We've got a week of school left and I believe I'm going to make it.

One of my least favorite responsibilities is my 6th grade advisory class. It only meets once a week but the expectations are ill-defined and getting a bunch of young middle schoolers to talk about anything meaningful is difficult anyway, especially when half of the group of 15 are ELL students. Today was the second to last meeting with them, yippee. Don't get me wrong, I like the kids well enough (most of them anyway) it's the structure of the system that I find difficult.

A month or so ago I decided to make the kids run advisory for awhile so each pair of students has had to plan an activity and run the class for the week. It's been up and down in quality but the 45 minutes passes and there is neither blood nor tears shed so I figure it's been successful. Today was card games, run by Ben and Derrick.

Some of the boys opt for sitting at a table...

while the girls sit close on the floor.

With the move to the new apartment comes needing to learn how to use some of the appliances. The washer in particular had me stumped.

Fortunately one of our colleagues (Lulu, who took us to her grandfather's farm last weekend) and her mom dropped by to give me a tutorial. It's been nearly a year and I don't think I'm any better at reading Chinese characters than I was when we first got here.

My spoken language is getting marginally better. Tonight we took a bike ride and stopped for dinner at a cafe that had no English menu and no English speaking waitress. I tried to ask about the few things I know how to say in Chinese - rice, chicken, pork, a glass of water. I even understood when she told me that the pork and rice dish had cheese on top. My attempt to ask about vegetables, however, was unsuccessful. And I'm pretty sure the only reason we got water is because the waitress' little sister figured it out.

The evening was beautiful - clear and starlit. Both Venus and Jupiter are high in the sky and this evening is the first time I've seen the Big Dipper in Taiwan. When we got home the full moon was rising between the nearby buildings. In this photo it's the white ball of light while the street light is the orange ball of light to the lower right.