Monthly Archive for May, 2009

ESL Poetry

Published on May 26, 2009 in Humor and Language. 0 Comments

I happen to have a lot of good blog material based on my students, but I’m usually so fed up with them that I don’t care to think about them outside of class. Fortunately for you, my readers, I have found something a little too awesome not to share: their poetry.

Of course, it took a lot of prodding and yelling in order to get them to write poetry, since Chinese students are notoriously uncreative. It’s not necessarily even that, so much as they are designed to avoid creativity. At any rate, I made them write very rigid haiku in order to work on their syllable counting. Most of them failed miserably at that while simultaneously creating bizarre and intriguing short poems.

Keep in mind the following poems were written by my 15 year old SAT prep students — students who deem themselves good enough at English to try and survive college in an English speaking country. And sadly, they are some of my best students.

I have tried to keep capitalization and punctuation as they are on the page. Here we go…

I am a good boy
But he is not a good boy
I’m better than him
-Liu

I am a bad boy
But he is not a bad boy
I’m worse than him
-Liu

He wrote these first two pretty quickly, at which point I made fun of him. He then spent a little while longer creating this masterpiece:

I’m wearing a hat
a very big blue and red hat
It’s a nice one.
-Liu

His friend never does anything I ask him to, so I’m surprised he even came up with these:

How fat the cat is
It always eats a lot like pigs
-Charlie

Moon. is bright and cold.
sun give the life to the world.
Moon always depends the sun.
-Charlie

Love give happy and warm
We always enjoy loves and.
-Charlie

I don’t really know what to say.

Without earnestly heart.
How can we enjoy lovely.
damage thorn.
-Viola

I give you half an hour to write three 3 line poems, and you give me this? Come on!

The T-shirt of Jeff
Green and blue strips that is cool
But it’s like a worm
-Angel

Great, commentary on the teacher. At least she’s being original.

The hair style of Jeff
someone says look like Beckham
But it’s like a worm.
-Lisa

More commentary on the teacher. Too bad you just copied the girl next to you.

So big an ice-cream
With chocolate and peanuts
tastes so delicious
-Andy

Teddy the cute bear
With brown curly hair and small eyes
Lazy lies in the bed.
-Angel

The squirrel wakes up.
He goes to eat some apple pies.
He is full at last.
-Lillian

Hmmm… okay.

I mentioned that most haiku are a commentary on nature, which apparently means “the sun” to Chinese students:

The sea is really blue.
Sun shines through the window
The star is bright.
-Lisa

The Sun never rise
So the stars can always shine
Shining in the sky.
-Angel

You are my sun shine
Rises from the east of world.
Makes me warm and pleased.
-Lillian

Yesterday sun rose
Tomorrow sun also rises
But today is dark.
-Ivy

Emo poetry exists in China!

I woke up in the night
And notice I have been dead
I go on to sleep
-Ivy

Then there are the students who understood the assignment and actually put forth some sort of effort:

Flowing bright moonlight
fallen leaves dance in the sky
With clouds and soft wind.
-Jessica

Without a slight sound
Night is descending in peace
fireworks blooming in sky
-Jessica

One day he comes in
the world I used living along
then one day he gone
-Jessica

Silent melting night.
snow shines in watery moon
pale light fills the world
-Andy

She is beautiful
the Venus of my own world
never notice me
-Andy

And then there are my random favorites which I feel are best left to speak for themselves:

I don’t want to be naive.
I fight for my dream forever.
It is my choice.
-Veronica

I’m doing my homework.
It is terrible.
-Lisa

Yesterday I dreamed.
I dreamed that someone was died.
I woke up at last.
-Lillian

Where ever you go
No matter how silly you are
I will go with you
-Ivy

Many girls like muscle men.
I do not think that is wise.
You should not judge people.
-Veronica

Flames make me insane.
They are brief but beautiful.
It is fantastic.
-Veronica

One of my favorite things to do is to read them to Caitlin with a very dramatic tone, leaving an emphatic pause between the second and third lines. Such beauty! Feel free to use these on your loved ones, just make sure you give their original authors credit. They put minutes of work into these.

A Questionably Sad Reality

Published on May 18, 2009 in Uncategorized. 1 Comment

Regardless of how talented you are at the sport, you will always look like an idiot chasing after a stray ping pong ball. This is probably why professionals have lackeys to do this for them.

Life Updates

Published on May 12, 2009 in Uncategorized. 0 Comments

It’s been a while since I’ve last posted. I’m fully aware of this fact, and it hasn’t really bothered me. Generally, this blog has been a way of procrastinating, and since I don’t really do anything most of the time, there’s nothing I really have to avoid doing. As a result, this blog has fallen by the wayside.

I spend my weekdays from 1–6 sitting in front of my computer, reading the internet.  I’m far more in tune with world news than I’ve ever been before, since one of the most interesting and “productive” things to do at work is read articles.  Despite the facts that I have absolutely nothing to do and that my boss thinks I should be in the office nonetheless, I still feel a bit guilty doing things blatantly not work.  I figure reading could be interpreted as research, and especially when I can run any site through Readability, nobody’s English is good enough to notice at a glance what exactly it is I’m reading.

One of the more fun things I’ve started doing is printing books.  The first few were pretty interesting and intriguing to the people in the office, but now that I’ve made 7, I think they’re starting to feel I’m wasting their paper — which is entirely true, but I feel they’ve been doing shady business with me, so I don’t particularly care.  The books I’ve been making are A4 sheets bound in quarto, so they’re small, portable, and cute.

Unfortunately, making books doesn’t quite quench my thirst for projects.  There are no pianos to rebuild, there are no trees to use for slacklining.  Aside from badminton and ping pong, Chinese people don’t really have hobbies.

I’ve been out of school for nearly a year, and I miss it a surprising amount. I can feel my brain going mushy for lack of use. I’m essentially married to Caitlin, because about 95% of my conversational contact is with her. Outside of work (a.k.a. the internet), I don’t really have anybody I interact with other than Caitlin, and there isn’t much encouragement to do any intellectual endeavors. The longer I’m here, the less I’m interested in the Chinese language, so I don’t even care to study that.

It’s been an interesting and beneficial experience living here, but it’s not for me. I find myself trapped in a system that’s contrary to logic, and the longer I’m here, the less I care about doing pretty much anything.