Thursday 12/12/02                     Teaching a Little Overachiever

 

            I found out the new girl Susan in our class (was in the 8AM section last semester) lives in an apartment near school with two empty rooms that I may check out.  But after class I had to leave for work right away because I was leaving early to tutor Stephanie at 4:30.  Dropped by Dr. C’s office to inform him and he laughed as I explained; don’t know why.  I really had the urge to stop and ask what it was that was so funny—that I was leaving work early too often?  That I was teaching a kid?  But I didn’t because Chinese people just laugh at weird times I guess.

 

            I called to let Erica know I was on the way and got their answering machine—Stephanie’s voice in English, then in French.  Oh brother.  Did her mom put her up to that?  As I walked through the NTU lobby I saw that the med students have been prepping for some kind of holiday show.  It’s been on the lobby floor all week—several Christmas trees, decorations and lights.  ShiDa is decorated too—garland, tinsel and balls all around the stairway railings and all over the student loungeb and a Christmas tree on the office floor.  The malls are very elaborately done up, big lit Santas and lights everywhere, and almost every mall has its own huge lit tree.  The one outside Living Mall seemed as big as Rockefeller’s.  It’s all so unabashedly un-PC, “Merry Christmas” words everywhere.  Brian just told me that Da-An Park has a huge display of scenes from Jesus’ birth all the way up to the resurrection, including a huge lit Nativity.

 

I took the MRT there with 25 minutes to spare but still had lots of walking (and the RenAi Circle is so huge and you can’t cut through it—just have to walk around the perimeter, with makes the distance so much longer). 

 

Steph was wearing glasses this time and like last, kept showing me different cute dolls/toys and I had to keep bringing her attention back to the “lesson.”  I tried making a schedule for us to follow each week, but it just turned into a list of what she wanted to do and she even drew a colored scale for each thing, a percent bar for each to note how much she liked it (Playtime and Joketime each got 100%, while Grammar and Vocab each got 25%).  We got off on lots of tangents, she made me sing, Erica made us really good beef stir fry wide noodles for dinner, and we did a project from her “Totally Gross Chemistry” kit that involved cutting open a diaper, collecting the absorbing crystals in a cup and watching them absorb water.  She learned the words “polymer” and “molecule” which I doubt she’ll use for another 6 years.  At the end, Erica asked me how to prep her for the college SAT (!).  I later mentioned this to Brad, who said, “I would’ve said, ‘Oh, it’s too late now.  She’s screwed!’”

           

            I met her neighbor who lives in the same building, a mother with a 16-year-old girl; wants me to teach her starting January and just came by to meet me, nodded with approval and said I’m “cute.”

 

            It’s nice to come home after work and chill, life back to normal again.  But I get in bed with my Chinese books and by 12 I’m falling asleep with the TV and lights still on, and give up studying.  My body making up for sleep deprivation of last week?