DEad WEek

Why is the dead week called the dead week? People here call their study week "dead week", which, in my opinion, is inappropriate. Why not "alive week" or "lucky week"? At least the name makes you ease a little bit of the tension from the end of the semester.

Anyway, I think I'd better go back to study. Otherwise I'm really going to be dead next week, the last week of the Spring semester.

juST a sHOrt POstINg

Do you know the liquor "Vodka" means water in Russian, and that "Whisky" means water in Irish? I bet you don't.

Come and find me for your prize if you knew these already, coz I was just informed of these two UNCOMMON(my definition) pieces of knowledge this afternoon.

EAstER huNTinG

This week is the holy week. It's mostly about religious, but for people who don't have any religion like me, it's a nice time to gather around with friends and networking with other people.

There didn't seem to be a lot of activities for Easter in Terre Haute, though the real Easter day is tomorrow. So, I found an Easter gathering at a church because of an American friend of mine. This day started rather early for me, because I volunteered to help at their church. Setting up all the tables, and taking down after the activity was mainly what I could help with. In return, I got super delicious breakfast to enjoy for the hard work.

I got to color eggs for only 25 cents, and I got to go for an Easter hunting!! Except for other children groups, they also had an adult group, which was quite a surprise to me. It's been a long time since the last time I did the easter hunting. I had it once when I was little in the States, and I held it one time when I was one of the members in the Student Association in college.

I had a great fun today.

tHE waRMth OF spRIng

Yap, colors are showing up from the trees, the bushes and the ground. Seasons here are obvious here. The warmth of the sunshine and the cool breeze seem to be announcing the end of hibernation to the whole world. There were lots and lots of squirrels hanging around on campus, I even saw a rabbit bouncing around the other morning when I was going for my RW class! It's so vivid everywhere, they're back to life!

ExtRA~~exTRa!! fIEld TRip IN eaRLy sPRinG

Yesterday, two of my classmates and I gave our last presentation for one of our classes. I've digitized the clip and put it on the web. If you have an hour of free time, you can link to this site and enjoy our presentation. If you have only half and hour, you can skip to 2/3 of the clip, which is the turn of my presentation.

It's not really a field trip, it's actually an activity that the regular teacher of RW class came up with. We went to a large park that is about 10-minute-drive away from campus. It's called "Deming Park".

It was really a big park. After having all 12 students gathered in the parking lot near the entrance, we started to walk into the park. Every 3-5 minutes, we would assign a student to a spot. The students had to describe all the details around them using adjectives and relative clauses. When all the students were settled down in their own spot, me and the regular teacher would walk around and check if they have any problem with their writing. We would help them mostly their vocabulary and description problems. After about an hour of writing, it was about time for the class, and the homework was assigned. The homework was to type out their writing today, check all the sentences, and most important of all, correct their spelling. Since 9 out of 12 students were from Saudi Arabia, and most of them had serious spelling problem, we hoped that the computer technology would help them out a little bit.

PS. There's 11 students in this picture because one of the students that is a Saudi Arabia girl can not take any pictures with Saudi Arabia men. Well... culture difference.

stREssFUl mE

I can finally take a little break to write my blog now. Starting from last Wednesday, I am having a frequent and close interaction with one of the class at INTERLINK. INTERLINK is a private institution that has a contract with ISU and assists ISU prospective students on their English abilities. Following is cited from INTERLINK website:

A majority of these students go on to ISU after meeting their needs at INTERLINK. Some students, however, study at INTERLINK for a variety of reasons.

Last week, I observed the Reading & Writing class for three days. The time of the class is from 8:30 to 10:20 and it's Mon. through Fri. I had to change my working schedule to work with the class. And Starting from this Monday, me and the regular RW teacher took our turns to teach the class. It's basically co-teaching, but I think I would teach the whole 2-hour class on Thursday or Friday.

There's several reasons that I'm kind of stressed out these days. It's been a while since I taught English last time. The age of the students in the RW class are way different from that of what I used to have in the past. I used to have elementary or junior high school students, but this time, I'm having future college and graduate students in my class. I had to look for suitable activities for teaching reading and writing sentences. The levels of the students are in a wide range, so I had to work very hard and think thoroughly on how to get every one of them involved in the activity and not feeling bored.

Today is the second day of my teaching, I felt much more better than yesterday. I couldn't have a good-night sleep since last Sunday, and I even dreamed of the sentence structure that I taught when I had the time to take my nap, which, as a result, made me more tired afterwards. But this is definitely a great opportunity for me to REGAIN my teaching confidence and to practice my teaching skills. Challenging task, but I think I'm kind of addicted to it.

hIGh-tECh lAB

Our language lab became officially a high-tech lab today because all the computers were equipped with Logitech webcams. I tried one of them today to chat with my sister through MSN Messenger, and it was awesome! I'm not trying to promote the sales of the webcams here, so if you're interested in how good the product is, please visit the local store near by your house.

I always thought, and it actually is true, that our department is always running out of money. However, these two days when three other people came in and started to install these high- tech products, I started to think that our department was saving the money for these babes.

Since the webcams were installed, I started to pay more attention on the top of each flat monitors. Counting all of them every ten minutes, making sure that each one of them are peacefully lying on the place where they should be. Frankly, this is kind of giving me the nerves. Hopefully our lab will not be a busy place because of these webcams. If people, especially international students, know that they can let their family see them while chatting on the Internet, students workers in the lab will have to pay more attention to the safety of these new items.

gOLf prACtiCe & mY JapANesE CarP KitE

It was a pretty sunny day today, which made me feel more like spring. This afternoon I had the chance to go golfing with my American and Korean friends. It was my first time of play golf. I didn't even know how to hold the golf club. The golf course was near campus, it took about 5 to 10 minutes to drive there. Too bad I didn't bring my camera, maybe I'll take pictures some other day when I go. I think I kind of like this sport. Not as violent as racquetball, but more fun than playing pool, which is another game I used to like.

I couldn't hit the ball at all in the beginning, and the posture we had to adopt to was extremely awkward to me. But after trying for a while, I found out that it's the posture that can help you swing the club better. I think I did pretty well today, and I will see if I can play more, since spring is coming and the weather will turn sunnier and warmer.

This is a little gift given by one of my Japanese friends. Don't really know the culture background of this, but I'll figure it out in the future. Despite the fact that I don't what this carp kite's for, but I do think it's absolutely cute.

SupER naNNy

Today, I found a very interesting TV program that got me addicted to it for the whole afternoon. It was called "Super Nanny". They had this British nanny who goes to families that had issues on educating children, and figures out what the problems were that cause their children "behaving in a disorderly manner". But first of all, I'd like to say that beyond what the program was focusing on, I noticed that these families were super rich. They live in mansions, they have their own huge garden, and their houses were beautifully designed. In the beginning of each episode, the nanny would stay with the family for a certain time and observe the daily interaction between the parents and the children. Some of the children really drove me nuts, but I think it's all because the way their parents educate them.

There were one family that had one older boy who always wanted his parent's hug when the mother or the father already had a twin sisters on both of their arms. Of course the boy's not going to be picked up, so he cried all the time. He would try to do anything to get his parents' attention. And there were a few kids that were so naughty that they just never seems to be willing to go to bed. They would jump out of their bed after their parents gave them their good-night kiss or bedtime story, and do whatever was funny to them but painful to the parents. Of course these bad behaviors were not because the kids were born to be like that, the only answer to this problem is that their parents didn't teach them in a proper way.

The nanny offers solutions to their problems like giving them a "time-out", take them to a separate room or put them on a chair, ignore their intention of getting their parents' attention or she would simply ask the parents to change their own behavior. But one thing that never changes to every family is that they all need to stick to a strict schedule, which is not commonly used technique.

daYLigHT saVIng TIme

There's something I quoted from the email International Affair Center sent to all the international students. Of course this is not only what international students had to do, but it's really nice of them to remind us of this.

Before you go to bed this Saturday night (April 1), don't forget to change your clocks ahead one hour. This is the first time in many years that Terre Haute has had a time change like this. We will remain on Eastern Standard Time (EST) throughout the year. In the Fall, we will be changing our clocks back one hour.

Starting from this week, we will have to change our time an hour earlier, which means the time between Taiwan and Terre Haute got a little bit closer. But it's strange that when it gets to 7 o'clock in the evening, it's still bright as 3 o'clock in the afternoon. And it won't be dark until 8:30 PM. This made me pretty confused several times.