some updates

Crafting update:
I'm in the middle of making a few new cozies (surprise, surprise!). One of them is a very special Father's Day cozy for my dad. Stay tuned for photos...

School update:
I finished cleaning up my classroom today, and officially checked out for the summer! That being said, I will be returning mid-July for a couple weeks of summer school.

Travel update:
I mentioned that I'll be going to the UK soon. I'll spend a little over 3 weeks there -- visiting friends in Scotland and England, and then meeting some of my distant cousins in Wales! I'm ecstatic!

Templeton update:
The cat-child is doing well, and amazingly enough, seems to be getting furrier!

book character day

Last Friday was Book Character Day at school. What fun! Here are some photo highlights:

Salome as Olivia (great ears! ;) -- next year I'll crochet you a coffee-cozy snout!), with three of her girls. I really think she should have won a prize for this -- what a great costume!
One of two first-graders who claimed to be George Washington.

Me as Ella Sarah, with a fellow pajama-wearer. I happened to already own sheep pajamas (though, as quite a few kids pointed out to me, "they're not exactly the same as Ella's"), and my mom and I made the stuffed cat the night before.

Encyclopedia Brown solving a mystery. What a nerd!

Encyclopedia Brown, a musketeer (with wig and beard!), Olivia, The Paper Bag Princess, Ella Sarah, and Miss Frizzle (complete with orange hair and specially-made dress!)

Woohoo! I'm already thinking about what I want to be next year...

riddle me this...

Last week in a departmental meeting, I was presented with a new job prospect. I guess I should back up a little and tell you that one of my current responsibilities is admissions testing. When a prospective student applies, I test their English ability to see if the student is a good fit for our school, and vice versa. We've had quite a few students to test recently, as the school is in its final stages of expansion, and thus has a number of spots to fill. Anyway, the ESL portion of the admissions screening is quite short and doesn't take long to administer, and in the past has been carried out by both myself and the middle-school ESL teacher. Having two of us giving this portion of the test simultaneously has been a bit on the unnecessary/excessive side, and we've both been left with a considerable amount of down-time between students. So I brought this up in our last meeting, sure that there was a better way to divvy up the testing load. Our director thought it over and suggested that during our next screening session, the middle school ESL teacher will do the ESL portion of the test on her own, while yours truly will do a chunk of a whole different test, more specifically, the riddles portion of another test.

Yes, you read that correctly. It looks like asking riddles will soon be part of my job. This might sound strange, but let me assure you that the test is legitimate and well-respected, and the riddles are not meant to be confusing. On the contrary! They test a range of sub-skills from vocabulary knowlege to problem solving, but do get progressively harder.

Quite a few questions came to mind when the new arrangement was first suggested, and I'll leave you with some of those.

1. Can I require prospective students to address me as "The Riddler"?
2. Can I write my own riddles and throw some of those into the mix?
3. Can I show up to testing dressed in a court jester's costume?
4. Can I preface each riddle with the words "riddle me this"?
5. Can I play a few notes on a recorder after each riddle, like this guy?

ch-ch-changes

This past week I was reminded just how quickly things can change. On Wednesday, I went to school as usual, and even attended a staff meeting after school. The very next day, school was closed.

Why, you might ask? There have been a high number of flu cases recently (though in HK we still prefer to use the more formal -- and scarier -- "influenza"), and at least two children have actually died from it. Though of course I feel sad for those families, I was still a little surprised by the Health Department's decision to close all elementary schools and kindergartens. It seems like quite an excessive response, but then, considering HK's recent run-ins with bird flu and SARS, I guess it's an understandable step to take.

On Thursday, the Education Bureau issued this statement:

"In order to prevent the spread of influenza in school campus, the Education Bureau announced that all kindergartens, kindergartens cum child care centres, primary schools and special schools will begin the Easter holiday starting from March 13 up to 28. During the non-prearranged period of school holiday, these school campus will remain open. Students could go to school as usual, if necessary."

So we teachers will continue to go to school, and students whose parents have no other options can send their kids to school. It's an interesting time. Classroom teachers are arranging work for students electronically, so as not to fall too far behind. This will hopefully prevent us from having to make up the lost days over the summer or on weekends.

A very cool thing about these arrangements is that we teachers, being less busy than usual, have had more opportunities to enjoy each other's company. For once, there's actually time to go out to lunch, and schedule fun PE "workshops." On Friday about 15 of us played a game of dodgeball -- I love dodgeball! And how many years has it been since I last played?! It was such a great stress-reliever, and absolutely hilarious to see respected colleagues diving out of the path of foam balls. Even after just two days, I feel like we've all grown a lot closer, and I look forward to more quality time together (with some work in there too, of course!). And hopefully kids will all stay healthy and have positive learning experiences outside of school.

Good Friday is the start of our Easter holiday, and also the day on which my mom and I will be leaving for Delhi. But more on that later...

moonlighting?

If I had the time and the inclination to get an extra part-time job, this would be it:


And they're hiring!!

It's very tempting. But I think it would take me a while to master technical Cantonese ice-cream vocabulary. Though I'm sure my Baskin-Robbins experience would help me at least get my foot in the door...

iPod first aid

This morning I noticed my iPod sitting on my side table, gathering dust after months of disuse. And the sight made me sad. See, sometime in April or May, after multiple failed recharge attempts, I had resigned myself to the idea of my beloved mp3 player being broken or needing a battery replacement. And being the go-getter that I am, I did nothing about it. Well, this morning, on a whim, I plugged it in. And lo and behold, it started recharging! This is not my iPod's first near-death experience, and though the whole thing perplexes me greatly, my confusion has quickly been replaced by musical ecstasy! Not that the lack of iPod was stopping me from listening to music altogether, but I guess I'd become so overly dependent on its convenience, that I found it hard to go back to my CD player on any permanent basis. Aside from a few albums bought and listened to over the past few months, I'd pretty much allowed myself to be music-starved. So now it feels like I'm feasting! Even playlists that had grown somewhat stale for me, now seem new and fresh! How exciting!

Oh, and after this evening, I am first-aid qualified, which hopefully, in some abstract way ties this whole post together. I didn't take any pictures of dummies this evening, mainly because we didn't practice on them. I guess I could have gotten some shots of my table-mates decked out with slings and magazine-splints, but somehow, that thought slipped my mind.

"are you ok? are you ok?"

I am now a very safe person to be around. After a 3-hour course this evening -- stand back!-- I know CPR!
Some highlights:

1. The three C's -- Check, Call, Care.

2. The phrase in the title -- "Are you OK? Are you OK?" -- repeated multiple times in monotone by a video-taped demonstrator.

3. ABC -- Airway, Breathing, Circulation... although we weren't taught how to test circulation...

4. Acing the multiple choice test at the end. Test-taking is one thing that I'm good at (and something that has occasionally been mistaken for intelligence), and it was pleasant to take an easy one with near instant gratification.

5. The interesting plastic mouth barrier that kept me from really having to perform mouth-to-mouth on my dummy.

no search parties needed

You may have noticed that my posts have quite suddenly dropped off from once a day to *fingers crossed* once a week. So to ensure that no search parties are sent out (allusion to one of Jon's recent posts), I thought I would take this opportunity to assure any concerned readers out there that I am alive, and actually doing quite well.

I started orientation for my new job about two weeks ago, and in that time have kept quite busy sitting in meetings, sorting through things in the ESL room, and generally figuring out what my job entails. Since I'll have a support role at the school, I will be working closely with 9 different elementary teachers and classes, and also under the new administrative umbrella of "Student Services." That means that there are quite a few people that I need to keep up with, so a lot of my energy so far has been spent trying to figure out how to do that most efficiently and effectively. Everyone has been really helpful so far though, and I feel like I have a pretty good idea of what was done last year, and what will be expected of me when school starts on Monday. I also think any anxiety that I do have will quickly dissipate once I meet the kids, get to know them, and get a better idea of how I can help them out.

I'm looking forward to school starting, but am thinking that for a while at least, it will mean less time for blogging.

summer school

I had my last day of summer school on Friday -- here are some pictures.

This is me with the yellow class (one of five classes that I taught each day). As you can probably tell from the photo, this class had quite a few characters in it... most notably, the child that I'm holding on to with two hands (btw, I think he's making that face just to be funny, not because he's in pain...).
Here I am with one of the older classes -- the green class. Getting these photos taken at all was quite chaotic...

Here's "Mr. Preston," my TA, with the white class. Cute!

The Horton Hatches the Egg books (that I blogged about earlier -- link) turned out to be a big success -- definitely worth the hours I put in assembling them. Before the kids started drawing, they had to put the parts of the story in order (there were easy and hard versions), then cut and paste the parts into their books. This step was pretty messy and time-consuming, with some kids needing more help than others... but somehow we got through it! When they finished sticking, they could start illustrating their books. I loved the pictures some of them came up with! I wish I'd been able to get more shots of the kids with their books -- but here are a few.

These two girls are showing their favorite parts of the story.
This was a "show me your silliest elephant" photo.
I think the kids enjoyed making the books, and at the end of the week they had something fun to take home. Thank you Dr. Seuss!

"you're a smart lady"

That's what one of my summer school students told me this morning. One of the classes was very impressed with the laminated pictures that I produced while we were discussing the story we read. One of the kids asked where I got them, and I shared the secrets of photocopying, colored pencils, and laminating (my new favorite past-time, btw!). Then came the "you're a smart lady" comment. But probably the funniest part of the exchange was when the kid "corrected" himself with, "I mean, a smart teenager." Not surprisingly, I was a little taken-aback by this child thinking that I was a teenager. But then I started thinking back to when I was 6 and I recall having no concept of age beyond the relative (i.e. younger than me, about the same age as me, older than me, and a lot older than me). I guess I probably fall into the "a lot older than me" category for this little boy, and amusingly, so do teenagers...
The pictures might look familiar -- they're from Horton Hatches the Egg by Dr. Seuss. I decided to read it to my classes because it's an entertaining story with a pretty easy-to-follow story line. The kids are going to be making their own [simplified] story books for the rest of the week. These little books were a labor of love... seriously. I hadn't figured out how I wanted to do them until my TA was long-gone, so I got to do all the stapling myslef... 135 books! I'm not thrilled about the amount of paper that went into these, but I'm hoping the books will be something the kids enjoy and actually look forward to taking home.

take a chance, take a chance...

I signed a contract today. I'm going to be staying in HK for the next year at least, and working at an international school teaching ESL to students in Gr. 1-3. I realize that's not much information, but I prefer not to go into too much work-related detail on my blog. If you want more details, email me, and I'll be happy to divulge more information!

Many of you know that I just finished up a degree in teaching science, so this decision might seem a bit surprising (trust me, this is something I asked myself, and was asked about in my interview), but I do have a degree and some experience in TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages), and I realized in the past year or so (through tutorials mainly), that I really enjoy working with kids in this age group. And the icing on the cake, so to speak, is the fact that I'll have some pretty cool colleagues (one in particular comes to mind!;)), not to mention that I'll get to go back to a more normal work schedule (how will I spend my Friday evenings? Not to mention my Saturdays?!). There are other reasons why I'm looking forward to this job as well, but won't list them all here. But one more thing that I will say is that I feel like the school's administration has been willing to take a bit of a risk in hiring me (I say "risk" because of my lack of official elementary experience), and I'm having a hard time not finding that fact extremely touching. I guess at least part of the reason why I'm feeling this way is because over the past few months I've experienced more than my average number of disappointments -- some small, some big, some work-related, some not -- and it just feels great to have someone (to steal a line from a great ABBA karaoke song!) "take a chance on me."

yesterday's interview

For those people who I haven't already talked to about my interview, and who might be expecting an update, here is a brief one:

I think the interview went really well, but the headmistress still has a lot more candidates to interview, so I'm not sure when I'll hear anything. The school looks like a really nice place to work, so if I am offered the job, I think I'll seriously consider taking it. But on the other hand, if they don't offer it to me, I don't foresee myself being too disappointed. I'm not 100% sure that the school is the best fit for me (and vice versa), so I'm feeling generally ambivalent about the whole thing.

Here are a couple highlights from yesterday's interview process:

• spelling my middle name wrong on the application form that I was asked to fill out prior to the actual interview. Thankfully, the secretary had already provided me with a tube of white-out. Maybe she could tell that I would have some issues...
  
• giving my lesson demonstration to the headmistress and the head of the English department. I guess I'd expected to have some actual children to teach and interact with for the demonstration, so found it a bit awkward giving a lesson to two adult women. Hmm... I hope they enjoyed the experience as much as I did.
  

cat-free update

Though this might not fit with the cat/hiking/miscellany angle that my blog has been taking lately, I thought I'd share some news about me. Shocking, I know.

I had a pretty crazy week... between working on projects at HKU and tutoring, I've been out all day pretty much every day. That, together with some late nights spent preparing for a presentation, has left me exhausted (and coming down with a cold, again!). But the good news is that I'm officially done with my PGDE (that's "Post-Graduate Diploma in Education") classes at HKU! I have three more papers to finish (or write... I guess "finish" implies that I've started them...) by the end of the month, but will not have to go in for any more classes! Yay!

So that's exciting. But I realized this last week that finishing this stint as a student means that I should probably be looking for some gainful employment for the coming year. Thus, I followed a lead from one of my professors and applied for a job at quite a prestigious local girls' school. I have an interview on Tuesday. It's a primary position, and would allow me to teach both science and English (EFL). I'm a little nervous about the interview, mainly because I was told that the headmistress (why does that sound so intimidating?!) would like me to prepare a 15-minute "demonstration" of my teaching. I asked for some clarification, but am still a little bit unclear on what is expected. S0 that should be interesting... But I'm trying not to worry about it too much. I'm not even sure that I want to work at this school, so the interview should be as informative for me as it is for them.

I'll try to post something after my interview, even if it's just to share some of the unforgettable moments of my "demo." Hehe. Stay tuned. :)