Day 10: Maybe Tomorrow

It rained on and off all day long, which is an improvement from earlier days, but not yet enough to do much work. We will be doing some heavy lifting tomorrow though, and it looks like we'll finally get the weather we've been hoping for.

The day commenced, as usual, with English class at 7:30. We started with our skit, as promised, and it involved a bank, a police station, and a jail. I was the bank owner (as well as a corrections officer later), Tao Yuan was the thief, Cherry was the police officer, and Eric was Tao Yuan's roommate in jail. And of course, the skit was in simple English, even involving an exchange of pleasantries between Tao Yuan and I before he robbed me, and between Tao Yuan and Eric when they met in jail. Afterwards, the groups each performed their skits. Theirs were understandably less complex plot-wise than ours, but some of them were actually pretty good. I think my favorite moment of the morning was when one of the students, Tao Shan Shan, said during her group's skit, "That sounds great! We can kill two birds with one stone." We definitely are not teaching them idioms, but this is the same student who, when we asked them what vegetables they knew in English, came up with leek.

We spent the rest of the morning doing some grammar practice. They seemed relatively comfortable with the basic tenses, so I attempted an ill-conceived lesson in the subjunctive; it did not go well. We went back to the more basic grammar, and it soon became clear that only a few kids knew the material. So we wrote this on the board:

Last night, I ______.
Now, I ______.
Tomorrow, I ______.
On weekends, I usually ________.

This seemed an effective template to help them understand the different conjugations of verbs for different tenses. We also changed pronouns every once in a while.

The afternoon was again uneventful, but all of us are very hopeful that tomorrow will be different. At dinner, I tried a new food: bird egg. Now some of you who know me well know that I have a great fondness for hard-boiled eggs. But these are better. First of all, they are bite-size. And second of all, they are boiled in tea leaves, so they have a flavor of their own; it is not necessary to season them with sauce. This was a wonderful discovery.

I think that about does it for today, but I promise to have a more detailed update of our progress on the park tomorrow night. See you then.