yay our internet's back, it's been down for awhile. sometimes i'm really glad that i'm teaching in china and not the US. yesterday when i walked into one of my 4th grade classes, there was a girl in the back bawling her eyes out, and when the rest of the class saw me they all pointed at these two boys sitting next to her. i went over there and tried to figure out what had happened but couldn't get a straight answer and was about to start teaching when one of the boys put his head down on his desk and started making weird frog-like sobbing sounds. i thought he was making fun of the girl's crying and totally exploded on him. i marched him out of the room and when he turned to face me his whole face was wet with tears and he kept making those weird frog sounds...needless to say i felt pretty scummy. luckily this is china and parents expect their kids to be yelled at everyday.

the chorus has been canceled for the rest of the semester. the headmaster of the primary school wasn't happy with the results of the midterms and blamed all the teachers, so they've all been feeling a lot of pressure and have been keeping the kids for a long time after school ends everyday, which is 4 pm. the chorus is supposed to start at 4:30 but last week we only had about 6 kids show up until 5 pm. i'm gonna talk to the headmaster of the middle school to see if we can start one here instead.

not much else to report...i went to zhangjiajie a couple weekends ago, which is a national park about 4 hours away and is pretty breathtaking. the park is about 20 km outside zhangjiajie city, which has the nearest airport to baojing. so come visit me, darn it.