Monthly Archive for October, 2008

Every morning, around 10 a.m., the students in the school assemble in a giant grid on the basketball courts outside.  They proceed to be led in physical exercises, generally accompanied by music someone shouting numbers. It’s quite a sight to watch, since they’re all rather obedient and do as they’re told.

Anyway, I’m usually woken each morning to these sounds. A few days ago, I realized that one of the songs played is none other than the theme from Beverly Hills Cop. I snuck to my window wearing my bathrobe and shot a quick video:

So, I’ve been a little busy in the past few weeks.  I went to Hong Kong to get my passport straightened out, I moved onto the school grounds where I’m teaching, I got sick then better again.  In all of this, I haven’t been blogging.  Sorry.

Hong Kong was interesting.  Not necessarily in a good way.  It was big, busy, and crowded.  Beijing is big, but it isn’t so much busy and crowded.  It is in fact bigger than Hong Kong, both in size and population.  This means that while there are a lot more people, the city is less dense.  Walking around Hong Kong felt like New York or any other big city.  Giant buildings surrounded giant crowds, and you practically had to shove your way past people to get anywhere.

Another thing I didn’t like was the British influence.  They drive their cars on the wrong side of the road.  Everyone speaks English.  It’s not China, no matter what everybody looks like.  I could go anywhere, and people could communicate with me, albeit with a British-influenced accent.  It was weird.

Also, everything was expensive.  I guess there’s just a lot more money in Hong Kong, but even cheap food wasn’t that cheap for China.  Granted, I only looked around the places I stayed, but I was trying not to spend money.

I ended up achieving my goal, but it did cost a lot of stress and energy.  To top it off, I was at the height of my cold, so it wasn’t the most relaxing thing to do, trying to get them to reissue me the right visa while I had an international flight leaving in barely enough time to get to the airport already.

I finally got everything fixed, hopped on a bus, ran to the ticket agent, ran through security/immigration, hopped on my plane, ran through the terminal, hopped on another bus, ran to school, and started teaching a class.  That was a fun class.

Also, I live on campus now.  The room is nice, but it’s a dorm room.  I’ve stopped caring about this post.  I’m going to do some laundry.

While I was in Hong Kong (more on that to come), I couldn’t help but find this particular brand of toothpaste amusing:

Now that I’m officially living in China, I’ve become used to seeing odd Engrish around, so I’ve stopped being really excited and interested when things like this come up. However, certain things are so strikingly odd, even I have to take the time to be mesmerized while I grab my camera.

In case the reason for the humor somehow escapes you, feel free to check a dictionary.  That toothpaste is really desensitized. See? It’s funny on so many levels.  So many levels!

The first chapter I was to teach was on seeing and sight from a vocabulary building book. I did a quick poll to see how many of them wore glasses or contact lenses, and only a couple of people raised their hands. I assumed they were shy, because even at a quick glance, I could tell that at least half of them were wearing glasses.

After a little more prodding to make sure they understood the question, I learned that only one student of the sixteen did not wear glasses or contact lenses. That was just a random sample of Chinese students, but my observations around the school led me to understand that most of the students have bad eyesight.

During my long run of classes on Thursday, the bell rang to signify the end of class. To my surprise, none of the students jumped out of their seats when I told them that class was over. Instead, one student asked me if we had to do eye exercises at home.

Unaware of the context, I assumed she was talking about “I exercises,” some sort of language drill similar to I statements or something like that. About the time my mind processed this information, I saw the whole class was sitting in their seats, quietly massaging their eyes while simple, cheery music played on the intercom. There were several breaks in the music where the voice from above would presumably instruct them to switch exercises, and they would all obey.

During all of this, I couldn’t understand if there was any instruction about keeping the mouths shut, so I talked to them and made fun of the music. They all thought the whole idea was ridiculous. If massaging the eyes to stimulate blood flow was to make their eyesight better, how come they all still wore glasses? And if Americans never did any of this, why is our eyesight still far better than theirs?

Maybe this is completely unrelated, but I think I remember reading an article a few years back about the genetic engineering of rice enhanced with carotene because there is a deficiency in Asia. Maybe I’m just making things up, though.

After an entire day of classes was sprung upon me, I wasn’t quite sure what to expect. I was given a book and a vague guideline, but that was it. Actually, the guideline was more of a page to use, then the rest was all up to me.

I looked over the page a few times before entering the class, but it wasn’t very much to go on. They wanted me to come in and teach one class a week about culture, since it’s a whole lot easier for me to do that than any of the English teachers on their faculty — probably because I was the only person who was actually raised in such a culture.

The lesson for the day was on Space Heroes. Interesting topic, and somewhat pertinent due to China’s recent first spacewalk. The page had four very brief paragraphs about what they considered space heroes: one on the first man in space, one each on the Challenger and Columbia explosions, and one excerpt of Ronald Reagan’s speech regarding the Challenger explosion. It wasn’t a whole lot to go on. In fact, it only took about twenty minutes to cover everything I wanted to do, and the class was forty five minutes long, and there were four of them.

Fortunately, when an ESL teacher runs out of things to do, one of the default options is “conversational English.” And so I would talk.

Actually, I think the kids liked me from the beginning regardless of anything I would have to say. I’m energetic and much younger than anyone they would expect to teach them. Also, I’m not part of any traditional behavior group — especially not that of the Chinese —, so they were taken aback when I would imitate their gasps or single students out for seemingly arbitrary reasons.

It was kind of intimidating walking into the room for the first time. Having been given no real training, I had to walk into a room of 40+ 10th graders knowing that they would view me as an authority figure. I chose my stance carefully.

I walked slowly and deliberately to the lectern, carefully placing my bag on the ground and pulling out the text. I slightly hunched my shoulders to seem a little meek and intimidated and asked several students if I was in the right room.

The bell rang, and the students all quieted down and sat in their seats. I waited at the lectern for a respectful quiet, looking around the room. Once I felt it was calm enough, I made my eyes light up and let out a loud and cheerful, “Hey!”

Immediately, everyone laughed and let out an enormous and simultaneous “Hey!” back at me. This would be a good day.

It turned out it was — the other three classes all had the same reaction.

I discovered there is a distinct advantage to teaching one lesson multiple times. By the last time you’re teaching it, you know what’s working and what’s not. You know how to manage your time and how to keep things interesting. Even after the fourth time, I wasn’t overwhelmingly bored of what I was talking about. Well, I should expect so, since I was mostly talking about what I wanted to talk about.

I figured that I could give these young brainwashed children a little lesson I gave to so many other people already. I gave a mildly paraphrased lecture based on the speech I gave at my commencement ceremony. I felt it was particularly pertinent because these children are forced to study for ridiculous hours, expected to get good jobs, and are a letdown if they fail to do so. I wanted to let them know that it’s okay to be happy, that it’s okay to do something they enjoy. Unfortunately for them, the culture is so deeply rooted in being pleasing to society that nobody will probably take my words and run with them, but I did get several interested head nods in each of my classes. Of course, the interested head nod doesn’t mean a whole lot, since I know I do exactly that when I’m not paying attention but think it’s important to seem like I am.

Inevitably, the question arose in every class about why I’m in China. I couldn’t avoid mentioning that I came to see China and my girlfriend — at which point every single class “oohed.” Inevitably, they all wanted to know more about relationships. One class even had at least five boys surround me after class, drilling me on relationships in America.

Chinese society, through means of parents and school, does not allow relationships in high school. Obviously, there are some highly devoted young students who try their best to ignore this.

One boy told me that they want to hear more about “love stories.” I thought this was hilarious, since any American teenager who openly admitted to wanting to hear about romance in front of his peers would be mocked just as openly. But this seems to be a serious concern and interest to these boys. To each his own.

In all, it was an exciting and energetic day. Exhausting would also be another e-word to use. I think Thursdays will be my favorite day of teaching.