Any time I get a cold it goes straight to my voice box. As the day wore on yesterday my voice got worse and worse. Fortunately, my classroom is outfitted with a microphone so that's what I resorted to by the last class. It's very odd to speak into a microphone while you're trying to teach. When I needed to say an aside to Douglas, along the lines of "knock off what you're doing," it wasn't an aside but instead broadcast to the whole room. Not that everyone else knew that Douglas should stop doing whatever it was he was doing, but my comment wasn't intended to be that public.

Some of the Chinese language teachers, all of whom are Taiwanese, use the microphone to teach every day. I think they must be used to teaching to a large group of students in a lecture hall setting. There's such a contrast between students who have just transferred from the local schools and the students that have been at KAS or another American school for awhile. When you've spent so much of your schooling in a lecture hall setting, especially in elementary school, you get trained to memorize, don't ask questions, keep quiet. The American system has flaws, for sure, but the Asian system is not the place to learn independent or creative thinking.