The typhoon this weekend was intense. Much scarier than the first one we experienced while living in Luodong. It was mostly the wind, which, on many occasions, made the building shake. My housemate lost her screen off her window. We made a fort in our living room and spent all day in it (ate two meals, watched three movies...). Bikes were blown over; scooters fell; many of the traffic lights on the way to school were torn off the poles. As you can see in the following pictures, there was massive damage to many of the natural areas too.


The students spent a good 45 minutes cleaning up the school this morning. The bulletin board about Columbus Day that I worked so long on was completely torn to shreds. I suppose that's what you get for having outside bulletin boards.

The day progressed as usual, despite the lack of electricity for most of the morning (and for parts of the afternoon). As you can see, not all my students caught up on sleep during the weekend.
A frustration of mine (that I've realized over the past month) is the lack of useful vocabulary that my students are learning. It's all well and good to teach them words to illustrate the alphabet and to help them remember what letters sound like, but when in the world is "camel" going to come up in conversation? Case in point. We've been working on the word "alligator" for the past month and a half with out second graders. But since they never use it except in class, it doesn't stick. As you can see, they're still struggling with it. I'm all for inventive spelling and simply encouraging the students to TRY to write in English, but in this system, it's either right or it's wrong, there's no space for attempts.

"Alligator"

As one might be able to surmise, this frustrates me to no end. So, today I decided I would teach my first graders something they could actually use: plus and equals. Success! They could demonstrate that they understood the vocabulary immediately. It was something they could actually use! By the end of the class, every single student was raising his/her hand to volunteer to do a English math problem on the board.