A couple of quick things

It's about 7:20am on Thursday morning. The sky is gray and cold, but my little-Christmas-tree-that-could is blinking happily in my apartment window. Only two classes remain today, and other than hammering out a bit of marking for my Grade 9s this morning, I'll be running off with my ugly Christmas sweater (pictures to come) to Kaifaqu for Christmas dinner with friends. I got an email from my mom today with pictures of our home in Alberta (always decked to the nines in Christmas decorations) which made me really happy but a bit homesick. I think this is the first time I've really thought that I'd like to be back home. But I also know that I'm going to have a great weekend of food and drink and sleeping and reading and drinking all the coffee I can get my mitts on. And I finally get to open my package from home which still remains unwrapped and "under" my tree.

The Grade 7 Christmas concert was a success, and although I wouldn't say my kiddies sang like angels, they did a great job. I'll put up some pictures in the next couple days (I'm still waiting to receive a few).

I also made my first obvious Chinese-speaking blunder in class yesterday. First, a disclaimer: I still have only learned a few words of Chinese. It's sad, I know. It's not easy to practice on my own, and the voice lessons often put me to sleep. Anyway... I try to use a few Chinese words in my classes when I give directions for work. So I've learned my numbers and I can say "sentences" and "paragraph" and "homework", so even the weak students have no excuse for not completing their assignments. Chinese is a language that has many characters. However, when changing Chinese characters into Pinyin (Chinese written in the Roman/English alphabet), many of the words are spelled exactly the same. The difference comes in the TONE with which they're said. Like asking a question by making the final tone in a sentence rise in English, Chinese has rising, falling, flat and dual (falling, then rising) tones for their words. So, the word "ma" can literally have at least 4 meanings. Yesterday, intending to tell my delightfully cute grade seven students that they needed to write 10 sentences and it was homework, I asked them to do the following:

"Please write 10 oranges."

Not knowing what I said, the kids started giggling and laughing at me. This is common when I try to speak Chinese in front of Chinese people, but the laughter was different. Luckily, one of my star pupils put up her hand and waved me over to her desk. Pulling me closer to she didn't have to shout, she explained. So, I got the kids to all help me say "sentence" instead of "orange" and to know the difference. SO funny. I couldn't stop laughing about it all day.

At least I didn't say anything inappropriate!

I'll probably write more later, but for all the people back in Canada, I miss you all tonnes and wish that I was there celebrating Christmas with you all! Especially my family. Lots of love from the land of the Reds...

T