Here’s the weekly photodump – though I’ve split up Week 4 into two parts!
Week 4 was…whack. I mean, wrapping up ST Day was one thing, but Celebration was a chaotic beast of a thing. A “student generated show” actually means “a lot of teachers making sure their students focus long enough to generate content.” Our students are wonderful, but we forget sometimes that we’re teaching them to be loud and outgoing and creative, and when those lessons are put into practice…yeah. I love my CDC 1A and 1B separately, but if you put them all together, they are impossible. So, this week was a bit tough. But it was also one massive tearjerker. Enjoy the photos!
Included below: Food, our trip to Shenzhen (yeah, China!), and various student goings on!
Sneak peek:
I think Doris snapped this photo – this is basically what Tiff and I did every day, right before we chased the bus!! :D
The Weekend
Student Teaching Day, Team Spelling Bee’s event, was, well, a bit stressful. So, to relieve some of that stress, David, Eve, and I decided to head to Shenzhen, which is just past the border of China. Originally, I had gotten my Chinese visa so that Binh and I could go to the Expo. However, David informed me that the Expo wasn’t exactly worth going to, especially if it was just for a weekend. Also, Binh and I (and JKuo and Moy) never managed to coordinate our schedules. China’s kind of a big country… Anyway, a lot of HK people head over to Shenzhen for day trips, which was basically what we did. (We would’ve gotten more people to come with, but most people don’t have Chinese visas – if you have a HK visa, you need an extra Chinese one, but not the other way around.)
So, yes, Shenzhen! Well, before we could go, we had to actually wait for David at PCC in Festival Walk (the mall at Kowloon Tong). Our plans got pushed back a lot – we’d originally wanted to find a hostel on Friday night, but then we realized how exhausted we were. So, we figured we’d just leave super early, but none of us are especially good at waking up early, and then we realized that we could cash in our checks if we waited for HSBC to open…so we ended up actually leaving at around 9:30ish, which wasn’t bad.
What’s nice about Shenzhen is that it’s only about 45 minutes away by, believe it or not, the MTR – you can just hop on at Hung Hom and ride the Eastern Rail Line all the way to the end, to Lok Ma Chau (or was it Lo Wu? I forget). Once there, it only took about half an hour to go through Customs, and all of that silly nonsense. Well, David and I had to go through that – Eve, as a HK resident, just breezed through.
Our first stop: Korean food! The three of us have a bit of an obsession with Korean food, and we try to eat it as often as possible (but Korean food is expensive, you know?). Also, the name of the place was “Say Food!” How could we not eat there? ^_^ Also, it was pretty cheap, and delicious!
I guess we were mostly amused by the fast food. Look, a Dunkin’ Donuts! We thought they’d only gotten as far as Korea, but I guess we were wrong! Also, McDonald’s, looking super Asian! In HK, they’re currently promoting some Hello Kitty cosplay (which is performance art, according to Wikipedia), but in China, I guess it’s Doraemon!
At the Shenzhen subway station – some ridiculous ad. Obviously we posed with it! (Thanks David!) Moreover, their subway system is kinda amusing – instead of using paper/plastic tickets, like everywhere else, they operate on a “token” system, like the ones you get at an arcade or something. So, you tap the token to get in, and afterwards, you’re supposed to drop it in a box in order to get out, except that sometimes the exit bit is a little faulty…for some reason, at the end of the day, I was still holding a token.
Okay, so Shenzhen is a day trip place because it’s famous for cheap massages – both the legitimate kind, and the, well, other kind. It was difficult to do research before we left, so we figured we’d just walk around until we found a legit one. Little did we know how difficult that would be! Also, David wanted a haircut, and we’d all figured that it would a quick and easy deal. How long can it take to cut a guy’s hair, right? Well, I took a half an hour nap, and when I woke up, he had three stylists, and some complicated cut/perm was going on…Suffice it to say, Evelyn and I walked around for a bit and found a legit massage place that was part of a hotel. :D It was cheap – only $70? yuan for an hour’s therapeutic massage – like, deep tissue and painful. Even and I got our own room, and things were fine until David came in, fresh from his haircut. And then, well, I feel like he has a couple of amusing pictures of us, or something. I feel bad for the masseuses – I couldn’t stop laughing, because David was being ridiculous. ^_^
Afterwards, well, we got pedicures, which is like a requirement of going to Shenzhen. We also watched Clash of the Titans (the remake), since that’s what they were playing. It was kind of an odd combo, but hey, whatever.
And then, our final stop in Shenzhen: food! :D
(Oh, well, there was the birthday present shopping, but that wasn’t, er, SB appropriate, so I’m just going to exclude that. I’m sure David and Eve remember!)
All in all, it was a pretty fun trip. What really shocked all of us was how utterly Chinese Shenzhen is, even though we were only about an hour away from Hong Kong. Even though HK feels pretty Asian, it’s a lot more modernized than most of Asia, and you can obviously see the difference in standards of living. To be fair, we didn’t go that far into Shenzhen, so we didn’t have time to see much (yes, we stopped at a mall, but it was just like any of the ones in HK). But still. HK still has traces of its British colonial roots, like the high tea that a lot of hotels do, or the fact that even though not everyone speaks English, every sign is in English. In Shenzhen, I was utterly lost – Eve speaks Canto, and David speaks Mando, so between the two of them, we were okay, but I couldn’t read anything at all, and forget about anyone speaking English! Also, none of our phones worked, since we were out of HK, so that was a little worrying. But we survived, and the massages certainly helped us distress, just in time for the chaos of Week 4!
Monday
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| Alouette! |
In order to gear up for the final project (an improv skit for 1A), we played a few games. This one, which they really liked, was a Hotel scene, with one person who was the receptionist, and everyone else had to be hotel guests. (It was a Characterization exercise.) Here, Kristy is the receptionist, Yoyo the bellboy, Peter is a father, and Devily decided to be an obnoxious 3-year-old. Devily, surprisingly, has a flair for the dramatic – poor Peter! she was whiny, and she almost knocked Peter over when she grabbed his leg, and I think she pretended to suck her thumb and cry…Peter had to eventually send her way to Yoyo, who had to be a babysitter as well. Leo was pretending to be a famous rock star, or something.
And then, after lunch, we haaaaaaaaaaave CDC practice time! For Celebration, every CDC puts on a performance, synthesizing the four classes that they have taken. For us, that’s the Phantom Tollbooth (er, word problems? lit? what exactly was I teaching, again?), Economics, Immunology, and Model U.N. Support CDC 1!! Every day during this last week, they’re allowed about an hour to plan their 5-7 minute performance. You can do a skit, a dance, and/or a song. My CDC is rather ambitious (they all believe that they should set the best example for the new students, bless them), so, er, we did all three. Anyway, even with four teachers in the room (of which, well, Tiffany did a lot of the work), we had a hard time getting the 11 students to focus. I gather that this is because they are all very good friends, and if I were in a class with 10 of my best friends, I suppose that we’d probably be useless students as well, so I don’t blame them in the least. (This is me trying to delegate them.)
Family Time! Jason, Rita, Athene, and Katherine, working hard!
We had Indian food at Chung King Mansions again, and it was delicious! Also, we’d had a Department Day (Carnival Day) which had involved some facepainting. For some reason, the students developed a need to scrawl their names on everyone, so we went to dinner with our students’ names all over our arms and stuff. No big – if there’s one thing Summerbridge has taught me, it’s that it’s okay to unleash your crazy once in awhile. But yeah – Monday was one of the busiest SB days I’d ever encountered.
Tuesday
Tuesday meant this “Funeral scene game,” where someone had to pretend to have died a horribly tragicomedic death (ie. Yoyo), while the rest of them spoke at her funeral. The students decided that Yoyo, walking with Devily, had spotted an extremely handsome man across the street (however, Yoyo had a boyfriend in America). Nonetheless, Yoyo ran ahead to cross the street, but she was so transfixed by the attractive man, she didn’t look both ways, and, well, Peter ran over her. Oops.
The players: Doris – the boyfriend
Devily – the best friend
Peter – the driver
Leo – Yoyo’s little brother
Kristy – the handsome man
Er…Devily, at the funeral, had a huge outburst, and moved Yoyo over so that she could lie down next to her best friend, wishing aloud that she’d died as well. Peter yelled at Yoyo and said that it wasn’t his fault that she’d died – she shouldn’t have been looking at attractive men, especially since she had a boyfriend. Leo burst into tears because no one would be making his lunch boxes anymore, while Doris was clueless as the boyfriend, though extremely sad, of course (she wiped her tears on Yoyo’s shirt, lolz). Also, Kristy yelled at Yoyo too, and said that it wasn’t her fault that she was so handsome. All in all, an amusing day, even if it took them a couple minutes to understand exactly what I wanted them to do.
Also, it was another Department Day, and one of the stations at lunch was to eat the potato chip that started out on your forehead. The catch? You couldn’t use your arms. Most students got savvy and “flipped” the chip into their mouths somehow, but poor Tweety! She just made amusing motions with her face – here’s one of them!
After work, we decided (well, it was also Eve’s birthday!) to head to my flat, eat Korean takeout (I wasn’t lying about the Korean obsession – there’s a cheap takeout place next to my flat which is delicious), and make no-bake peanut butter/chocolate/oatmeal cookies (no oven, remember?). We briefly stopped over in Citysuper to buy ingredients for the cookies, and then we grabbed the 115 back to Hung Hom! We wolfed down the food while watching the beginning of Karate Kid (something we’d picked up in Shenzhen), and then Robin, Eve, and I cooked the “cookie mixture.” David was feeling a little useless, and Tiffany was tired, so we let them hang out and watch the movie. All in all, a pretty chill night – Korean food, cooking for our students, good company, decent beer…what else could you want? (Also, the movie was amusing.)
Wednesday
Look, a letter from Yoyo! I still haven’t figured out how to fold this Flying Heart, which she’s really good at!
For funsies, the staff hid on the students’ buses and then jumped out and scared them when they got on (okay, so we sort of wanted to see what they were up to on the bus – apparently a lot of drama goes on.) This was Michael and Steven, squashed into a seat!
Look at the origami Dodecahedrons the students made! ^_^
Friday
Final projects! (Summerbridge is about the final project – a concrete manifestation of what the students have learned)
Left: 1A’s skit – a debate between King Azaz and the Mathemagician, discussing words versus numbers. I gave them the 3 prompts, one vocab word for each student, and 5 minutes. All in all, they did an amazing job. (I’ll try to post that on Youtube.) I gave them 2 easy prompts and 1 difficult one, and, unexpectedly, they went for the difficult one. Oops. They did really well, though, and brought up a lot of great arguments, things which I had just hinted at, but hadn’t really discussed. Aww, my students are so smart!
Right: 1B – their skit about meeting Tock’s family, which also included 2 word problems/Mindbenders that they came up with. And to think, at the beginning of the summer, they could barely understand how to solve word problems, and now they can make up their own!
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| Mindbender!! |
Tiffany’s Final Projects!! (We combined, in order to have a bigger audience for each performance.) Each of our students had to give a speech about Child Labor or Child Soldiers, told from the viewpoint of a certain country. The costumes corresponded with each country. ^_^
Left: Yoyo
Right: Peter, as France
CDC Closure! Every other CDC took a break from working on their performance, basically so they could just have a party. My CDC, on the other hand, really wanted to work, so they took a few minutes to eat/drink, but then back to work they went! Here’s a pic of our CDC, though, toasting each other.
^_^
For Celebration, one student from each CDC was chosen to give a speech, and Myles and I were assigned to help them write these (we had to work on it every day). At the beginning of the week, we were pretty worried, because the students were pretty reluctant, but by the end…wow. Their speeches just blew me away, actually. On Friday, we took a picture with a couple of the speech kids: Ocean (SB is so sweet and yummy!), me, Miki, Elsie, and Yuki Tai!
Jack (returning student), looking cool during his CDC’s performance. Lolz
Student closure: any student can get up and thank their teachers, their friends, etcetera. It’s kinda just one big cry fest. (Have I mentioned that we’re the Crybaby CDC? I bought us a tissue box, actually.) Of course, CDC 1, the leaders of SB, had to get up there first (there weren’t enough seats for them – students were supposed to go in groups of 2 or 3, so they just sat on the floor). Here they are, passing the mike around. Yoyo’s arm, Peter, Kristy, Devily, Leo, Jade, Ricky, and Sammy. Yeah…they sobbed, and thanked their teachers (ie. Thanks Paulina for feeding us, and for being okay with it when we didn’t always have time to do our homework!). I’m not going to lie – I teared up. A lot. I’m just going to miss my CDC soooooooooo much!
That’s it for now! On to the Celebration post!
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