someone's got a case of the mondays...

Ok, I'm sorry I haven't updated since Thursday. I know you're all waiting on the edge of your seats to hear about my latest adventures. Or something.

So things have been moderately busy since the last time I updated. I spent all day Friday planning for classes and grading quizzes and homework. The quiz scores were completely disappointing. In my ESL class, the average was around a 53%. All I did was give them a dictation and had them spell 10 words that they had copied for homework and we had gone over in class every day. I didn't think it was too hard to ask them how to spell the word "frog." Jesus.

My history quizzes weren't much better. I'd say the average was a 6 out of 10. At least that's not failing. One girl literally didn't get any answers right. I couldn't bear to give her a zero, so I gave her 1 point for trying. I probably shouldn't even have been that nice. So, I'm going to be a lot more strict and have my students who got a 50% or below have their parents sign their quizzes. At least this way I'll know the parents are aware of how badly their students are doing. And since there were some kids that got 100%, I know that the quizzes weren't outrageously hard.

Friday afternoon after classes were over, Shannon and Molly and I went to the Botanical Gardens down the street from school. It was really beautiful. Here are some highlights:

The rest of the pictures are, as always, on kodakgallery.com

Saturday afternoon, Shannon and I decided to be tourists and go down to the Bund to take some pictures of Pudong. I'll update more about the rest of the weekend later, but I'll leave you with one more picture:

In case you can't see, yes I am giving a peace sign and no I am not smiling. When in Rome...