Day two of exams is behind me, leaving fewer than half of my classes to go. With three classes, Tuesday is my long day. I started at 7:00, had about a fifteen minute break between my first and second class and about twenty (in which I had my lunch) between classes two and three. My last student finished his exam at 3:15. I was thinking of going to sanda tonight but opted to work on my grades (what I have of them) and enter them into the computer in case something happens to my score sheets.
I had some interesting speeches today. The only major mispronunciation was one boy who talked about preventing chrome. That's actually an improvement over the normal mispronunciation for that topic, which ends up being "cream prevention." In pinyin (the Roman alphabet version of Chinese), "i" always makes a long "e" sound, so I took special care and gave multiple reminders at the end of the semester to make sure that "crime" was pronounced correctly.
In the realm of idioms (each student must correctly define and give an example sentence for two class idioms without any help whatsoever), one boy mistakenly defined "to pass away" as "to pass the time." I almost laughed out loud at his example sentence, which ended up as death by video games.
Today's fashion highlight was in my first class. The last boy to do the exam had on a black polo shirt that said, "Develop a sense of purpose. Today is all that matters."
Indeed.
Posted by at June 1, 2004 6:04 PM