loves of my life

did i ever mention that i love my students? maybe this post is a little premature but i have just over a month left here and i already feel the pain of separation. by my estimates i have probably worked with a little less than 2000 kids here in less than a year! how many first year teachers can say that?!? pretty cool...

the faces in the pictures don't have any meaning to anyone except me but they will be engrained in my memory forever. i hope i can at least stay in touch with a few of them to see how they turn out.

this semester i was lucky enough to have both old and new faces. i have 15 new classes and 11 old classes, which i think was a good balance. i have to say that i definitely feel closer with my old classes though.

here are some old faces:



and here are some new faces!




for some of these kids i probably had very little to no effect on them whatsoever (they saw my class merely as a 35 minute break in the day) but for other kids i think my effect has been bigger than i'm probably even aware of. for example, when i met aaron's mother (my little private student), she told me that aaron felt excited about learning english for the first time in my class. i think it all goes back to when i showed them a justin bieber music video haha, but hey, whatever sparks your passion. to be honest, when aaron asked me on QQ to be his teacher, i wasn't exactly sure which student he was, so it just goes to show that i'm not always aware of who is following me. his oral english is improving rapidly now that he is opening his mouth and giving the language a shot.

moving on, this class is literally a teacher's dream. there's at least like 50 of them but they're well behaved, quiet and polite. they're almost too good...maybe they have something up their sleeve...hehe. the boy in the orange stripes has excellllent english but sometimes he uses his skills for strange purposes. last class he ran up to me in my the middle of my lesson and told me that his stomach was uncomfortable and that he needed to go to the WC immediately. i was like, OK, go!! hahah

sometimes i like to get in the pictures too :) nice, nice 6th graders.

what will i do without a classroom full of chinese kids? oh, woe is me!