Ah, the wonders of being almost a year behind with my blog. Things I post about from last year are almost relevant again! Like today’s post; Easter! So, at Aston we like the kids to “celebrate” the western holidays to try and absorb some of our culture. We don’t go into the details…well, in fact, we don’t even tell them anything about the holiday’s religious roots. They just think it’s a holiday about eating chocolate and painting eggs. Well, not too far off…

  
So, those familiar with the blog will know about Beitang Primary School. It’s the primary school that I teach at when I’m not teaching at Aston. Chinese primary schools are very different to their western counter parts. Firstly as the left-most photo shows. There are a lot of students. A lot. Each grade has 7-8 classes. Each class has 60-70 students. And that’s “small” class-sizes. Beitang is one of the best primary schools, it’s “proud” of that class size. Anyway, there are 6 grades in primary school, so conservatively thats 6*7*60 … more than 2,500 students! My primary school (Hayes Meadow Primary School, represent!) The other two pictures also highlight differences, read on for more…

2012! Bang! That sounds like the future! “Twenty-twelve.” New years resolution? Get on with my blog. So, with no further wait: Every so often I use my photography / cinematography skills to help out the school. Last year this involved making some photos for use on a flier, and also making some testimonial videos that other potential teachers could check out. I’m quite happy with the results, it turns out my classrooms can be converted to makeshift studios quite easily…

I shot this video last week. I was mainly shooting photos at the Beitang sports day, but I thought the photos didn’t give justice to just how many kids were there dancing. While this isn’t a particularly quality video, I think it gets the idea across. Enjoy! Photos (600 of em) from the event are in my very, very long que of photos to edit and blog.

It’s (or, it was) that time of year again. When we introduce our students to the strange and weird customs of Halloween. As always, the kids really embraced it. I guess it’s a pretty cool holiday – you get to dress up as whatever you want, and then people give you candy. What more could you want? As usual this proved a goldmine for photos, so… enjoy!

Wow, tomorrow would be the one-month anniversary of having no posts on the blog. Oops. So, why the long silence? Well, busy, busy, busy! I have 1800 photos worth of blog posts on their way, highlights include heading to B’s hometown again, my parents visiting, and, oh yeah — I got engaged!
However, let’s kick things off with something that happened months ago; the last day of Beitang! Beitang is the primary school where we teach for half the year, it was the last day of class so I took in my camera, and it was fun all round…

Needless to say, the next lesson I taught the meaning of irony.

“Men love to chase women who are as slippery as slippery as wat soap in the tub.even if those whose who dislike taking a bath.”

I saw this great quote on a kid’s notebook. Usually they have badly translated English (Chinglish) but this one definitely made me laugh the most I’ve laughed in a while…

So, H1N1 is still a big buzz-word in China. As such, the government and it’s agencies are constantly implementing new, illogical counter-measures. For example, B’s schools quarantine; it’s now in effect during the week, but lifted at the weekend. They’re not really quite getting the idea. Anyhow, the latest such counter-measure for me to witness was this “extra” exercise at Beitang…

So, Halloween isn’t really celebrated isnt celebrated at all in China, but at Aston we like to teach culture as much as language; so a few weeks back we set plans into motion to celebrate Halloween, including getting all the kids to dress up. It made for some excellent photographs…