发烧了

School has been really hard this semester, but a couple of days ago it dawned on me that my study habits changed near the end of last year. Due to the fact that last semester's teacher never gave us any 停学 (ting xue) I stopped memorizing how to write the characters. Instead, I just learned how to read them. So when I began school this year I merely continued in my old study habits, not memorizing how to write characters. My justification was that if I needed to write something I could always do it on the computer. And if there was no computer around, no problem; I always have my cell phone with me, I'll just use that. It made sense to me at the time, and it still does; except for the fact that I am a visual learner and the best way, for me, to learn characters is to write them over and over and over again until I finally can write them perfectly.

One of the other things that I did at the very beginning of my studies was to break down each character in order to really understand why a character was written the way it was. For example: 妊 (ren)means to be pregnant. This character is composed of 女 (nu), meaning female and 壬 (ren). The right side of the character gives you the meaning (duh....only women get pregnant), and the left side give you the pronunciation. Or take 好 (hao) for example, meaning good. Again, 女 means female and 子 means child. The idea is that a woman with her child is a good thing. By the way if you'd like to know more about this then you can click on this link. I'm sure there are better sites out there but this was the first one I came upon that looks to be accurate. I, rather than from a website, learned this valuable information in a book I bought from Amazon.com before I left for China in 2007. I am sad to say that since that move Reading and Writing Chinese: Traditional Character Edition has been lost; I was sure I left it in Taylor, but I couldn't find it anywhere this summer! On a side note, the fact that I bought this particular book shows you how much I knew about the Chinese language before leaving the States, notice that it is the Traditional Character Edition and not the Simplified Character Edition, which is the one I should have bought. This method of studying was very time consuming, but tremendously helpful. So over the past couple of days I went back to this type of studying and it has really paid off.

But enough about me. When I got home today our 阿姨 (ayi) told me that Nate had a fever. So I gave him some Tylenol and now he seems to be doing better, which means I probably won't be able to blog for much longer! We've had a sudden change in weather which I am sure is the cause of Nate's fever (the boy's healthy is weak like his momma's - by the way if you think healthy was a typo then you probably haven't lived in China). Aside from Nate getting sick, I am really glad the weather has changed. I love winter, and although it is by no means winter yet, 54 degrees is a lot better than the high 80's we had a couple of days ago.

Noah is doing good in school, although he did get into a fight yesterday. Apparently we need to trim his fingernails, the boy Noah fought with looks like Freddy Kruger got ahold of him! Today when I dropped him off he when right to his seat and sat down, patiently waiting for class to start. Friday they have a field trip to a park, I'm not for sure which one, so we'll see how that goes.

Oh yeah, I almost forgot, yesterday I started teaching. I teach two times a week (Tuesday and Friday). I teach the art class, which consists of only ten students. Jenni's classes are going well, today she had a meeting with a teacher from one of the other campuses to give him some pointers on teaching in China. Well Nate just pooped in the floor so I better sign off.....like I said earlier " I probably won't be able to blog for much longer!"

One last thing though: tonight we are eating Quesadillas. I stopped at Carrefour on the way home and bought some cheese (something that is not easily obtained in China), sour cream (even harder to find than cheese), and some Tostitos tortilla chips. BecauseI haven't seen our tortilla lady outside of BICF since we've been back, I stopped by a Chinese market and bought some 大饼 (da bing). I've not tried it before, but I think this will make a nice Quesadilla. I'll let you know how it turns out!