Starving Students?

The past couple nights Andrew and I have had Parent Teacher Interviews at school... 4 hours on both Tues and Wed AFTER teaching all day... needless to say, we are VERY glad that they're done with for now!!

The cool thing about it was that almost 100% of the parents came out, which would NEVER happen in Canada. Also, the students came along with their parents, so they could hear exactly what was being said about them. Here are some of the highlights:

The funniest quote came from a mother, who when she found out that her son was getting a B in my class, turned to him, gave him a little smack on the head with his report card, and threatened him with "No A, no food for you!" I tried to keep a straight face, but just couldn't pull it off... I burst out laughing. I'm not sure if she was serious or not, but the kid looked a little scared!

As most of the parents don't speak English, the interviews were all done through a translator (which takes a little getting used to- you have to remember to keep your sentances short and pause every couple sentances to make sure that everything you just said actually makes it into the translation). Anyways, one dad told me that he thought his son's English was very poor. So I asked him "Do you speak any English?" (of course he didn't understand this so it went thru the translator). "No" was the answer to my question (surprise, surprise). Most of the parents are pretty quick on the draw, but this man didn't seem to see the blatant irony in his statement!

6 more weeks of classes before exams, and 7.5 weeks till we fly home for the summer. Can't wait!

Winner!

Those of you who read this blog regularily will remember my post from a couple weeks ago... the one where I bought the moldy feta cheese and then put my receipt in the draw box for chocolates.

Well, last week I got a phone call with very happy news: I was one of the winners! They told me in broken English where I could go to claim my prize, so this weekend Andrew and I set out to do that... getting there was an adventure, as we communicating to the "customer service" people that I had won chocolates. After quite some time of miming a draw box and getting out translating books, they finally worked out why I was there and happily gave me a big gift-wrapped box of chocolates... turns out they were all individually flavoured bars with cool names (see the pic above)... so delicious. Now I just have to make sure I don't eat them all at once!