A Week of Evaluations

The last week was one full of "evaluations," there were two competitions, one test, and an interview.
I spent almost the entirety of April/May preparing for these moments.  Read below to see the story and results.

It began with Thursday (May 19) and the students' singing competition.  Each class sang both a pro communism song and a song of encouragement.  My class 6 students asked me to help them combine Michael Jackson's "Heal the World" and "We are the World."  Thus, I completely arranged a new number for them.  This picture is the Chinese song--the red papers should resemble the Great Wall.

To introduce the Jackson number, a student read his words in English and I read Jackson's words in Chinese.  I then conducted the song.

Class with me together. (Please excuse the low quality; these are snapshots from a cell-phone recording.)

To give you some idea about this competition, listen to the video above.  It's not always about sounding pretty. Okay, it's not about sounding pretty.  The entire class sings together, regardless how many of the classmates are tone deaf.

Saturday was Dominick's English speech competition.  He placed first in the Zhengzhou East region and moved on to the entire city level.  I worked by coaching him for this competition.

Dominick (a student among the best in the 11th class) and I at the speech competition site just before he drew his topic.  He was given 15 minutes to prepare a 3 minute speech about a topic he would draw at random.  I gave him a bit harder topics to practice (For example, "Should China continue its open border policy") and, come contest day, he was relieved when they lobbed an easy question his way.

Dominick (郭维-guo1 wei2-his Chinese name) in the speech competition.  The Chinese above says "Zhengzhou City's High School Foreign Language Speech Competition"

The following day was my own evaluation.  I sat the Level 3 Chinese language test, requiring knowledge of 600 characters.

Finally, this past Thursday, Dominick had an interview for a full ride scholarship and admission to the best universities in Asia--National University of Singapore or Nan Yang University in Singapore.  He passed the written test and needed to interview in English, thus the main motivation for entering the English speech competition.

Now comes the big question... how did they do!?  What happened?

Well, the summarized results are as follows:
A) Singing Competition--Class 6 earned a 98.12 out of 100 and placed in the top 3

B) Speech Competition--Dominick earned 1st prize and ranked 3rd in the entire city

C) Chinese Test--results are not published, but I feel comfortable with it, because I currently know and can use about 1,000 Chinese characters.  (The challenge will be June's test--Level 4--which needs 1,200 characters

D) Singapore Interview--He passed!  He is among the 13 students selected from Zhengzhou, and the only student from his school, that will be given a full ride to a university in Singapore, including a living stipend, round-trip airfare, and guaranteed 6 years of employment with a Singaporian company following graduation.  He'll leave in December and this will truly help his future.

It was a great week with plenty of work showing positive results.  I'm pretty happy--I'm kind of counting it as a birthday present to myself.

Later Days,
Rick