Week 17 of 17

Sorry the vacation has made me lazy but I have finally come around to write about the end of my first semester teaching.

Week 17 of my classes consisted of conducting spoken finals and collecting writing finals and showing the movie Elf three times. Elf put me in the Christmas spirit and every class loved it. Actually, several of my classes gave me Christmas presents. My sophomore classes gave me: a purple scarf, a tiger keychain, and a stuffed panda bear. My only non-english major class gave me a beautiful framed chinese character (fu) which means good luck and happiness for the new year.

The other highlight of week 17 was during a students' final. One student, who shall remain nameless, told me his favorite class was when they did "speed dating" because he got to date many girls and "pick one." Keep in mind this class of 35 students has 2 boys and they were doing fake speed dating to practice English with each other after we talked about differences in dating in America and China. When he said he "picked a girl" he meant that since the speed dating in class he has been secretly dating a classmate! He then went on to tell me that watching the movie Freedom Writers in my class made him decide he wants to be a teacher. It was great to finish my last week of classes knowing I had greatly influenced one of my students in ways I didn't know possible.