Hello Kitty and Dinosaur

Too cute! This is from one of the spelling exercises in this class.

I've recently gotten a job working as an English teacher at a "cram school" here in Taipei (for those of you not acquainted with the term "cram school," it is a privately operated school where parents send their children to after their normal school. Most children in Taipei get shuttled to cram school in the late afternoons, many of them to English cram schools where the kids get a linguistic boost).

I spent my first two working days teaching 4 and 5-year-olds about colors and hair, then Typhoon Morakot hit and I got a day off, and then I was assigned to teach some older kids.

One of the new classes I'm teaching consists of a half a dozen or so 6- to 8-year-olds, all really cute, one token girl in a class of super energetic boys! First day of teaching them, I split the class into two teams, and they offer up names for their teams -- Hello Kitty and Dinosaur -- big mistake! They form two lines, and all the boys naturally go to the Dinosaur team line, even the ones I've assigned to the HK team, while the little girl is beaming and standing in the HK team line. I realize my mistake and erase the names, and the little girl tugs at my skirt and eagerly points at her pencil case, asking if I could rename the team Cinnamaroll. It was soooooo cute, but no, Cinnamaroll is just another HK name, so ultimately, I named them Noodles and Dumplings.

I don't allow them to pick their team names anymore, but I try to come up with silly ones, like Stinky Feet and Stinky Tofu. Food names are pretty safe, but animal names can incite a debate amongst the kids about whose animal is fiercer, plus food is not gender-specific so we don't end up again with 5 kids scrambling for the Dinosaur team and one little girl representing Hello Kitty.