Cheating, Parties and Mid-Autumn Day

So this is going to be a massive blog post. For starters, today is mid-autumn day in China. It's a minor holiday, kind of like our Halloween. What do people do on mid-autumn day? Eat a big dinner with the family, eat mooncakes,--they're like pastries with fruit filling, not anything special but still pretty good--look at the moon and remember the story about the moon (so this pretty girl eats some medicine, becomes really lite, and flies to the moon with a white rabbit. That's pretty much the story. I'm not sure what the punch line is). It's a time to have fun. Which made today's classes really easy; yesterday, is another story.

So I have been telling yesterday's class for a week that there will be a Idiom, Proverb and Vocabulary quiz this week. At the start of class everyday, we have been covering one idiom and one proverb for that day. I explain each for five minutes and move on with the rest of the assignments. I told them last week that I would give a quiz today I also said before I started the quiz "No cheating, this means yada yada yada" I wish I had a youtube video of what happened after I started passing out the quizzes.

The class, after I had passed out THREE QUIZZES, started passing around dictionaries like it was a scrabble tournament. They didn't even look at the test before they began cheating. So many people were cheating, I couldn't even tell who wasn't cheating. I wrote down about twenty names of people I was going to fail , before I stopped the quiz and said that I wasn't going to grade it (that or fail the whole class), and it took ten minutes, after the class monitor explained it in CHINESE, for everyone to catch that I wasn't going to grade the quiz and they were wasting their time by finishing it. And even THEN the students got about %50 of the answers right (I feel like that teacher that gives an open book test and then one student fails it, except I gave an open book quiz yesterday and everyone failed, I think I maybe doing something wrong here). So that's my experience with giving a quiz on paper. Probably will never repeat that. Still have no idea what I am doing for a final.

But tonight I got to hang with one of my other classes when they had their mid-autumn day party. Here is a picture:

This is my smallest class. Pretty sweet. I hate to play favorites, but they are so much easier to teach because there are so few of them. Plus they are really cool. Some other happenings:
I think I saw an albino Chinese person today. They were chinese, but they had naturally light brown hair. Plus they were really pale. I thought it was another american, but they were Chinese. One of the strangest things I've seen in a while. I'm ashamed to admit, I stared. Something else, Haley and I were walking to the our apartments when this little boy points us and yells at the top of his lungs "WAIGOREN!" (foreigner) His grandmother smacked him in the mouth. You talk about funny. Adults know that we know what Waigoren means, but little kids don't. So the only people that call us that are little kids. Anyway, another day, another night.

"I'll see you in the morning if nothing happens."

p.s. My class has yet to be visited by any State experts, I hope that maybe I'll dodge that bullet, but we'll see.