3 weeks to go...

So somehow I'm down to 3 weeks on remaining teaching time - I can't believe how quickly time has passed but August and Beijing do feel like a very long time ago.

So with 3 weeks left of the clock I am back into oral English exam season, so far I'm one week in. This semester's topics are: music, movies, homes and 'all about me' (they have to talk about their hobbies, personalities and appearance), all of which bring some interesting insights into my pupils.

It seems that Michael Jackson, The Beatles and Westlife are popular amoungst my 17 year old pupils - this surprised me no end! Sam Smith is also very popular and not surprisingly Taylor Swift is a big hit in this part of the world. Korean pop bands, especially one called Big Ben (this really confused me the first time I heard them talked about) are also very popular, mainly because I think the girls find the singers very 'handsome'.

The topic all about me has brought some rather self-scathing reviews including "I have a characterless face" and "I think I should change my personality", but if they can convey this successfully in English I am, in contrast, a very happy bunny. My personal moment of triumph though is them correctly using the term introvert to describe themselves and genre to describe types of music and movies, even though that one brings inevitable pronunciation difficulties. If nothing else I can claim to successfully teaching them that this year!

'Attractive' has become the word of the week and that will probably continue. It seems that 'attractive' is the go to word when they can't think of another more suitable word. The word gets generically applied to sports, music, movies, holidays, anything but people, and it's never correctly used. I'm not quite sure who taught them this but I might go crazy if someone else tells me "the avengers is a very attractive movie", I'm not even sure what that's supposed to mean. And try as I might, I can't for the life of me get most of them to stop confusing the words funny and fun...

Goodness only knows what next week has in store.

 A purely because I took the photos this is what my classrooms look like. There is so much stuff piled on their desks it's ridiculous!

G x