International Students' Festival (2012-Feb 13 )

In February, North Central College hosted a Multi-Cultural festival to bring together all the diverse groups in the community to share in everyone’s different cultures. There would be performances by local dance groups that practiced traditional dances for certain cultures, food to sample from all over the world, and even quick language classes for children. It would be about a half hour lesson, enough time to teach the most basic of all basic words from that language.

I was given an opportunity to teach the Chinese class! I worked side by side with my own Chinese teacher to teach the children numbers in Chinese, and a few greetings and sayings. When I taught them the numbers, we acted out the sounds we were making. For instance, er4, which you say like ‘Arr,’ while falling in tone, sounded like a pirate, so whenever we said two in Chinese, everyone had to be like a pirate and sport their hook! When we said three, san1, we all looked up to the sun and said it in a high, flat tone. We also taught them I love you in Chinese, wo3 ai2 ni3, and a couple greetings. Then, we had them practice by saying I love you in Chinese to their parents.

One of the boys was very shy, and I couldn’t quite figure out how to get him out of his shell. I’m sure if this was a more frequent class than once, and then never again, I could have a better rapport with him, enough to get him talking and participating. It’s tough in just one half hour session.
Another regret I have is that I wasn’t better prepared. I was ready to get all the materials together and everything to have pictures and colors and more exciting things than we had, but then I was told I wouldn’t be doing it by the people who ran the festival. They wanted someone with more experience with the culture festival to do it, and wanted someone who also had never attended to do it. Thankfully, my teacher saw my talent, my interest, and my ability to do it and made sure it was me doing it. It was a great experience, and it was nice to hang around with adorable kids and be able to teach them things and hear them getting it. I’m excited for next year for another chance to do it.