Wen Hua Party

One of my Chinese classes is a weekly class at the Chinese Cultural University. The class is free and the teachers are students who will teach Chinese when they graduate. The best way to learn teaching is to be a teacher. No amount of book learning will substitute for the real thing. Anyone who thinks teaching is easy is someone who has never tried it.

At the end of the semester, we had a performance where each class sang songs. Because we were all foreigners they asked us to perform something from our native countries(hearing us mangle Chinese songs wasn't very appealing.)

My class had mostly Indonesians, some Vietnamese, a Panamanian and me. Being both from the Americans, the Panamanian and I became a team. In a moment of bravado I said I could sing anything, so my teammate said she would chose an English song with a salsa beat. She would dance and I would sing. We chose, "Yesterday" by the Beatles(with a salsa beat). Some people can do this very well,

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uv5yrRtfMRw&feature=related

but not out team. Then at the last minute my teammate said she didn't want to dance and would sing with me, here is my teammate Maria:

Our fiasco had a positive effect, in that everyone who came after us knew they couldn't do worst than us, so I'm sure we boosted their confidence.

The Indonesian students were good, most of them were graduate students at the Taiwan National Technology University.

But by far the best were the students from Vietnam. They made us all look bad.

My teacher(on the left).