A crazy week of fun/students!

Well how can I say this?

This last week has been interesting, to say the least. We've gotten to hang out with students who are amazing all while having to finish up final exams and turn in grades. It's been a busy week...

I don't know where to start because it's all running together now. I'll start with finals, both Lacy and I have about 500 students between the two of us. We teach two different courses; one is Public Relations and the other is Oral English. We spread the Public Relations exam over a two week period, this week and last. The reason we did this is because we individually interviewed each student for a job. The job they were interviewing for, Chinese-English translator. So you can imagine 200-250 interviews each would take some time. Our Oral English final exams were last week and those were fairly easy in comparison, so no stress involved.

After we finished with exams we had to give final grades and enter them into excel spreadsheets calculate scores and turn them in. Sounds easy yet time consuming... not so fast! Our rosters are IN CHINESE! Nothing new to me except for the fact that they changed this years rosters and they are much more detailed. Now there are spots for so many different things; number of students who took the final, number of students who didn't take the final, number of students who averaged between 90-100%, 80-89, 79-80 etc etc. So it was a little draining having to have them translated and then getting them turned in on time.

On to the students, the most exciting part of being in China! Some of the other teachers put on a narrated Christmas program. It was basic, the passage was read aloud in Chinese and then the show began. Again, it was simple but enough to get the point across. There's not a lot of resources here to put on a big show so they used what they could and made sure the gspl was presented through this opportunity. A huge blessing...

As I have mentioned before on our blog site we meet with a group of students each Wednesday evening. This week we took advantage and discussed the Christmas story. The students love to hear about western "festivals", what they call holidays. So we read the passage from the Word and then talked about the importance of the different prophecies that had been spoken before the virgin-birth.

Speaking of ""virgin-birth," the topic of sexuality in China is one that is not brought up much. The literal translation from Chinese to English for "virgin" is "holy mother" WHAT DOES THAT MEAN? When we began to talk about the different things that were important from this passage, everything BUT the fact that Mary was a virgin was mentioned. So I said "aren't we missing something?" They said "no, we don't think so" (very innocently). So I went in to talk about the fact that Mary had never been in a relationship with Joseph. With my eyes kind of open wide and bobbing my head as if I were trying to say something "between-the-lines." The other thing that was funny was a student, one of my closest Chinese friends, Jim would say "whats a birgin, he couldn't pronounce it correctly. AND THEN... the lights came on. The shade of color on their faces went from "winter pale" to "cherry red." Probably the most I/we as a group had laughed this whole semester. They didn't know what to do or say... and it made it worse that they "knew" what it was but didn't "know" what it was, if you understand what I mean. So the shyness factor was multiplied...

You would think that the "Virgin Mary" story would be over right? Well it's not... We ended up laughing just as hard, yet again... Why you ask? We not only read the passages but we sang Christmas songs. "Silent Night" was one of those Christmas songs.... In one of the verses it reads "Round Young VIRGINS, Mother and Child..." I was sitting next to Jim and this was AFTER we had talked about the whole "virgin" issue and then I noticed this was in the next line... I looked at Jim as he sang the words knowing that he didn't pick up on this the 1st time. Now that he knows... it clicked and he realized he HAD BEEN SINGING about this! His face was HILARIOUS! As if he had seen a ghost. We stopped and began laughing once again...

I hope you enjoyed that story as much as I enjoyed being there with these amazing people! I just wish the humor stopped there for one night... too bad because it didn't.

We were just hanging out as we do when we finish with our discussions. We ordered pizza, ate, and talked about life. A question came up about how Lacy, Kerry and I will travel to Hong Kong on Saturday. We usually try to give them a funny answer like walk or ride a bike. This time I got my handy pocket translator out and typed in "hitchhike" It helps you to know what the tones are so you can pronounce the words correctly. This is hard enough even when you have a native Chinese speaker saying the word for you while helping you practice let alone trying to learn it from a dictionary. Anyway, I spoke the word and all the students began LAUGHING SO HARD! They told me to say it again, so I did, and again LAUGHING! Come to find out "hitchhiker" and "I need to poop" are the same word BUT DIFFERENT tones. Yeah, I said the wrong tones... laugh all you want! This is how memories are made EH?!