|
Eleven Rotarians gathered via Zoom and we recited the Pledge of Allegiance, followed by an invocation offered by John MacFarlane. Zach Stach reported the clean-up at the Splash Pad site the previous Monday evening took only 15 minutes with Jake Hexum, Katie Johnson, Pete Wasberg and Zach participating in the effort. Thank you to them! The Peach P[t]rivia Quiz, initially rolled out in 2005 and repeated in 2006, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2013, 2014, and 2020 (over which time we have averaged 4.3 questions asked and 1.8 questions answered correctly) was administered with the quizzer determined to have all three questions answered correctly by the quizees; we accomplished that result but it took four guesses from four possible answers to get the last one correct. But will that be reflected in the statistics ten years from now? You bet! When we opened it up for brags and fines, Tim Hunt contributed for a fopaux he made at last week's meeting, unintentionally referring to Rotarians as men. Wally Cole then shared a picture of Millie Bruvold taken with District Governor Roly Turner and Roly's wife Judy in 2010. Greg Darling finished brags off by announcing he is celebrating his 62nd birthday with family coming home and a plan to barbecue 20 pounds of ribs. Menghui Yan Andrews then spoke to us about her experience teaching Mandarin in New York City in a private school system. Holding both a Masters Degree in linguistics from Shandong University in China and in publishing from Oxford Brookes University in the United Kingdom, she has taught Mandarin for over ten years. She has been teaching kindergarten to grade six classes, with five or six classes taught in a day and about seven children in each class. She teaches both heritage and non-heritage students, with the focus for the former on reading and writing and the focus on the latter more on dialogue. Mandarin is required in the private school system that employs her until sixth grade when it becomes an elective (and Latin becomes a requirement). Before the pandemic there were 300 students in her school but that dropped off by 24% last year due to the pandemic. Mandarin has 214 picture words and if you understand the logic of it you can create your own phrases. Abstract words such as emotion, pride, love, are more difficult to draw but again there is a logic to all of it as Menghui showed with various examples. She described her teaching style as culture oriented and music and art based. Her professed nervousness about speaking to us did not show and we appreciate what she put together for our benefit. Thanks Menghui! |
