Maple Leaf Arts Festival

This last week was an incredibly busy one. Kristen was recovering from being sick, and was trying to write her first ever midterm exams for her Grade Nines. On top of that, she also marked sixty five essays! Needless to say for someone who is not a trained teacher, it was a hell of a week.

Paul bit off a little more then he could chew last week, and spent the weekend struggling to catch up! On top of collecting over 200 chapter review tests, he collected 200 review sheets, 200 crossword puzzles, and filled out 200 participation assessments. He also prepped for this week's lessons, coached the ultimate frisbee team (which is in the process of gearing up for a trip to Tianjin to play in a competitive tournament)  and was an "honourable judge" for three different Maple Leaf English Arts Festival competitions.

He's not the brightest crayon sometimes...

However, the English Arts Festival was pretty sweet! He worked with his grade sevens to write fairy tales for the creative writing contest, and judged the drama contests (with the department head, the Dean of the ESL department and the superintendent of the school). He also helped groom some of the students pronunciation and sentence structure for the speech competition. Oh, and he judged the competition...

Some pictures:

The middle school kids all were out for the arts festival... it may have been mandatory attendance. I am not sure. Either way... full house~!

One of my grade seven students. She was picked to go on to the Maple Leaf Cup (an open speech contest in Dalian, sponsored by the school). She didn't win (there were high school students and students who had studied abroad at the contest and this was only her first time) and was pretty devastated. On Monday, she came up to me to tell me that she was sorry about disappointing me. I had a long chat with her about how proud I was of her and told her what a great job she did... different world over here sometimes!

The ten finalists at the speech contest.

Tiniest child at the school.... plays violin like a forty year old Russian lady who studied for twenty years under an
old-school master from the Moscow symphony. Amazing!

J____ on the left is one of my students. He split a reed halfway through the song and was hilarious about trying to contain his embarrassment. Definitely one of my favourite students.