Of Dragons and BBQ Bananas

Life at Maple Leaf Dalian in Jinshitan, China (金石滩 - Golden Pebble Beach) has been interesting to say the least. It has definitely been keeping me busy! There are three tiers for the High School students; Foundations (elementary) Bridging (intermediate) and Full BC (advanced) - I'm teaching the pre-social studies in the Bridging program - where all the students are striving to get into the coveted Full BC. Even the failing ones.  The high school is also segregated, so I have over 70 boys that I have to teach Canadian social studies to. On top of this I have to TOC (think substituting), which is an added headache as the process of getting the list every morning seems to be a cumbersome process.    Administration faults aside, once I get to the class it is usually pretty interesting. As a sub the boys immediately assume that it's going to be an easy class so it's "free time". The first part of the class is usually me having to somehow assert my position as the Teacher and more - or - less The Alpha Male.      Sometime it's easy and all I have to do is get the students on the page as me, usually achieved by talking about Dragons or making goofy comments about their names (ie. Friday, Field, Paradox, and.. Bieber - he got a 'change your name' comment) and sometimes it's the hard way and I have to kick a student or two out.   My most recent TOC was for an English 11 class and we had an excellent discussion about how Dragons are a fantastic element to a story and why Dragons are just simply fantastic. It was a fun discussion as the students really wanted to convince me why adding Dragons into their story would help it, I played the devil's advocate and gave them a tough stance to argue against. They did well and after some reminders that I was only arguing for the sack of arguing they really got into the discussion.
   Then, after the class got bored with the arguments, the word 'desire' was asked to be defined. I gave them a simple definition and put it in the terms of food. I asked if the cafeteria food was ever 'desired' and you should have heard the resounding 'NO!' that followed. I then asked for which food was desired and got some obvious answers, pizza and KFC. Then some not so obvious, sushi/sashimi and BBQ bananas.
 I was told by the class to ignore the student as he always came up with these kind of answers. But I was curious. Apparently, it's a real thing. You take your banana and grill it. I have yet to try it but I want to!