Laoshi hao

Whoever thought it would be a good idea to put me in charge of 54 Chinese seven-year-olds is nuts. Well-intentioned, but nuts.

I spent a while just now trying to think of a comparably farcical and incompetent pedagogical exercise, but can't.

I totally had a lesson plan, I swear. It just didn't make much sense when I was faced with a gaggle of squirming kids whose language I couldn't speak, as I tried to explain the finer points of English conversation (we got as far as "Hello! How are you?" "My name is..." and, inscrutably, "Good afternoon!" but things started to fall apart at "I'm very good."). The young'uns were tickled pink to have a foolish foreigner in their midst, and liked repeating things in unison, but weren't too into the whole dialogue thing.

In my (feeble) defence, when we arrived at the school we spent a couple of hours of hashing out our roles for the next couple of months and were then told we would just be introducing ourselves to the students. So as we stood in front of a sea of smirking faces and my partner turned to me and told me we had half an hour left and should maybe teach them something, I cried a little inside.

It could have been worse, I think. No one ran from the room crying when they discovered they were being taught by a cretin. And my partner, who, um, did a lot of translating, knows the Mandarin equivalent of, "Shut up and sit still, for the love of all things holy" much better than I. But somehow I don't think we kindled a lasting love of the English language in the adorable rapscallions' hearts.

Maybe it will be better next time. They're very excited at the prospect of getting Yingwen names, blissfully ignorant as they are of the language's colonial baggage.

In the meantime, I'm going to go buy valium in bulk.