Tuesday

大力 looking a chalkboard that reads, "You Will Be the No!"

There's a down period between when school starts and first period. Students are supposed to be working on homework. Everyone as their books out, but not everyone's workng on them. They boys next to me are passing an NBA magazine back and forth between the trhee of them. They're looking at electronics, though, iphones, samsung phones, cameras, not pictures of Shaq and Kobe. One girl pulls out a poster o some Chinese pop star, checks it out, and tucks it back in her desk. Spiky Hair, to my left, copies a friend's English homework while the teacher is out of the room. Most of the student, though, are actually studying.
It's snowing, so morning excersizes are cancelled; that's why we have this down time.
As soon as the teacher walks in the boys shove the NBA magazine under a desk and turn back to their workbooks. Fifteen seconds later it's out again, and one of them is reading under his desk. Ten minutes later the teacher starts making rounds, and woop, back under the desk goes the magazine.
Geometry was first again today. The teacher started class before the bell rang.
Next is Chinese, the equivalent to our English classes. I'm no longer the only one struggling to stay awake. The kid with the NBA magazine takes out his matalic blue psp.
After second period all the Americans went on a tour of Jingshan. We saw the trophy room, international conference room, billiards, ping-pong and rock cimbing room, the biology labs and the olympic-size swimming pool. When I got back to class a kid who sits in front old me I missed the best part of the day.
"I know! I missed English, that's my favorite class!"
"Not only English." he replies, "We played pranks on kids in the class."
When I ask what kind of pranks they were he says they're too hard to explain.
"Something with language," he says. Hmmm.
The last block was a "class meeting," which pretty much just meant it was time for people to get their new seats for the semester. Here, desks move with the student, so instead of simply standing up and walking a few feet, everyone carried their desk with them, dropping textbooks and pencil cases in their wake.