Mostly, today consisted of me telling myself how much I needed to get done, and then failing to actually do it. But I'll spare you the details.
Tonight, Rachel, Chialing, Ariel (an ETA from last year who spent this year studying in Taipei) and I went to an absolutely adorable Thai restaurant down by the Banana Pier, where we gorged ourselves on green curry (my favorite), some sort of pork mash (Chialing's favorite, which we teased her for), coconut milk-seafood soup (Ariel's favorite, maybe?), pickled cucumbers (Rachel's perennial favorite), stewed cabbage, and empty heart vegetable (EVERYONE's favorite). Afterwards, we all agreed we were stuffed.
So, naturally, we all then set out to get ice cream. Not right away, of course; we made a little detour to the Love River to walk, sit, chat, and let our food digest. BUT THEN! Ice cream. And waffles. Obviously.
Question for my American readers: do we have ice cream with waffles in the States? I can't remember ordering it, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's not a thing there. Is it? It DEFINITELY is here, as is ice cream inside "toast," aka a loaf of hollowed-out bread.
Anyway, at a great little place just a block off one of my main routes but which I'd never seen before (also discovered on the back roads: another Smokey Joe's!), we got two waffle/ice cream combos, one chocolate banana and the other blueberry, and enjoyed them while smacking at mosquitoes and getting excited about how cold our metal chairs were (summer is here, for sure).
In all, a great night.
But where does the "mental floss" of the title come in, you wonder? Well. That would be via Sporcle.com, my latest easy-to-justify waste of time. Their website includes lots of things that I haven't yet explored; what I have explored, repeatedly, is their geography quizzes. Surprise surprise: I, like most Americans, have unfortunately never had a proper geography education, and therefore when I began quizzing myself I sucked.
However, as of about a half hour ago, I had a breakthrough: all 48 countries in Asia named in less than a minute. (Now, if only I could get the East coast of Africa straight in my mind...) So now I'm challenging you: how are you at geography? Click here and let me know how you do.
Beware of the Middle East, tiny countries and the hard-to-spell "stans"...
Showing posts with label ice cream. Show all posts
Showing posts with label ice cream. Show all posts
Sunday, June 3, 2012
Tuesday, April 24, 2012
Ice Cream
Wow, four out of my last five posts concern food. Annnnd who can guess what Bekah's missing about America?
Today, though, I feel that I'm justified. For class today, Alison and I taught the 6th graders the past tense, along with a handful of new location words: museum, post office, train station, restaurant--and ice cream shop. For our game, I wrote a bunch of little paragraph-long stories about people, detailing where they go during the day, and then asking "Where was _(person)__ _(time)__?" The first kid to raise their hand and get it right won a point for their team, which was, in this case, illustrated by earning the picture of the people they answered right about.
Here's an example about "Joe":
Today is Monday. In the morning, Joe eats breakfast at home. After breakfast, Joe goes to school. After school, Joe goes to the ice cream shop with his dad. Then, they go home and eat dinner. Where was Joe Monday after school?
The answer, of course, is "Joe was at the ice cream shop."
And Joe wasn't alone in going to the ice cream shop. He was joined, in these stories, by Isaac, Luke, Isabel, and Chloe. Add to this the fact that "ice cream shop" is part of the new vocabulary we're learning (read: endless repetition), and that, to keep kids' interest, each class today included asking the kids their favorite ice cream flavors. Add to that the fact that today was in the 90s F, but "felt like" 102F, thanks to the oh-so-lovely humidity.
Then maybe it'll make sense as to why I'm writing about ice cream today.
After dinner, I decided I just had to have some. I tried to fight it, tried to remind myself that it's bad for me and expensive here, but it was no use. I did at least talk myself down from my original plan (Coldstone Creamery not far from here!) and decided to "just go and see" what they had at the local grocery store.
And the local grocery store, wow! It's been closed all month for renovations, and man did they renovate! It's like a whole new store, and it definitely feels more Western--larger isles, a greater variety, wider open spaces; though I know it's impossible, it actually feels bigger, too. And they had ice cream. Strawberry ice cream. In a carton. It's not the same, of course (made me suspect this is actually what they used for my shake the other day), but it was cold and it was creamy and it was DELICIOUS on a hot evening.
I can never seem to help myself from getting brainwashed by my own lessons, particularly when they urge me towards what I want anyway. But, really, is that so bad when it means cold ice cream on a 100+ degree day? I think not.
Today, though, I feel that I'm justified. For class today, Alison and I taught the 6th graders the past tense, along with a handful of new location words: museum, post office, train station, restaurant--and ice cream shop. For our game, I wrote a bunch of little paragraph-long stories about people, detailing where they go during the day, and then asking "Where was _(person)__ _(time)__?" The first kid to raise their hand and get it right won a point for their team, which was, in this case, illustrated by earning the picture of the people they answered right about.
Here's an example about "Joe":
Today is Monday. In the morning, Joe eats breakfast at home. After breakfast, Joe goes to school. After school, Joe goes to the ice cream shop with his dad. Then, they go home and eat dinner. Where was Joe Monday after school?
The answer, of course, is "Joe was at the ice cream shop."
And Joe wasn't alone in going to the ice cream shop. He was joined, in these stories, by Isaac, Luke, Isabel, and Chloe. Add to this the fact that "ice cream shop" is part of the new vocabulary we're learning (read: endless repetition), and that, to keep kids' interest, each class today included asking the kids their favorite ice cream flavors. Add to that the fact that today was in the 90s F, but "felt like" 102F, thanks to the oh-so-lovely humidity.
Then maybe it'll make sense as to why I'm writing about ice cream today.
After dinner, I decided I just had to have some. I tried to fight it, tried to remind myself that it's bad for me and expensive here, but it was no use. I did at least talk myself down from my original plan (Coldstone Creamery not far from here!) and decided to "just go and see" what they had at the local grocery store.
And the local grocery store, wow! It's been closed all month for renovations, and man did they renovate! It's like a whole new store, and it definitely feels more Western--larger isles, a greater variety, wider open spaces; though I know it's impossible, it actually feels bigger, too. And they had ice cream. Strawberry ice cream. In a carton. It's not the same, of course (made me suspect this is actually what they used for my shake the other day), but it was cold and it was creamy and it was DELICIOUS on a hot evening.
I can never seem to help myself from getting brainwashed by my own lessons, particularly when they urge me towards what I want anyway. But, really, is that so bad when it means cold ice cream on a 100+ degree day? I think not.
Monday, November 21, 2011
Technical difficulties
Thanksgiving is one of my favorite holidays. The food, the family, the contemplative mood--and, in my family at least, the desserts--are all great reminders of what makes life so special.
Which is why I was overjoyed that all of my LETs wanted me to teach the holiday at their schools. This is, according to other ETAs, a bit of a rarity; Thanksgiving is, after all, a uniquely American holiday (when celebrated at this time and for these reasons, anyway) with few real-world applications outside of the US. But then again, I am the resident American teacher, so it's my job to teach my culture, right?
So that's what I set out to do. I had had some ideas about how to do it last week while lesson-planning, which I enthusiastically shared with my LETs, and which they agreed to with few issues. It wasn't until Friday, as I sat on the train headed for Taipei, that I realized I had volunteered myself to create and teach the entire lesson by myself.
I went to work, and crafted a PowerPoint presentation in pretty Fall (well, American Fall, anyway) colors, including a brief account of the first Thanksgiving, discussion about when it is, and, most importantly, a description of Thanksgiving traditions and foods. I made myself drool as I uploaded photos of turkeys and stuffing and cranberry sauce and picked out our vocabulary words for the day--thankful, feast, turkey, stuffing, cranberry sauce, pumpkin pie--wrote out instructions for hand turkeys, complete with a sentence pattern they were to write in the palm area ("I am thankful for______"), and found and linked to several YouTube videos.
But when I arrived at school today, I discovered that we had a problem. Several, in fact.
At Hanmin, we don't have an English classroom, and so go from home room to home room teaching English; only one or maybe two of these is equipped with a computer-overhead set-up. We knew this ahead of time, of course, and Alison had booked us for the audio-lingual room upstairs. But when I got to school, I discovered that my beautiful PowerPoint's formatting had been severely mangled in the transition from .pptx to .ppt and, what was worse, that the "audio-lingual room" was entirely lacking in the audio, thanks to a blown amplifier.
What followed was several periods of awkwardly silent YouTube clips drawn from disordered PowerPoints (I did my best to fix them over breaks), as I tried to explain what was going on:
"See, that's Squanto, and he's helping the children plant corn with fish to make it grow better...See, Lucy is telling Charlie Brown that football is a Thanksgiving tradition, so this time she won't yank the ball away...See, the Thanksgiving Day parade..."
To make matters worse, the large, echoey room's microphones were also not working, and I quickly discovered that, out from under the eyes of their home room teachers, the kids at Hanmin are much MUCH more prone to talking. By lunch time, my throat was beginning to ache.
Fortunately, though, just before lunchtime we scored another room with a projector, and this time one with functioning audio--but still no microphone, and this room was larger than the last. We finally rigged a mic to work for the last period of the day, but by that time there was no going back. My throat was irrevocably sore.
On the plus side, though, I think the kids enjoyed the presentation, for the most part, and I was able to teach them many things about Thanksgiving that even my LETs had not heard about, foods like candied yams and stuffing, and activities like Black Friday and the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade.
I'm pretty sure that this clip was their favorite part of the whole day, though, so here it is for your enjoyment:
Snoopy is a big hit here; he was also their favorite part of the Macy's parade clip I showed them.
After classes, I took my malfunctioning throat home with me, a persistent technical difficulty from a day strewn with them. But it didn't matter much as I got to enjoy the wonderful company of Emily, Lydia, Fonda and Chialing on Chialing's birthday, sitting outside her shop, drinking tasty drinks and eating delicious food and ice cream with her homemade mulberry-cranberry-strawberry jam on top.
I can't think of a better way to end a day that was all about Thanksgiving than that: eating great food with great friends and reflecting on how great life is.
Which is why I was overjoyed that all of my LETs wanted me to teach the holiday at their schools. This is, according to other ETAs, a bit of a rarity; Thanksgiving is, after all, a uniquely American holiday (when celebrated at this time and for these reasons, anyway) with few real-world applications outside of the US. But then again, I am the resident American teacher, so it's my job to teach my culture, right?
So that's what I set out to do. I had had some ideas about how to do it last week while lesson-planning, which I enthusiastically shared with my LETs, and which they agreed to with few issues. It wasn't until Friday, as I sat on the train headed for Taipei, that I realized I had volunteered myself to create and teach the entire lesson by myself.
I went to work, and crafted a PowerPoint presentation in pretty Fall (well, American Fall, anyway) colors, including a brief account of the first Thanksgiving, discussion about when it is, and, most importantly, a description of Thanksgiving traditions and foods. I made myself drool as I uploaded photos of turkeys and stuffing and cranberry sauce and picked out our vocabulary words for the day--thankful, feast, turkey, stuffing, cranberry sauce, pumpkin pie--wrote out instructions for hand turkeys, complete with a sentence pattern they were to write in the palm area ("I am thankful for______"), and found and linked to several YouTube videos.
But when I arrived at school today, I discovered that we had a problem. Several, in fact.
At Hanmin, we don't have an English classroom, and so go from home room to home room teaching English; only one or maybe two of these is equipped with a computer-overhead set-up. We knew this ahead of time, of course, and Alison had booked us for the audio-lingual room upstairs. But when I got to school, I discovered that my beautiful PowerPoint's formatting had been severely mangled in the transition from .pptx to .ppt and, what was worse, that the "audio-lingual room" was entirely lacking in the audio, thanks to a blown amplifier.
What followed was several periods of awkwardly silent YouTube clips drawn from disordered PowerPoints (I did my best to fix them over breaks), as I tried to explain what was going on:
"See, that's Squanto, and he's helping the children plant corn with fish to make it grow better...See, Lucy is telling Charlie Brown that football is a Thanksgiving tradition, so this time she won't yank the ball away...See, the Thanksgiving Day parade..."
To make matters worse, the large, echoey room's microphones were also not working, and I quickly discovered that, out from under the eyes of their home room teachers, the kids at Hanmin are much MUCH more prone to talking. By lunch time, my throat was beginning to ache.
Fortunately, though, just before lunchtime we scored another room with a projector, and this time one with functioning audio--but still no microphone, and this room was larger than the last. We finally rigged a mic to work for the last period of the day, but by that time there was no going back. My throat was irrevocably sore.
On the plus side, though, I think the kids enjoyed the presentation, for the most part, and I was able to teach them many things about Thanksgiving that even my LETs had not heard about, foods like candied yams and stuffing, and activities like Black Friday and the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade.
I'm pretty sure that this clip was their favorite part of the whole day, though, so here it is for your enjoyment:
Snoopy is a big hit here; he was also their favorite part of the Macy's parade clip I showed them.
After classes, I took my malfunctioning throat home with me, a persistent technical difficulty from a day strewn with them. But it didn't matter much as I got to enjoy the wonderful company of Emily, Lydia, Fonda and Chialing on Chialing's birthday, sitting outside her shop, drinking tasty drinks and eating delicious food and ice cream with her homemade mulberry-cranberry-strawberry jam on top.
I can't think of a better way to end a day that was all about Thanksgiving than that: eating great food with great friends and reflecting on how great life is.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)