For my third lesson, I chose to teach about Easter. At the beginning of the semester, I asked my students what they would like to learn about during our time together. Many of them were interested in American holidays. The only relatively big holiday celebrated in spring is Easter, so I chose that. Knowing that I should not thoroughly discuss religious aspect of the holiday, I focused on the fun traditions of Easter like the Easter bunny, baskets, egg dyeing and hunts, dinner, bonnets, lilies, etc. In class, we had a competition to see who knew the most about Easter, and I had the students do Happy Easter word searches. I gave away a lot of jelly beans during the activities. We also played Pin the Tail on the Bunny. They had a great time with this, and the winner of this game received a chocolate Easter bunny.
Following the games, I had them write Easter stories (based on an Easter cartoon) and present them to the class. I received a lot of positive feedback from the students saying that they enjoyed the class; however, I had one student tell me he did not like it. I had been warned that Chinese students are often brutally honest. Most of the time this comes in the form of nice compliments, but not this one. I was very upset by his comments. After thinking over the incident, I decided that I will never please 300 students and that I just have to do my best. Also, I realized that it is much easier to remember one negative comment than many positive ones.
Our brains have two sections, velcro and teflon, the velcro catches the negative comments until we forcibly rip them from our mind and the positive comments slide right down that teflon into oblivion! I am sure he was just ticked that E. Bunny never stopped at his house and he didn't want to be reminded about his Easterless childhood....
ReplyDeleteYou crack me up and make me feel better- thanks!
ReplyDeleteYeah, I agree. You can't please all the people all the time, you can only please some, some of the time (and hope that it's a majority).
ReplyDeleteSome kids hate Christmas too, despite the fact that it's here and already been Chinesed (which is good to localise). They hate it as they see it as a form of western traditions taking over and Chinese festivals being forgotten. In a way it's happening. Who goes and watches the Dragon Boat races these days, or does or watches a lion dance... yet everyone does a little something for Christmas, despite the fact it's not theirs.
I don't think being Easterless gets them down as they have their own festivals such as mid-Autumn with mooncakes. It's that they're afraid of losing those festivals by over-writing with western ones.