Hair Moments

Blonde Hair Moments.
- On Friday, I gave my elves a spelling test, their first one. I very smartly took down our word wall just in case students could see the spelling words from their desks. About half way through the test, several elves pointed out that the daily morning language exercises on the board contained a lot of spelling words (on purpose, I wanted them to practice that morning). Oops. Then they pointed to the Language Arts paragraph we were revising on the wall, which also had spelling words. Double oops. My elves are too honest.
- Mandarin Language mistake of the week: I was reading sentences at the end of a chapter on radical characters. The character for horse is also almost the exact same as the character for a question mark. You just add a box in the character. So instead of reading: "My bike is broken, can I use yours?" I read, "My bike is broken, can I use your horse" I was thinking how much China still has a long way to go before being a developed country, before I realized my mistake. But really, in any other situation, mistaking a question mark for the word horse would've never made any sense!
- And I guess, maybe the other Mandarin mistake of the week was letting a bunch of the guys at Joe's who were "teaching" me more Mandarin phrases lead me into saying dirty Mandarin words. Luckily no locals were paying attention during the time of my mistakes. Never again!


Red Hair Moments.
- It never gets old when I hear a little one say "Mama, tou fa!" (meaning "Mama, hair!" Of course they're talking about my hair. I need some witty come backs in Mandarin. This happened yesterday at the airport.
- I also get the above reaction when grocery shopping. I was getting really annoyed because it was happening WITH EVERYEONE in the grocery store, but then I realized I was going on the weekends and normally my grocery day is Monday. I forgot that on the weekends, a lot of farther out villages bus their people into Beilun on the weekends. Said far out villagers have never encountered a laowai before, let alone one with red hair. (In reference to this, while we were at the airport picking up the new MS Science teacher, Dana and I waited as the lady in front of us made several terrified attempts to get on the escalator, clearly a far out villager. I hope she wasn't the one going on the airplane, because that would totally blow her mind!)
- Obviously, all the Chinese have black hair. Some put dark brown highlights in, just to be different. And the super radical ones put a more orange/red/yellow color in their hair, which isn't actally too far off my hair color. Yesterday I shared an elevator with one of these radicals with bright yellow/orange hair. It was super awkward because she STARED at my hair and I had no way to get away. I could just see the cogs in her brain clinking as her mind screamed, "How?!?!?!?! How do you get that color?!"


Personal @ school victory.
Last year my elves were trained to look at what needs to be done in a task, and just finish it, no matter the quality of their work. Once they were done, they could do whatever they wanted, like draw on the board. This has been driving me bonkers this year, because they're always yelling, "Finished!" and then they go for my white board markers. They do everything to race through their work, so I've been trying to untrain them.
On Friday, I had my elves revise a fake paragraph I had written that contained many of their common grammar mistakes (the same one that I accidently left up during the spelling test). We revised it first, then editted, and when we couldn't read it anymore for all of the corrections, I rewrote the whole thing with corrections on the white board. I read it through to them and then asked, "Are we done?" There was a resounding "Yeeaa--- noooooooo! We missed a period there. That needs to be capitolized. We should change this 'and' to say, ´later´ .. " and it just kept going! Inside I was doing mini jumping jacks, cartwheels and star jumps for excitement! Finally! A task they wanted to do well, instead of just get done. Or maybe they've figured out they don't get to do anything exciting if they finish early ....