Poetry Jam, April, 2011

Killed a baby chick today

In my grade 1 classroom, we are knee deep in growing things. We are watching tadpoles grow legs. We are watching silkworms molt and prepare to cocoon. And our tour de force incubator act includes (d) 15 chicken eggs and 5 duck eggs. Many other classes have come by and watched while I candled eggs to show them the growing embryos-- extremely cool thing actually to be able to seeing the developing baby fetuses.

Anyway, after the students of 2C left, I realized that I couldn't see anything in two chicken eggs. Having read that that was probably a sign of a non developing embryo, I culled them from their siblings and opened the eggs. The first egg that I opened had a barely developing yolk and had indeed stop developing. In the toilet went that one. The second egg, however, was hard to open and had a thick sac-- that should have told me that I was doing something that should never be done, particularly during Holy Week. So, once the egg was opened, what's a girl to do? I cracked the shell further and discovered to my horror a small black chick with a beating heartbeat--- AAAAAAA. I cried out and stashed it into the trash can in the bathroom. Then, like, Lady MacBeth, I washed my hands over and over. I just can't believe that I, protector and lover of all things small and furry, killed a chicken fetus. Just can't believe I did that... What if that was the only viable egg and now it's gone?? I have vowed to stop handling the eggs all together. Just so wrong....

Who needs a mini van?

Here are Vic and I returning from the local grocery store for our Sunday shop. Yes, that is a full set of 10 rolls of toilet paper in my lap. Fortunately, we have that super handy front basket for the perishables. We had the guard at our apt complex take this picture. He was chuckling, too!

Model United Nations, 2011, SIS

Model United Nations is an afterschool activity that Renata participates in. She has been busy for about a month preparing to represent India in the two areas of education and child soldiers. She has done a lot of research on India's literacy rates and % of child soldiers. Pretty cool stuff.

Yesterday she and her brother participated in the Model United Nations for southern China hosted at her school. Luca was a page for social and economic council as well as human rights council. Both of the kids are seated in the second row up-- she is two from the left and he is nine from the left. At the end, kids are elected by their peers for different titles. Renata was elected "Nicest" and "Most Likely to be Secretary General some day". She wanted to be elected "Hottest" but that went to another deserving middle schooler. She did score highly for "Best Informed Delegate" as well.

Next year when she is in high school, the Model UN is held in Singapore. Cool!! Luca will be a delegate when he is 7th grade as well.

Pretty proud of our kids today!!!

Proboscis and Orangutans and Macaques, oh my

Victor and I were fortunate enough to be able to attend a teaching conference in Borneo, Malaysia last week. We stayed at a beautiful 5 star resort in a city called Kota Kinabalu. Four pools, bowling alley, tiki bar, incredible food you get the idea...
However, what was even more fortuitous was that a short 45 minute flight across the island brought us to a nature preserve for endangered orangutans to which Renata has been buying trees since she was in 2nd grade. Cool, huh? Because to be honest, when you live in Portland, Maine, there are not many locations that are more remote or exotic than the island of Borneo.
So we took a 7 am flight across the island and were able to hire a van and driver to ferry us around two nature preserve. Not surprisingly, lots of folks visit that part of the island to see orangutans. What we learned we arrived was that the trip can be a bit of a two-fer or, in our case, a three-fer. First, we drove out to the orangutan preserve and arrived in time for 10 am feeding time. As we and the crowd of about 100 folks there learned, orangutans are kinda shy, so they take a while to show up for their snack of fruit and milk. Macaques, other hand, are happy to put on a show and eat orangutan leftovers. The bottom picture
features a mom and baby grooming. Of course, she just said, "Lift your arm, for god's sake."
Meanwhile, behind the macaques, three orangutans were swinging down ropes and filling their bellies. Finally, fifteen minutes into the side show, the big daddy orangutan featured in this second photo lumbered onto the stage about 10 feet from us. He was majestic. When I smiled at this beautiful 200 lb creature, Renata corrected, "Don't smile, Mom, he will think you are challenging him and attack you." Well, there is that.
When we returned to our taxi, our
driver brought us to a neighboring nature preserve that protected proboscis monkeys. These are the funny guys who are featured in the other two photos. According to my biologist husband, the males with the biggest noses are the ones that get their own pack, get to eat first, get groomed the most frequently because, "turns out the ladies like the big noses..." Really? Here is one of the dominant males in picture three. Just fabulous...

Sihai Park in Shenzhen

One of the great benefits of being a grade 1 teacher is getting to go on field trips. On Wednesday, we took our first graders to this local park about 15 minutes from our school. I was so taken with the variety of things to do there that I took our friends and family there again today.

To the left was a 15 piece band including two flutes, 3 mandolins, a cello, and 4 Chinese sitars (???). Of course the music was a little tinny for my western ears, but watching all of these folks play so joyfully for whoever showed up to watch will be something I won't forget.

Beautiful shaded areas dot the park. Here are the kids in a tree before they were asked to get down. What I didn't photograph were old guys playing Go and mahjang tiles, ballroom dancers, tai chi followers, and babies, babies, babies.

In other sections of the park were bumper car rides, foot powered boat rides, Chinese talking cockatiels, a tea house, duck and turtle fishing...

Finally here is a shot of a giant bull that was erected when they built the park four years ago. It was the year of the bull four years ago, of course.

The Lantern Festival

So it turns out that fireworks kind of go on endlessly around the time of the Chinese New Year, or Spring Festival. Today, we learned in our Chinese tutorial, is the 15th day after the first day of the new year and is a festival called the Lantern Festival. There have been more dragon dancing, more cool dress up clothes, hard to recognize, but festive snacks, and right now at 8:45 in cool and rainy weather, endless firecrackers and fire works. I think this is the official end of the Chinese New Year so I guess that dogs are sleeping a bit more peacefully in China tonight... I couldn't help myself.

Learning Chinese. Today was our 5th lesson and despite what the kids say, we are getting better--learning more vocabulary and syntax, of course, but also learning more about the Chinese culture. Yesterday, I read a book review of "Dreaming in Chinese" by Deborah Fallows She, a linguist and fellow struggler with Chinese, posits that one can not truly understand a culture without being fluent in their language. That idea has been kicking around my head a lot and made some sense to me today when I learned that Chinese use the word zhu zai "to live" to describe wherever you are staying or visiting. So when Cherry, our tutor, found out that we were going to a hotel for one night this weekend in Hong Kong, she said that she would teach us "visit" or "stay at" dai zai but it is better to say zhu zai even if just for one night.

Maybe it means nothing, but I was thinking about how we definitely delineate home, house and other in English and would never say we lived in a hotel unless we were Eloise at the Plaza...right? What do you all think?