Where have all the students gone?

My two morning classes today were great, the students participated in all that I assigned them and followed directions well. What I taught they seemed to understand, and what I asked them to do, they did.

My evening class was a different story. It's my last class for this week (sports meet cancels the Thursday and Friday classes) and same as last week there was an attendance shortage.
My class roster shows 35 students registered, tonight I had something on the order of 25 attendees, about 5 were auditors. My students seem to think it's acceptable to just skip the class for these singing competitions (there was another one last Monday) as long as they call me at the start of class or have their friends tell me - some don't even bother doing that.
I've made it clear that every class counts for 6% of their grade this semester, and the Midterm next week counts for 20%. I'm not going to enjoy giving any F's (I don't think of myself as being sadistic), but a number of these students are headed in that direction.

Last night I had an annoying disagreement through cell phone texting with a girl who I said 'hi' to the first week I was here (she just saw me recently and decided to start talking). I don't know her other than that she has a boyfriend who does Tai Quan Dao (Taekwondo) and she asked if she and her boyfriend can come to my apartment next weekend to learn English (knows nothing about me and practically invites herself). I told her she could come to my office during the week because I'm busy during the weekends and she went into a long spiel about how she doesn't care if I don't invite them to my apartment and how foreigners are always 'busy' when people try to be nice to them.
I told her straight up that I AM busy (+240 students, weekend lesson planning) and told her she can suggest another time (I felt like saying a lot more and much less nicely, but I guess that's one reason why cell phones have such small keypads - the necessary precision in button-mashing filters out your angry responses). She said sorry she didn't consider foreigner's "territory awareness" but MY GOD! If you haven't exchanged more than three sentences with someone in public you're not in a position to invite yourself to their apartment!


Aside from these frustrations I'm actually having a very good time here and thinking more and more about renewing my contract. Admittedly this isn't the best place to learn Mandarin because of the local dialect, but the people by and large are very friendly: the intellectuals are great fun regardless of their level of English, and I've even managed to make friends with the head cook at the Oujiang dining room. His name is 张 六 九 (surname, given name). His given name is the year he was born ('69)!


There are also some new foreigners here; a family from Georgia that as far as I know does everything except eat through the Internet. The mother Mary Ellen is teaching an Organizational Studies course in the college for the next 10 weeks while the husband Lee teaches business through the Internet, the two kids (Carter and Madison) do school through the Internet, and the nephew Alex (he's close to my age) works on completing a master's degree in education through (...would you believe it...) the Internet.
They seem pretty nice, but not particularly keen to soak up the local culture... eh, if it's not your cup a' tea...

Always something...

Since my last blog there's hardly been any lull in activity of any kind. Either I'm off on an adventure and doing something with people, or I'm preparing my lessons (on my computer in my apartment or on a notepad some random place).
Good news is I've hammered out my grading criteria for the remainder of the semester and now I have a template for next semester. Bad news is now I have to start failing students that aren't trying their best (or at all).

Before I forget, I need to add this little tidbit: Last week I saw a play with my "English-conversation-partner/Chinese-teacher" Julia about some high school students that have done very poorly on an exam and try to convince their teacher to give them the keys to the safe so they can change their answers and pass. I found the play a little disturbing and the premise and outcome a little cliché by American standards, but I think a lot of the students really enjoyed the performance.

The stage - low-budget, but I say use what works.










The Street Petshop of Wenzhou - rabbits, hamsters, guinea pigs and parakeets.




On Saturday I... ...go on, guess ...you'd never imagine I'd do this over the weekend... I went hiking with the Crazy English Club. This time we carried up a barbecue grill and some tents and sleeping bags that were rented from the school. We went way up into the pass and set up camp in the empty side-channel near one of the reservoirs.










Campsite - shared by ~100 people






I didn't stay the night, I had to get down and get up the next morning to run the 1500-meter in the 瓯江 学院 sports meet (the teacher's race, not the student race).

Jia Jing and Xiao Ming both walked down with me and then back up again. It was 5 hours round trip and the last three hours walking up they did in the dark. I felt really bad about putting them through that, even though they insisted it was nothing.



In the 1500m race it was only one other teacher and myself, I won by more than a minute and more than half a lap, pushing myself as hard as I could. I don't know what my time was, but I imagine it's the same time Matt would've run if one of his legs were chopped off.

On Monday, Julia (the girl who's been teaching me Chinese) asked me to be a part of a promotional video recording that took place at the same time as my second morning class. I refused, the class was more important, but then she called me after lunch and asked me if I could do it then. The scene involved me speaking to several English-competent students alongside a Swedish exchange student about four years my senior and a Korean professor.

The whole setup was a little odd but, eh.


Today one of the students (not mine) told me he'll be performing in a singing competition next Monday and asked me for two things: 1) English song ideas, and 2) if I'd sing with him. (Fortunately for me, the English faculty and all the other foreign teachers, the competition is at the same time as my Monday evening class, so I could only give him ideas).

This evening, after a day spent in the office talking with a colleague I walked by the cafeteria and found Ben making Dumplings with several of his students. So I got invited to participate and got a free meal out of it.

Very soon now I'm going to give my students a midterm about "definitive experiences" (I've explained the topic many times now), so this week I'm hammering out the last things that they need to do to be ready for the presentation day (I don't have my Thursday & Friday classes next week).

(gasp) must... stay... a...(spludder)...-float!

(No I haven't had actual problems breathing, and I'm pretty sure I'm not developing pneumonia. I'm just getting a little bogged down by a lot of the busy work I need to do for my lessons.)

When I graduated college I had only one semester of student-teaching Biology under my belt, but I felt I knew enough to be an effective first-year Biology teacher. I knew the subject, the curriculum requirements, and several methods by which I could impart information in a meaningful way.
Teachers as a whole usually have similar methodologies, even among different subjects, but having to transpose my experience of American high school science classrooms to Chinese university language classrooms was no easy task and it's still a challenge.

What's more, I lack a number of traits that are present in most of my fellow teachers:

- 1 - experience, most of them have years of it, I have next to none. (Youngest on the faculty.)
- 2 - subject familiarity, I speak English fluently, but there's a difference between knowing how to use a skill yourself and truly understanding its intricacies enough to impart that skill to others.
- 3 - empathy for learners, I want my students to succeed and be able to guide their own learning, but I don't know the depth of what they know or the places wherein they're lacking.


I'm not the only one having problems though. Benja and I have both had to endure some rather harsh criticism from our students about the slow pace and simple language that we're teaching. While it's nice to know that the students have the gumption to speak their minds and let us know their thoughts and feelings it would be nice if they did so with a little more tact.
One of my students sent me a text saying "I don't know what I can learn from this class" after I gave a rather boring lesson. I told her "thank you" for telling me her level of English understanding, but it was still pretty hurtful.

So now the both of us are going to rework our courses - the students seem to think they're above the things we're teaching, so we'll treat them like such. We'll act is if they know all they seem to think they know and test them as if they do. If they really are as hot as they seem to think they are then they should do fine, if not then hopefully it'll be a wake-up call for them to get wise to all the simple facets of English that they don't know and be patient.


Besides that I'm still staying active. I expect I'll go hiking with the Crazy English Club again this weekend, and in the meantime my college (瓯江) is hosting a track meet for which I'm signed up to run the longest race they offer (1500 m) on Sunday (if only it was Matt instead of me). Shelley tells me I'll be the first foreign teacher to do this - though I wish I were in better running shape, I haven't run a race since high school, and most of my exercise in this country so far has been Qigong, bicycling and hiking.


...Oh and Matt you'll get a kick out of this: all of the teachers I asked about the meet say they don't know the times of their races and events! (I only learned mine because I kept asking the secretary)

Making a better world... one bag at a time

While I spent the last week doing the work necessary to be able to put my lessons together I found myself spending a lot of time going over the ideas I started developing a few weeks ago in regards to the problem of pollution in and around Wenzhou.

Last Sunday I bought a couple large bags from one of the shops in the University Town business center and on Wednesday I biked and hiked up one of the trails behind Chashan Town looking for garbage to collect. I continued my ascent until I reached a village where the neighborhood dogs got a little territorial and didn't let me pass through (haven't had any trouble with dogs in China before, not sure what went wrong).
In any case I started picking up garbage in plain view of several of the locals as they did some of their work and I continued to work my way back down the trail. I ended up with enough refuse to half fill one of the garbage cans (~100 liter) near my apartment; hardly a dent in the grand scheme of things, but people watched me work, and hopefully that at least will tell people that there's a problem.

Then today I had another hike with the Crazy English Club. This time we went by a new route and continued hiking (ascending and descending) for almost three hours (not counting breaks). I brought both bags and on the way back we loaded them both.

I live for this stuff.

Defacto Club Leader - Wang Liao Xin

Susan (newcomer)

(right) Xiao Ming - the younger brother I never asked for but like regardless.

Jia Jing (in her Earth-goddess pose)



(The fruits of our labor)

I felt sorry for making the casual weekend excursion with friends into an activity approaching extremist environmentalism, but most everyone seemed proud for having done it, and some of the students say they hope to learn from my example. And we passed several people on our way out, so we didn't do this unnoticed.

Now we just need to get other people to do their part...

We make ‘em tougher here in China...

Last post I mentioned that my students had military training (军训) here's the proof.




I'll never look at a basketball court the same way again.


That pair doing the goose-step march on the far right are my students.




Forget basketball and field events... these students will demonstrate movements with shields and clubs.



I think Americans should consider adopting this little addition to our regular style of schooling - it's just one week at the beginning of the school year (and only for freshmen in high school and college), most of what the students do is stand at attention and march when and where they're told to, there's no aggressive behavior or beating, and it does so much for the students' self-discipline and sense of direction and purpose.
My students saw me there watching and many of them said hi to me (one group even said "Hi Miner" all together). I felt proud of them. All I'd seen of these students was from a dais in a classroom and occasionally around campus, bookworms like me. But seeing them dressed in camo-gear, marching together, it gives me confidence in what they'll do for their education.
...(Plus I can tell my colleagues in the U.S. that my 5' Asian girls are just as tough and more disciplined than their 6'4" American male football and basketball players.)
I felt a little bad not being out there with my students, but I put myself through another form of physical hardship to prove my dedication to personal growth and refinement of spirit: fasting coupled with intense self-reflection (Yom Kippur).


Another really interesting development:

When I was in Vancouver, Canada this last summer with my bros and Uncle Mike and Aunt Susie I went with Mike and Tom to a Buddhist temple in Richmond and met a woman named Yvonne who works with her husband Harvey to send BC teachers to teach in primary and secondary schools in China, mostly Wenzhou.
I sent her some emails about what I've been up to and included some questions about what teachers are allowed to do as far as field trips off-campus, but she was too busy to reply, and then she lost my email address (that was a few weeks ago).

I include all of this background to emphasize how much of a shocker it was when Yvonne called me on my China cell phone around noon on Thursday to say that she was on campus and wanted to see me before she went back to Canada (she borrowed another teacher's cell so she could make an in-group call and got my number through the Foreign Affairs office).
So I biked over to the campus, talked to her for about half an hour, met her husband, and then said goodbye when they had to go to a lunch with some of the Wenzhou administrators.

...it was pretty cool.

The rest of that Thursday I spent with Julie, my teacher. In the evening I went to her home to make dumplings with her and her family (husband Mu + mother-in-law). And I made sure not to eat anything before the 24 hours was up.

Land of a thousand holidays

This country has holidays like they're going out of style. That's not to say that EVERY holiday is celebrated equally, or that every one warrants a day off, but it seems every week or so there's something being celebrated.
Truth be told, I didn't know about this holiday until a few minutes ago, so this is one of the exceptions to the rule of frequent celebration.

九月九日憶山東兄弟 王維

獨 在 異 鄉 為 異 客，

每 逢 佳 節 倍 思 親。

遙 知 兄 弟 登 高 處，

遍 插 茱 萸 少 一 人

jiǔ yuè jiǔ rì yì shān dōng xiōng dì

dú zài yì xiāng wèi yì kè

měi féng jiā jié bèi sī qīn

yáo zhī xiōng dì dēng gāo chù

biàn chā zhū yú shǎo yī rén

Double Ninth, Missing My Shandong Brothers

As a lonely stranger in the strange land,

Every holiday the homesickness amplifies.

Knowing that my brothers have reached the peak,

All but one is present at the planting of zhuyu.

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_Ninth_Festival)


My brothers of course are neither from, nor in Shandong (the buggers are in Walla Walla, WA and Hanover, NH respectively) so the poem isn't a perfect fit for me, but it still seems to suit my situation quite well.


Aside from the parallels between my life and web-sourced literature I have another week with no classes while my students are in military 'training' - at least if that's what you call standing under the sun in camo gear and marching back and forth to a drill instructor's orders. It sounds more tedious than anything else.

Oh, and another interesting thing that I decided to try. I realized I've spent about as much of my life in Oregon (~11 years) as I spent in Massachusetts (~11 years), so I decided to try and make contact with some of my old primary schoolmates before our lives get any further removed from those days than they already have. (Thank god for Facebook).
I only made contact with a few, but it's still nice to get a link established with someone from the past after such a long time.

Last Tuesday's adventure to the South

All of this was in a valley only about two hours drive south of Wenzhou. Every stop was practically overrun with visitors like ourselves, and all sections of the hike had paved stones, but the trip was still an exciting one, and as you can see we got to visit some very beautiful sites.
Participants: Ben Clarke (the guy wearing the stocking cap), Me (the young guy with the light eyes), Mr. Mu (Julie's husband who invited us), Mr. Mu's college friend (now the headmaster of a school in the north of China).

After this trip we went to a nice little restaurant near Chashan town (next to the college) and had a good dinner. It was a good trip.

It never ends...

In general I'm a pretty stoic person, but recently I've had to deal with some issues that got through my skin (figuratively and literally).


When I first came here and was living in an apartment on the first floor I considered getting a mosquito net, but after I slept there several nights without any of the pests intruding on my slumber I decided it wasn't worth the investment. When I moved up to the second floor however, the little monsters began to bother me without end. They came at me one at a time when the light was turned out, and after buzzing by my ear would fly away before I could turn on the fluorescent light. And the moment one was no longer a problem (after I had crushed it) another would begin flying in and pestering me.
The difficulty was in actually crushing one because they fly much faster than the mosquitoes we get in America.

There is a striking similarity to this situation that can be seen in my day-to-day life regarding the students and various people that I have met since I came here. Students and some teachers ask if I have free time to talk with them so they can practice their English (and on the rare occasion, teach me some Chinese), and during that time they are polite but typically are uncomfortably close to me physically and go on talking and interacting without pause (sometimes for hours).

Both problems result from the lack of a protective and exclusive net - in the former it's a physical net, in the latter a spatial as well as chronological net. Likewise in both cases I feel like I'm being intruded on and being sucked dry.

Good news is I got to do some martial arts with my colleague Ben the other day. We did some qigong and then some touch sparring. I took one harsh kick to my left leg and it still stings a little, but overall it was a lot of fun.