn it as well.  We were working on the difference between simple present and present continuous.

This is an exercise from our textbook.  I went around the room and had them each give an example using either form and trying to work in adverbs of frequency.  I made them talk into a microphone as well, since some of them are so shy they can barely manage a whisper.  It was actually kind of fun!  And it made it obvious that they understood.  Friday morning at 11am I'm getting a lot of blank stares and sometimes it's hard to know why.  Confused?  Tired?  Hungover?  Hungry?  Daydreaming?

Me too!  Well, at least 4 out of 5.  But it's done and it worked and now I have a better idea of what to do next time, which I guess is the whole point.  Plus they're so darn loveable I can't be mad at them for too long anyway.  Even when I catch them texting during a listening activity.