Never before have I been so enthusiastic about such a horrible concept as midterms. They're great! Hanmin is currently in the midst of a week of them, in which all students have to take tests measuring how they're doing in five core subjects.
As you may imagine, this takes up a good chunk of their days. As you may also have imagined, this means I have a good chunk more of free time this week.
So what did I do today? I went to school--at 10:50 am--and was obscenely early. My co-teacher had told me I would be needed at 11:05, so I planned on being a little early, and once I got there, I realized that class didn't actually start until 11:15. (A small detail which I really should have remembered, considering that that's the same time that particular class starts every day...)
At 11:15, we began teaching class--which was nothing special, until the towards the end. The new unit we're teaching is called "I want to be a doctor!" (insert snide remark about all parents' hopes and dreams for their kids being indoctrinated into them here), and Maggie and I had decided to have them make their own worksheet about what profession they wanted to have. At the top, they were supposed to write their name, and "I want to be a _________ when I grow up;" at the bottom, they were supposed to draw a picture of it.
The choices we had just learned to fill the gaping vacuum of possibility were "doctor," "nurse," "cook," "driver," "farmer," and "worker" (I tried to clarify this one with "road worker" and "construction worker," which is what the picture actually showed but that just got complicated). But, as the kids were intent on their back-and-forth gaze between their papers and the board, I thought of how few of these kids would actually want to have one of those six jobs, and how boring that would be for grading.
So I started an alternate list, based on whatever occupations I could think of on the spur of the moment and which I thought some kids might like and be able to write: businessman/businesswoman (hard to write, but also hard to ignore), fire fighter, police officer, lawyer, teacher. But of course, even these didn't even begin to scratch the surface of these kids' dreams.
Soon, the questions were pouring in, with Maggie serving as an intermediary, describing jobs until I could identify the English names for the kids. "He wants to work with computers..." "Like fixing them?" "No, like making the programs..." "Computer programmer!"
Vet! Painter! Artist! Soccer player! The diversity just kept flooding in. My favorite moment came when one of our high-level English students, who is also a fantastic artist, began asking Maggie about something to do with "衣服" (yifu--clothes), and I was able to skip the translation phase and go straight to the prognosis: "fashion designer!"
I left the class feeling inspired by all the kids' enthusiasm for all of the things they dream they'll do when they grow up. It led into a conversation between Maggie and I in which we recalled what we wanted to do when we were growing up--Maggie wanted to be a businesswoman, I wanted to be (at various times) a vet, a research scientist (animal behaviorist--who wouldn't want to chase animals through the woods and study them?!), and an architect--and it was interesting to see what we have actually become: a teacher and a teaching assistant/aspiring author and editor.
And then I went home. Yep, a single class is all I taught today: woo midterms! Had a pretty great rest of the day, too, inspired by my lovely 5th graders: bought some long-put-off-but-necessary items at Carrefour (cutting boards, hair dryer, another utensil set, bottled coffee--necessary so my beans don't run out), read a bit, talked to my wonderful friend Lindsey on Skype, did some cleaning, ran to the stationary store, did some more decorating in my room (hooray for bulletin boards that actually have stuff on them!), and considered going to the gym. That last one didn't happen BUT I did put in some quality looking-for-a-good-work-out-routine-online time.
Ah, midterms. Love the ample time you give me to dream big dreams, just like those of my 5th graders.
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