Cloudy in Beijing Blogging about my time in China

Sunshine Party, Tiger Party and Badboy Party

The textbook the school gave me to use isn't all that great sometimes. There's actually a section about Walkmans. Who uses Walkmans now? So with the election coming up, these past two weeks I've been teaching my students about American government and politics.

As part of the lesson I've had my students divide up in groups and create their own political parties. There's been some pretty generic sounding ones, like Peace Party, Victory Party or United Party. But there's also been plenty of creative ones, some quite silly, and a few I didn't quite understand.

There's been several Sunshine Parties, a cute name in my opinion. I've also had a Tiger Party, not sure what that has to do with politics, but cool name nonetheless. One group also named themselves The KFC Party. Their symbol was, as expected, a chicken. It was so funny, I let that one slide. Another group decided on The Scale Party, drawing a scale on the chalkboard for their symbol. I think they were maybe going for justice.

My personal favorite was Badboy Party. Their symbol was apparently a man in what looked like a beret, smoking a cigar. Ironically the party wanted to fight corruption. There was also The Killer Party, who had to later explain they don't like killing, they just "kill" at everything they do.

I then had my classes pretend to be in a presidential election. Each Party would have one member run for the "presidency" by giving, what I hoped would be a rousing speech. My students are often times quiet, so I wasn't quite sure how'd they do.

Though their grammer and pronounciation was off at times (Corruption turned into "kraption" and Healthcare became "Healthycar") , some of my students just blew me away, especially the ones in my international finance 704 class.

"Ladies and Gentleman, I am Handsome and I want to be your President!"

Handsome -- yes, that is his name -- killed his speech. He basically yelled it. "I will improve healthcare! I will create jobs!" the words just lunged out of his mouth, decibels higher than the hesistant and soft-spoken answers he had given me in the classes before. To add to the atmosphere, I had my students chant the presidential candidates' names before they went to speak. Most of my other classes seemed too shy, and unaccustomed to the chanting part. But International Finance 704 totally got into it. It wasn't just chanting, but more like a synchronized roar. "HANDSOME! HANDSOME!" the students shouted together.

David Bens, his opponent, wanted to up the ante, yelling just as loud all the while pointing to his classmates. The response: passionate applauses and sproadic yells of "YEA!!!" Students even rocked their desks, and stomped the ground, making it sound like a tremor was erupting. For those five minutes, it felt like my class had turned into a mob. And I loved it.

Yea that was a good class.