Making Jiao Zi

The past couple of weeks have been very low key for us. Since returning from Tibet it has been business as usual. We spent a few days getting our classrooms ready for our students and meeting the new teachers from all over the U.S. The school year started out with us seeing over two hundred students at our school. Although school keeps us busy, we keep ourselves balanced with a healthy mix of study, exercise, and entertainment.

The school year has seen many changes already for Pazi. She was originally told that she might not continue teaching four year olds due to low enrollment for that age group, but when a spike in number hit another age group, the decision was made to keep Pazi as the go to person for the pre-school. To make matters even more interesting, her class started with ten and has now mushroomed to eighteen! The school is searching for a qualified teacher to relieve Pazi of half the load she currently has but it will take a bit of time to find someone.

As for Adan, he has been given some new duties heading into year two with QSI. He will continue to work in the Intensive English department, however, now for just a third of his time focusing attention on six year olds instead of seven and eight year olds. Another third of his time is devoted towards physical education classes. The majority of the classes are for primary aged students. The newly hired PE teacher from Chicago has helped ease the load taking on nearly half the current classes in the school. Consequently, all of this has allowed for the last third of Adan's time to be designated for planning time as athletic director. He's currently trying to find schools throughout southern Guangdong province and Hong Kong to play QSI International School of Dongguan.

Adan and Pazi feel the new teachers this school year bring added energy to QSI. Last year the teaching staff was around the average age of forty-five to fifty. Now, that number has dropped somewhere in between thirty-five and forty. The teachers have incredible backgrounds with many of them living and teaching in places like Indonesia, Kenya, Nicaragua, Pakistan, and Syria. The experiences these individuals will share as the school year progresses will be great for sure!

Learning to Make Jiao Zi

The only real major event that has taken place outside of school for us the past two weeks has been learning to make Chinese dumplings (jiao zi) from our good friend and fellow teacher Ms. Nancy. Nancy works in both the regular classroom as a teacher's assistant and also teaches for the Chinese department at school. Adan has gotten to know her very well considering that the two of them share a classroom/office space together.

Ms. Nancy is about eight months pregnant and has had her mother-in-law stay with her as she prepares to give birth. The two women wanted to have a fun afternoon activity last weekend so they invited us along with a few other teachers to come over and help make dumplings. The experience reminded us very much of making tamales with family. Everyone has a dish filled with combinations of vegetables and egg or meat and vegetables to put in the middle of the wheat flour dough pieces that we had to neatly pinch to make the perfect dumpling. Believe us, it took a while to get used to but in the end we managed pretty well. We enjoyed ourselves immensely and in the end got to sit down for a lunch with taste testing. Nancy's mother-in-law treated us all so very kindly and spent several hours prepping for the dumpling making and then cooking once the dumpling were ready for boiling. And when the time came to sink our teeth into the food everything was oh so yummy!