Classes at Jing-Shan

The American classes are the silver lining to each new school day at Jing-Shan. Our American classes are scattered throughout the course of the day so that way we don’t have to sit through the Jing-Shan classes not understanding a single word of a lecture. Wednesdays are the worst days because we don’t have our American classes until after lunch. Our American classes consist of martial arts, tai chi, brush painting, Chinese calligraphy, Chinese, English, and knot tying.
Of all our American classes, my favorite is knot tying class. We only have knot tying on Fridays, period 1 and period 2. The knot tying teacher is really sweet and she’s so good at knot tying. Just by taking a glance at your knot, she can quickly tell you whether or not its dui (correct) or bu dui (incorrect).

Last Friday, I got the chance to talk to her before class began and I found out that her son’s in my class! She wouldn’t tell me his name because she wanted me to guess who he is. She gave me two hints, only one of which I understood, which is that her son is shy. After hearing this, I was like great… he won’t be difficult to identify out of our class of 50 students and 36 of them being boys. Haha..

Chinese calligraphy is sometimes fun but it’s very tedious and slow going so you need a lot of patience for it. It takes a lot of practice just to perfect each character stroke. Usually, during one of our art classes, one person always ends up getting frustrated.

Chinese brush painting is one of the few ancient Chinese arts that I enjoy doing. It’s less tedious than Chinese calligraphy and it looks very pretty too.

(my pitiful attempt at trying to draw a bamboo tree)