Love for Handsome Lake

I cannot count the number of times my colleagues who teach oral English at other schools tell me how much they hate teaching junior 1 students (about 12-14 years old). *Quick aside: The reason for the large age span in any given grade of students has to do with their professed ages being based on the lunar calendar. See, when a Chinese baby is born he/she is already one year old and then will turn two on the lunar new year. Sooooooo, if child was born a day before the lunar new year, then he'll be two when he is merely two days old. Conversely, if the child is born a month after the lunar new year, he will not turn two until he is 11 months old in our was of customary counting.* Well I love my Junior 1 students. This term I am teaching 8 classes of them: 4 small classes where Barbara and I divide big classes in half, and then 4 large classes. The large classes are Junior 1 Classes 5, 6, 7,8. Classes here are ranked, Class 1 is the best, and Class 10 is the worst. So by logic you'd think that these would be the bad classes. Admittedly, their English is not quite the same as Classes 1-4, but what they lack in skill, they more than make up in eagerness....except for Snoopy, who spent 30 minutes standing outside of class because he thought "fuck you" to be terribly funny to shout over and over. Today I found my favorite student of all time and his name is Handsome Lake. Yes that is correct, Handsome Lake. He's adorable and funny and loves to speak English and he is a member of Class 8, my new favorite class. They were full of energy and eager to learn; a teacher's dream quite frankly.

News on the less meritable front:
I was supposed to have been moved out of my apt. last weekend, but due to 50,000 things that are wrong with the place, I am still sleeping on the couch of my old empty place, bringing clothes back and forth from my new school apt. via backpack each day. Yesterday, after they still had done nothing to fix anything, I went through the place and found the following things wrong:
1) No phone line (has phone and lots of holes in the wall that could maybe in the future house phone wires)
2) No place for internet (in my contract)
3) Refridgerator doesn't chill (kinda key factor for said contraption)
4) No water or power to washing machine
5) No hot water (that was fixed this morning)
7) One (1) electrical socket that works (that means lots of extension cords and a monster power strip will be needed to plug in tv, two lamps, water cooler, fridge, washer, and internet.....haha does it sound like they need to do something)
8) Toilet doesn't work

Addressing the last part: I went in yesterday between classes to use the toilet only to find upon test flush (i do these kind of things now b/c i've been in china long enough to know there is about an 1/7 chance it's not going to work) I find that no water fills the toilet bowl. So, I go down to admin, tell my boss the problem and say that I cannot move into this place until the toilet at least works...i mean the rest can be dealt with after if NECESSARY. Well he says no problem, no moving until the apt. is all ready (wonderful that he says this after it was demanded that I move all my effects out of my old place last weekend). This morning I go up to the room at school to get a roll of TP (for a clever game for my Junior 1s) and am overwhelmed by a smell I can only liken to vomit coming from the bathroom. I open the door and where the non-functioning toilet was yesterday, today there is just a hole in the ground. And later I find out that all of the dorm toilets were backing up into said hole in the ground in my bathroom today....hence the horrid smell. When I told them the about the toilet problem, I would have thought that a new U-tube or a couple cranks of a pipe would have put it back in order, not take the whole darn thing out.

The only thing to do on a day like this is to remember that my students are awesome, the weather was perfect to run by the resevoir, and TIC (this is China) and I've come to expect the illogical and idiotic to happen on a daily basis.