Day 13: Rain = Short Post

Easy come, easy go. It rained steadily throughout the day, and the fog has persevered into the evening, which does not bode well for tomorrow.

We continued teaching directions today, using a slightly different technique. We separated the kids into groups, and had them each pick a location where they were to start, and then they were to pick a mutual location where they would "meet up," and then they would tell us how to get from where they were to the meeting place. It went very well in some cases and not so well in others. The word "intersection" seems to be quite a stumbling block for them; they tripped over the word and forgot it many times. By contrast, 路口 (lukou), Chinese for "intersection," is very simple. After we finished that exercise, we moved on to telling time. Most of them had at least studied this before, so it went more smoothly, although there were a few students who didn't have a masterful grip on numbers, without having to incorporate the time aspect. We nevertheless explained different ways to say certain times (4:10 as "ten past four"; 5:45 as "a quarter of (or to) six"). Luckily the Chinese have an analogous practice in their language, so it wasn't difficult to explain.

The afternoon was disappointing in that we were confined to the indoors. I mostly read, and also did some coding. I'm trying to learn Java over the summer, as I don't really have room in my schedule for a computer science course, and Eric and Tao Yuan are helping me out, as they are both computer science majors. Other than that, the day was decidedly unproductive. I am hoping against hope that we can get at least an hour or two of work in tomorrow.

If anyone knows an anti-rain dance, I'm all ears.