doggie bags and lesson plans

I found out about doggie bags today. The word is "da bao," and no, the "bao" has nothing to do with "bow wow" as is dog bark, but that is the way I remember the term. It simply means to put in a box, and that is what they do, give you a little box to take the food home in. For me today it was "ma po do fu" which is somewhat hot tofu, and it’s the hottest thing I can stand to eat, though I can only stand so much of it. So now I have half an order sitting in my refrigerator just waiting to be heated up. Unfortunately, I have no microwave oven.

Getting ready for the lower functioning English class tomorrow, and that is always the biggest challenge of the week in large part because everything must be so well laid out, every activity planned for. Tomorrow is the lower of the low functioning classes. Thankfully, as I’ve mentioned, one of the teachers here has an excellent set of lesson plans which I have borrowed, well, pilfered, though even these must be fine tuned to the class and prepared ahead of time.
And with this class you need a lot of activity. One of the activities for tomorrow is to put them in groups of two and give them a slip of paper with an occupation on it and they have to decide how to do charades on that activity for the class. My guess is they will like this one.Unfortunately, the other activity for tomorrow is a little more problematic. I am supposed to have them stand in two circles, one inside the other, and they are supposed to go around introducing themselves with information they’ve been given on slips of paper. The only problem is that there is no room for them to get into a circle in the classroom. So I’ve been thinking of other ways to carry out the activity.

One of the grammatical activities has to do with working with plurals. The Chinese language has no plural. The nouns say the same. There is no "book" and "books." There is just the word "shu," which does not change regardless of whether you are talking about one or a hundred. You say "yi ban shu" or "one book" as well as "yi bei shu" or one hundred books." So the activity calls for giving them a bunch of examples of plurals and having them break them into different groups. I can already tell this will be too much for my class. I will probably give them all the plurals and give them a rule and tell them to find all the ones that fit the rule. That’s what I mean by having to adjust the lesson plan. Exciting stuff, huh?