Back in the classroom (temporarily)

I'm back at school today to teach my winter break complementary class. It's sort of a different experience from my usual teaching; the students are brand-new first graders, the periods are forty-minutes long (I'm teaching two period back to back) and I guess they haven't been issued their uniforms yet because they're all wearing normal clothes. It's also sort of different in that I've taken this as an opportunity to change my approach a bit. Because all of these students are here because they ostensibly want to be, I don't feel like I have to worry about discipline as much. So I sort of skipped the whole rules thing and today we played a name game and then human bingo. The name game (where students go around a circle and have to say their name and then all the names of the people who spoke before them) wasn't as helpful to me as I was hoping. I wanted to learn all the students names, but they speak so quickly and quietly that I'm more likely to remember their favorite colors and favorite animals than their names (I'm already thinking of certain students as Yellow Dog and Black Llama for this reason). Human Bingo was fun for them, and since I played as well, it gave me an excuse to force students to talk to me. (The purpose of the game was to get the names of students who could answer yes to certain questions, i.e.: Have you eaten boshintang (dog soup)? Are you wearing plain white socks?).

So my Southeast Asia travels have finally come to an end. Malaysia was fun, but I liked the climate in Vietnam better. Saigon impressed me because motorbikes outnumber cars by about 4 to 1. You have to take a whole different tactic there when crossing streets. It works best to just sort of slowly meander across the road, because bikes can easily maneuver around you if they see you coming. You're more likely to get hit if you dart out. But it's strange to walk through moving traffic, with so many bikes, to say the least. I think Vietnam and Thailand qualify as countries I'd like to visit again (I spent 3 1/2 days in Saigon and 8 days in Thailand, almost exclusively in the South).