Welcome back to the working world of higher education in China. After three long months of travel, watching TV, and planning lessons, we finally started teaching on Monday, March 17th. The first week went very smoothly: Nick implemented procedures in Oral English for student presentations, pronunciation work, and targeted vocabulary increase and use. I got the students used to the new syllabus for Writing II, and then we took a walk outside in preparation of the students' first writing assignment of the term: My Connections to My Environment.
Lots of people in the modern world are slowly losing touch with the way that we get things like clothing and food. There are people who make things for people they never meet.
We all buy things made by people we have never seen. As I reflected upon last year in a class at the Christian Study Center, this is very de-valuing of work. If we can at least be cognizant of the origins our our stuff, we'll make better decisions about what we buy, and where we buy it.
This coming week in writing class we'll do a review of all the English verb forms in 2 hours. At first it seemed like too much material, but I've broken it down into "verb stations" where students will read about a particular verb tense, its most common usage, and common errors. Then they'll write an example sentence using a verb given to them from the Mad Libs card game pack.
Easter here was nothing too special. I brought it up in class last week under the heading of "current events" so that the students were aware of it. Nick and I have almost eaten our weight in wonderful Easter candy sent over by our parents. And then, I tried to dye Easter eggs.
There is food coloring in China; this I know by the beautiful cakes that can be ordered. However, it isn't sold in the people's grocery stores or on the street (haha). How, then, to dye eggs? Natural ingredients. After reading some blog posts about natural Easter egg dyes, I set off in search of 1) white eggs, and 2) natural dye ingredients (herbs, spices, etc).
The eggs were easily acquired from the egg lady at the end of the "vegetable and fruit street." She had brown eggs, white eggs, and the little speckled ones. She even gave me a deal. The natural dye ingredients were a little trickier, but here is what I found: grape juice and red cabbage (for red/purple), curry powder (yellow), broccoli and green tea (green), and blue mint candies (blue).
Saturday rolled around and I searched through all of the plastic containers that I had for ones that would hold about a cup of dye. I put the eggs on to boil. I put some of each dye ingredient into the cups and added a couple of rice vinegar. I had the brilliant plan to use the egg-boiling water to pour directly into the dye cups because warm water would be better. I poured some into the ceramic containers and the plastic one that previously held Gao-le-gao hot chocolate mix. Then I got to the peanut butter container. I thought surely a hard plastic like that would be able to stand high temperatures.
A second after pouring boiling water into it, the clear container with the mix of curry powder and vinegar began to flatten and melt on the counter, and gross yellow fluid was poised to stain the entire counter and floor. I picked up the edge of the container and flipped it into the pan, thus avoiding disaster. A ceramic cup worked much better the second time ...
The eggs turned out better than expected - now on to new adventures!
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