The Results are In!

Well, I didn't win the McFlurry contest, but I did get paired with an awesome teacher! Her name is Shu-ting Yu ("My name is pronounced Shu-ting, like shooting star," she explained the first time we met, "but when you put it with my last name, it sounds like 'Shooting you!' But don't worry--I will not shoot you!")

After the co-teaching pairs were unveiled this morning, we all got lunch and sang karaoke for 3.5 hours as an ice-breaker. And Shu-ting knew all the words to this song:



Even for a native Chinese speaker, this is no small feat. It's starting to look like an excellent school year!

Speed Dating

My fellow Fulbright ETAs and I have been Speed Dating with the Local English Teachers (LETs) for the past week or so, trying to find our perfect co-teaching match. Today was our last day of madness with a harrowing, 2 hour, 12-round speed dating session with all of the LETs before ranking our final choices.

I must admit, the whole ordeal has made us super-competitive. There are a few teachers who probably topped everyone's list and a few who ended up at the bottom of everyone's list. It feels like a big popularity contest--those of us ETAs who are more well-liked will probably get our top picks, while those of us who made a less-favorable impression (which is different from a bad impression) will have to make the most of their matches.

In short, there are 12 neurotic, competitive, over-achieving recent college grads anxiously awaiting the results of the matching process. To make matters worse, we just received the following email from Dr. Phillip Elliot (aka Dr. Phil), our program adviser:

Dear all,

Amanda, Chris and I finished matching you with your LET(s) at about 8:40pm this evening. Joy joined us as well, for dinner and discussion.
We hope the matching will be acceptable to you. We will inform you of the results tomorrow morning at 11am at San Min.

Dr. Phil

Now you may be asking yourself, Why don't they just tell you your matches over email? Yeah, I've been wondering that myself. I hope this means we'll find out about our matches by having our co-teachers pop out of individual cakes or something like that. But I try not to hope for too many things.

To add to the suspense, my flatmates and I are playing a game: we each made a list of who we think will be matched with whom. 1 point for each correct match, and 5 points for correctly guessing who will be matched with a teacher we'll call Mildred, the perceived least-favorite of the bunch. The four of us have agreed not to open our guessing lists until after the coordinators reveal the matches and we eat lunch and sing karaoke to celebrate the upcoming year of teaching. (If you think this sounds like a really "Asian" thing to do, you're correct--in approximately 12 hours, I will be in Asia, singing an off-key duet with my new co-worker.) The three losers each will buy the winner a McDonald's Caramel McFlurry, all in one glorious, gluttonous trip to everyone's favorite slice of Americana. Hopefully hilarity (or tons of vomit) will ensue.

Stay tuned for contest results and possibly some terrible KTV MP3's, if you're lucky.

--The Chao