Learning...

Lately have been reading and learning a lot more from areas I am not familiar with but find very interesting once I started getting into those. Things like US politics, immigration issues, environmental issues, modern Chinese history, world economy, and even Middle East conflicts. I always hear about the dispute between Israel and Palestine but find it very puzzling and I'm clueless about what actually is going on. Little did I know it has a lot to do with the cultural and historical clashes between the Arabs and the Jews. Anyways I've been reading all these partially for work (course material and OPI practice with the advanced students), the rest is just leisure reading, especially from free magazines like Businessweek, the Economist, Forbes, etc. that I got from my unused air mileages.

Talking about the students again, once in a while I would have totally blanked out class periods because of various reasons. One happened the 2nd day of this 2nd semester last Thursday. The students just barely learned the long list of vocabulary but apparently haven't digested them all. And I was not aware of what the previous teacher has done and I just taught at usual pace and it was a disastrous class. One slower student just gave up and the atmosphere just went downhill from that point. Everything that could go wrong did. Problems with the computer, stumbling on reading in pinyin to the students, students losing concentration because of the difficulty in the materials, failing of group work, etc. It truly was a test of everyone's patience.

One more extremely interesting but strange and almost kind of creepy incident was at the immersion activity a couple weeks ago. A higher rank student from the other class was introduced to me because he used to live in Hong Kong and his parents are natives form there. We found out he's just one year older than I am and we lived in the same community back in HK and attended the same kindergarten!!! We may have rubbed shoulders there. Crazy.