One of my favorite classes is about to graduate from Hess- they are all fairly young (most are in 6th grade now) which makes them more managable than the junior-high aged kids (I guess it's the same in all cultures!) There are a couple of very smart and hard-working kids but most of them just love to talk and figure out some way to communicate in English. They can drive me crazy sometimes though. Like I have been their teacher for about a year now and when they got their new books for this new level about half of them wrote "Christmas" for my name. And our new book is called "Technology and Me," and they kept calling it "Teacher and Me," and I had no idea why, but it turns out that's really what they thought it said. Sigh. Still I love 'em.

We have a "Games Day" at the end of each level, where they are supposed to play games the whole time, but kind of as a review of the level. I played a game called "Going to America," because the book kept asking them if they thought they were ready to visit and English-speaking country, and all of them said no, because their English is so bad, and I kept trying to convince them that their English is much better than my Chinese, and there are countless Chinese immigrants in America whose English is worse than theirs, etc, but they just weren't having it. So the game was basically a game-show format where I would give them a situation and each team would race to find a solution- things like asking directions and ordering food at McDonald's and such. (The McDonald's thing was cute- I was like, you guys know what McDonald's serves! Just order a hamburger! But then they ordered corn soup and milk tea to go with it...)

The one girl, Ruby, just loves dodgeball. I used to make convoluted games where they had to make a present perfect continuous sentence in order to throw the ball but this time I was like, screw it, just play dodgeball. I took pictures because we have to give them graduation books and I thought these would be fun. They didn't come out so great but so it goes. You can also see the two boys hiding in dogdeball- one of the weird aspects of Taiwan culture is the physical intimacy between non-gay men. They're just always putting thier arms around each other, rubbing each other's backs, etc. Not so much with the women, only the men.