2/13/2012

I got up at about 6:45 and made sure pancakes were ready for the family when they woke up. Jenny, of course, was already awake, doing her study thing that she does. The boys were down at 7:00 sharp and we all had breakfast together.

Jenny has MOPS on Mondays, so she brought the boys to church with her while I studied Chinese and read. I'm reading Simply Jesus by N.T. Wright. I'm not far in the book yet, but I can tell it's going to be good.

After nap time, we played a little game where I hid under the comforter and attempted to consume all children and then regurgitate them. It was pretty intense. I feel like I won, though no official winner was determined.

Later, Levi and I did some of his homeschool/preschool work.

I got a call asking if I could come in and do some para sub work over at the Chinese immersion school. This will be my fourth day there since last week. I've loved working there and having a day filled with Chinese! Oh. I guess I never mentioned that I'm doing that kind of work. I've been helping out at Scenic Heights Elementary School in Minnetonka. I help out in their Chinese immersion classes. So far I've worked with Kindergarten, 1st grade, 2nd grade, 4th grade, and 5th grade. It's been absolutely wonderful to work there. I'll share more as time goes on.

How Some of Us Are Perceived

In the local kindergarten I teach at, I have some flashcards that go with the content I’m teaching so the students can get a visual idea of the content being taught. This week, I was teaching about different countries. Each flashcard had a country’s flag and a person from that country on the card. Here are the cards:

The disturbing part, I think, is that some people were probably asked, “Hey, who can draw up the American guy?” And some guy probably raised his hand and said something like, “I have tons of American friends; I know exactly what to do.”

Apparently most Americans wear sweatpants with collared shirts along with white shoes while donning a scraggly beard and a bandana. We’re a huge fan of gum as well, I guess (or maybe chewing tobacco).

Until next time,
Jeremy, Jenny, Levi, & Liam

You Can’t Leave

One thing I noticed while teaching kindergarteners here is that sometimes, when the children aren’t listening or participating, the teachers threaten them by saying, “If you don’t __________, you won’t be able to go home. You’ll have to sleep here at school and you won’t eat dinner.”

I’ve heard this many times from a few different teachers.

This is one example of how stressed out Chinese students can be, from 3 years old and on until they graduate. (The course we’re going to be teaching tackles this issue head on.)

Until next time,
Jeremy, Jenny, Levi, & Liam

Don’t cross ‘em

Doesn’t he look so proud? So arrogant?

Since I have pretty long legs, I need to to cross my legs every once in a while to stretch them out, especially while I’m teaching, because I sit in a chair in the kindergarten classes for a half hour. This isn’t uncommon, I know, but apparently when you do it while teaching, it’s impolite and makes you seem really prideful. At least that’s what my teacher’s assistant told me… After almost a full year of teaching, this is the first time I’ve heard it. She told me, “I didn’t want to tell you because I was worried you’d get angry.” I laughed and said I’d rather know how to not offend everyone in the room! Who knows, though? Maybe it’s just her opinion and most others don’t feel it’s rude; you get a lot of conflicting stories when it comes to things like this. I just found it funny that she waited so long to tell me something this important!

So if you’re teaching in China, take note!

Until next time,
Jeremy, Jenny, Levi, & Liam

A Whole Big Cake

Yesterday I was teaching 6 year olds how to say “I can _____.” I can speak English, I can dance, I can sing, etc.

I asked the question, “What can you do?” This one kid raises his hand and says, “I can a whole big cake.” I was super confused and I didn’t hear him very well and asked him to repeat it. He repeated the same sentence. “I can a whole big cake.” Clearly, he wasn’t grasping the concept of “can”.

Later, I was also teaching some vocabulary. Words like “ball”, “doll”, “bicycle”, etc. I showed a flashcard of a doll and asked what it was. The same kid raised his hand and said, “A whole big cake.”

I think that boy must have learned that new phrase and was just DYING to use it, so he did… As much as possible. It was pretty funny, but I had to go back and re-clarify a few things to make sure that mistake wasn’t made again.

Until next time,
Jeremy, Jenny, Levi, & Liam

See you later, Jessica!

So at a kindergarten I teach at, there is a Chinese teacher who teaches English there. She’s been there for a long time, and her name is Jessica.

Every time our classes end, they always say, “Goodbye, Jessica!” and no matter how many times I tell them, they never remember that my name is Jeremy.

Actually, they sing a song. It seems to be common at this kindergarten; they sing,

Goodbye (Jessica), goodbye (Jessica)
See you later, bye bye
Goodbye (Jessica), goodbye (Jessica)
See you later, bye bye

Until next time,
Jeremy, Jenny, Levi, & Liam

Certified!

Well we got some absolutely amazing news today: I’m an official certified teacher of the Life Education course with the Red Cross of China!

I’ll be teaching this course in universities and high schools in Xi’an, China. It’s volunteer work and each class happens once per week and lasts for a semester. Hopefully I can get the time and resources I need to teach this course at a few different universities each week.

The course covers many aspects of life. Each week is a different topic. The topics are: Foundations for Successful Living (Holistic Wellness), Responsibility, Time Management, Managing Stress, Me and My Money, Understanding Yourself, Am I Who Others Say I Am?, Character Building, Me and My Value System, Friends for Life, Resolving Conflicts, Relationship Workshop, Is it Love or Something Else?, Why True Love Waits, Preparing for Marriage.

I can’t wait to teach this to as many students as I can!

That’s all for now!

Feel free to write with any questions!

Until next time,
Jeremy, Jenny, Levi, & Liam

Happy Words, Sad Words

Teaching has been very good lately. This week the content I had to teach the five-year-olds included the words, “fat” and “ugly”. The included grammar was: “You are fat.” “He is ugly.”

Initially I’m dreading teaching these words and I was considering just not even teaching them because I knew as soon as I taught them, they’d go around calling everyone fat and ugly. In fact, here in China, it’s not unusual for someone to tell you that you are fat or that you are not attractive. The way I understand it, they are trying to encourage you and push you to do better (to lose weight, etc.) The problem though is that I feel that the more this is done, the more irreversible the damage is. The more you tell someone how fat they are, the less likely they are to do anything about it.

After considering a bunch of factors, I instead took some other content which included “happy”, “sad”, “pretty”, “handsome”, and “thin” and taught the children how certain words are “happy words” and certain words are “sad words”.

Here’s an example:

Me: “Can we tell someone, ‘you are fat’ or ‘you are ugly’?”
Children: “Noooooo!”
Me: “That’s right; Those are ‘sad words’. Can we tell someone, ‘you are handsome’ or ‘you are pretty’?”
Children: “Yes!”
Me: “That’s right! Those are ‘happy words'!”

I then had the children go around and tell their neighbor to their left that they are handsome or pretty (based on that child’s gender) and then had them say the same to the child to their right. You should have seen their faces! It’s such an awesome sight to watch a kid tug on another kid’s shirt, tell them they are handsome, then watch that boy’s face smile. I’m very glad these kids get to know that they are pretty and handsome.

(On a side note: Unlike America, in China it’s not uncommon at all for a man to tell another man that he is handsome. It happens all the time. The awkward part is when there are two of you standing there, and they only tell one of you that you are handsome. Worse yet, sometimes they’ll just say, “He’s more handsome than you are.”) That’s the kind of thing I’m trying to combat with this teaching.

Over 40 five-year-olds heard this teaching, and I hope they’ll all remember it for the rest of their lives. Happy words, sad words, and an encouraging reminder that each and every one of them is handsome/pretty.

Until next time,
Jeremy, Jenny, Levi, & Liam

Jenny’s 24th birthday

So because we were busy making Levi’s birthday video, we didn’t get a chance to talk about Jenny’s birthday! We’ll rewind a few days and tell you about it now.

 

We have a helper that comes and watches our kids and teaches them Chinese. We’ve had a helper that has come for almost half a year now, and we really trust her with our kids so we let her watch them while we went out to have a nice breakfast at Starbucks. Luckily for me, it’s next-door to a McDonald’s, so I snagged some breakfast there and we sat in Starbucks enjoying each other’s company.

 

We came home and spent time with our kids and then in when dinner time came around, we went on a double-date with our friends and got some nice Italian food. (Pizza)

 

Tomorrow is a big day for us because Levi is going to be starting his FIRST day of preschool! We can’t wait and we’ll tell you all how that went when we get a chance.

 

In other news, the school semester has started up once again! I started today off teaching 3rd grade students. I had only two classes. I will return there tomorrow and next week I start teaching at the kindergarten. Can’t wait! So many kids, so much craziness, so little time.

 

Until next time,

Jeremy, Jenny, Levi, & Liam

Today, the weather will be…

A couple weeks ago, I was teaching at a local kindergarten, when all of a sudden some random guy just just walked in and asked me if I wanted to read the weather for a local news station. I agreed, so after class we went outside. He hands me this sheet full of Chinese Characters which I had to quickly translate into pinyin so I could read it more fluidly. I was very thankful that I could read almost all of it (thank you, Skritter!).

 

Another Chinese teacher was going to read the more difficult stuff and then I was going to read the more simple part (which was still around two or three paragraphs of weather information). I watch her read the weather first and she… just… dominates. I mean, she’s doing hand motions and exaggerating her voice and sounding so excited about the upcoming (extremely hot) weather. Dumbfounded, I was just staring at her, jaw dropped, thinking to myself, “Oh… Em… Gee… They want ME to read like HER!”

 

They turn the camera to me and I read the weather, stumbling through a few parts, and probably seeming incredibly boring. I felt pretty happy with how well I did, but as soon as I finished, the cameraman kinda slowly lowered the camera and said that I had to do more actions. I was thinking to myself, “This is going to be rough.”

 

Unfortunately, I didn’t have time to do all they needed me to do. I had to go home to meet up with the family, and ran out of time. We don’t have cable so I never saw if I actually made it to the big time, but now every time I go down the street, everyone is like, “There’s the weatherman!” (I’m totally lying, they don’t say that.) I don’t think I actually made it on TV but I know that I read a report to a self-satisfactory degree and I was proud of that. I was being recorded by microphone and camera with around 10 Chinese people around me watching me do it. I was happy with myself hanging in there. (I don’t usually put myself out there like that, believe it or not!)

 

That was super stressful though!

 

Things in Xi’an are going really well! The weather is currently standing strong at around 29 degrees Celsius (84 degrees Fahrenheit). The humidity is around 55% and we have a nice breeze coming in from the southwest at around 14km per hour. We have some scattered clouds which I expect to hang around until sometime 3 years from now. Tonight we might see some scattered showers and the wind will die down a bit, bringing us a nice, sunny day tomorrow. ;)

 

Until next time,

Jeremy, Jenny, Levi, & Liam

800 and some other updates

Yesterday marked the day where I passed 800 Chinese characters learned. It's been a difficult attempt at 2400 by 2011, but I'm going to press on! (Due to falling behind by our trip to Hong Kong and other factors, I'm behind my goal by 400!!!!!! (I know, I know!) I'm going to continue on, though! Really, four hundred spanned out among six months means I only have to learn an extra 60-70 per week. Not too bad compared to the overall goal.

Levi has been so active! We have gone swimming at a local indoor pool a couple times now. It's really fun! The water is heated (almost to a fault), so it feels like a warm bath. We bought some floaties for the boys here for about $2-$5, so they really enjoy feeling safe and independent in the pool. Even Liam :) Levi also really enjoys helping vacuum, which is ironic because it's actually much more difficult when he's "helping", haha.

Liam has been SO attached to his mommy lately. No matter who plays with him, he will always cry if Jenny walks past him and he remembers she's not holding or playing with him. On the plus side, he's been sleeping and eating a lot! We're thinking he might be hitting a growth spurt.

The Dragon Boat Festival is coming up, so I have a couple days off of work this coming week. It's been great teaching those kids. My largest class is 62 first graders... Can you believe it?! It can get out of hand really easily, haha!

That's all for now... Have a great day!

Until next time,
Jeremy, Jenny, Levi, & Liam

The Small Goose Pagoda

Yesterday, we went to the Small Goose Pagoda with our landlords from the last time we were in China. We have a good relationship with them now - we are very happy about that. They were also the people who took us to a village a while back. (I tutor their daughter every week, for those of you who may not remember.)

We had a great time! Levi had a little rough time because this "park" was more like an outdoor museum - you just go there to look, not touch! :) He enjoyed sitting on some horse statues and checking out some other ones as well. Afterwards we went to a restaurant and had some great food. They said they have a lot more places to take us to, so we are excited about that!

This coming Saturday we are going to be off to Hong Kong! We have to get my visa switched over to a working visa, so I can get paid while in China. I will be working at an Elementary School and a Kindergarden school as well. I'm so excited about all this! We'll be there for seven days total. We should have internet at the hotel, so I'm sure we'll be updating you guys while we are there!

Please check out our pictures from our time at the Small Goose Pagoda by clicking here.

Until next time, Jeremy, Jenny, Levi, & Liam

Tutoring Update

I (Jeremy) am very excited because I'm now tutoring three Chinese kids, and that'll soon be upped to four!

I gained one fourteen year old boy from the first girl I tutored. She wanted to know if she could bring a classmate with her, so last week the three of us met and McDonald's and we worked on the difference between the short "e" sound (bet, bed, red) and the short "a" sound (bat, bad, rad). I felt it was very beneficial for them as this is one of the difficult English language sounds for Chinese people. I feel that their English is improving every time we meet.

The most recent girl that has joined me is an eight year old orphan. Not long ago, she was going to be adopted by a Chinese family, but they decided to back out because they felt like she was not smart enough and that something was wrong with her brain. She was being fostered by a couple from Britain in the meantime. It's very important to mention that nothing is wrong with her intelligence at all. She's actually quite smart in my opinion, but there are various reasons the Chinese family might have felt that way, and there isn't time or space to go into that now. It's also important to mention that not all Chinese families would have felt that she had some mental issues. Anyways, moving on... Recently, she was chosen to be adopted by an American family who also happened to adopt two others from her orphanage. She is familiar with one of them (isn't that neat?!). Soon she'll be moving to the southern US area, so the British couple mentioned how they are looking for someone to teach her American English. I mentioned I'd love to, so that's what I'm doing! Monday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday from 1:30pm-3:30pm. I'm so happy about this opportunity. She's such a delight and a breath of fresh air to me. Her English is already very good, but I'll be focusing on teaching her the American accent and I'm also teaching her how to read. I have no doubts she's going to excel!

The fourth is a girl I'm going to tutor instead of my brother. As many of you know, he's temporarily moving back to America soon so they can have their third baby delivered in the USA. I'll be helping the girl out until he gets back. More on that later!

Until next time,
Jeremy, Jenny, Levi, & Liam

Old Friends and an English Tutor

We had a great meal with some friends we made from our last trip here to China.

They took us out to a nice restaurant which serves strictly local dishes. It was pretty good! We had a spicy fish soup as well as some garlic cucumber, some pumpkin strips with a sweet breading (Levi ate a TON of those) and some shrimp and octopus soup. We caught up and discussed what's been going on with our families since we've been away.

Their daughter is in her teens and has been learning English since she was five or six years old. She has been doing especially well on her written tests, but not so well on her speaking tests. It just so happens that I specialize in speaking English! :) I offered to tutor her, to which they were wondering how much I charge. Thinking back on our relationship, Jenny and I thought it'd be best to tutor her for one hour per week, free of charge. The father said 我非常感谢 which means, "I'm so incredibly grateful." I was so happy that by helping out some friends for one hour of my week, I was able to bless them in that way.

They'll be stopping by starting this Saturday the 6th, which also happens to be my (Jeremy) birthday :) We'll be keeping you posted on her progress and how that all goes. I'd like to tutor a few more people if I can, but we'll just see which opportunities present themselves.

Until next time,
Jeremy, Jenny, Levi, & Liam

Workin' Man

Jeremy got a job!

He's working at a nearby English school and will be teaching first to sixth graders along with just a few hours per week of Kinder-gardeners. He can't officially get paid to work a job until he gets the proper work visa, so he can start that as soon as he gets back from a trip to Hong Kong with the family which we'll be taking sometime soon. That will allow us to get this job solidified. :)

He'll be working nine and a half hours per week, which is quite a bit for now. It's either that or full-time, and with studying and the family and all the transition it's most likely not the wisest decision at this point. We'll see how this part-time deal goes, and if we think increasing hours is a good idea, we'll do that. :)

You'll all be kept up to speed on all this: Don't worry :)

Until next time,
Jeremy, Jenny, Levi, & Liam

Newest Developments

Hello again!

Well we are "officially" unpacked and settled into our new apartment! We LOVE it here at this apartment, so that's a great transitional aspect of this whole trip. Our place is on the 18th floor, it has three bedrooms, two bathrooms, a kitchen, and a dining room/living room area as well. It's probably not as big as it sounds haha. It is furnished with everything we need minus a dryer, which we went out to buy a week ago. We are very grateful we can buy dryers here :)

We have two new pieces of information!

Levi is out of his pack-and-play and into a big boy bed! The change was surprisingly easy! He's been great staying in his bed at night and even during his nap-time. We are so proud of our boy! I even think he might sleep better in the bigger bed. (Maybe it's more comfortable?) Anyways the first morning he slept in the new bed I heard a squeaking sound coming from his room. I went in, and I didn't see him in his bed, so I quickly followed the noise to behind the curtains where he was sitting, looking out over the city from our 18th story window. It was really cute. (The squeaking sound was because he was twisting the metal rod that is a part of our fence that keeps him or other children from playing with and/or opening the windows. Baby-proofed 18th story windows... Glad to have those!)

Liam has his first teeth! The two front bottom ones. It explains a lot because he has been really uncomfortable and hasn't been eating as much, but by the posting of this blog, he is back to normal, so that's really good. Glad we brought Baby Orajel and Baby Tylenol!

I've got a job offer so they are working on my visa stuff. I'm not sure how long it'll take before we're all set up, but I'm excited! I hope it doesn't take long.

Until next time,
Jeremy, Jenny, Levi, & Liam