Carry on Blogging!

• A student tells me he likes to play with chemicals in his room.
• Another student is going to a Catholic High School in Plattsburgh, New York.   America, he says, is a Catholic country.
• Another student is going to a high school in Tennessee.  You have to go to the mansion of the Cat King -- we call him Elvis.
• Forgot to bring my Chinese textbooks with me.  What a silly boy!
• I asked some students in a class if their parents had been affected by the financial crisis of 2008.  Everyone of them said their parents worked in government.  So they were not affected.
• Damn!  My shoes got holes in them.  I was teaching a class and I thought I had gum sticking to the soles.  It turned out that a piece of sole was dangling.  I got married in those shoes.  I hate to stop wearing them.
• A student told me that his father was a twin.  How,  I asked, could he tell the difference between them.  He said it was very easy.
• I learned this as I asked the students who was the most beautiful person in their life.  I made a joke about how they would all tell me their twin brother or sister.
• Tony has been really disagreeable lately.  I had a slapping match with him on the bus on Friday evening.  He wanted something he couldn't have, and I became the object of his ire.
• The students think Cowboys are cool and also very American.
• Who is China's biggest rival?  I asked a group of students and they told me America.  A few said Japan.  I asked them if they thought Russia was a rival and they said it was China's friend.  They had no opinion about India being a rival.
• Beauty and Goodness.  I tried to talk to students about these concepts in a conversation class.  I hoped I could get them to separate the two in their minds.  Beauty being a visual and an oral thing (in the case of music).  Goodness having to do with the proper use of a thing.  The students didn't want to make the separation, and they were perhaps right to do so.  I have come across this article about beauty and goodness.  I read that "both of these words have narrowed in modern times, so that it's much more of a stretch to make the connection than it used to be."  The Greeks had a word that could mean both beauty and goodness at the same time.  The students were looking for that word.