December 19, 2011

The night china shot down Santa. Sort-of.

Pre-Party Planning:

This last Saturday I attended my first Christmas party in China. It all started two weeks ago when the head of our English Language department sent an email to Max, Tyler and me asking us if we would be interested in attending a Christmas party thrown by the catholic based charity organization “Jinde Charities”, of which he is apparently a volunteer. Originally in this email he also asked what we would be able to do on stage. Apparently last year Lyn (a Drake student) and Leo (another foreign teacher at our school) sang a Christmas song which was apparently the highlight of the night [click here to watch on YouTube]. He was obviously pushing us to try and do the same. The only difference is Leo came to China to sing professionally, so he is actually really good. I myself am not down with the whole “white dancing monkey” routine. I’m okay when the school exploits my race in small gatherings, like lunches and dinners, but this was a whole other level. Plus it wasn’t even University related! Nevertheless I decided to go. See, I actually like James. He is always friendly when he sees me, asking if I need help with anything and reminding me to call or email him when I need something. He can get things done in a timely fashion... like no other foreign language official I’ve met. Plus, he seems to at least understand when I freak about things such as imputing grades. The best part is he pretends to understand and care, even if he doesn’t, pretending is good enough for me.

December 12, 2011

December 5, 2011

teacher...TEACHER! AH TEACHER!

Word around the water cooler NUCLEAR PLANT

Life drags on in China. I’ve reached the point where not much surprises me anymore, and I really need to get back my sense of adventure. I’ve developed a daily routine and while that is good for my sanity it’s boring for my brain.

Yes, I hate the Chinese education system. No, I have not murdered any students yet.

Classes are good, now that the only class of heathens (the non English majors) is over, and you can rest assured the average grade in that class turned out pretty low. The final for the class turned out fairly interesting; because the school did not assign them a book I had to draw on another source to test their spoken English level. I settled on having them read a 5 minute section from different famous English speeches. The speeches I chose were:
  • Barbara Bush – Wellesley Commencement Address
  • FDR – 1st Fireside Chat
  • FDR – Infamy Speech (Pearl Harbor)
  • JFK – Inaugural Address
  • Margaret Thatcher – This Lady’s Not For Turning
  • Nixon – Checkers
  • Nixon – Resignation Address
  • Robert F. Kennedy – M.L.K. Assassination Announcement
  • Steve Jobs – Stanford Commencement Address
  • G.W. Bush – 9/11 Announcement
  • Patrick Henry – Give Me Liberty, or Give Me Death







Seemed simple enough, I posted .pdf files on my class blog for them to look over and at the beginning of next class each would tell me which one they wanted to read and I would assign them a certain number of words which they could pull from the online copy. Of course, in China, nothing can ever be easy. Chinese logic sometimes makes me afraid for the future of this country. I explained this to them and got every Chinese excuse in the book, “But teacher, I don’t have a computer…”, “Teacher, teacher, no printer…”, “Teacher, to busy, no time!” This problem was easier to fix than I expected though, apparently publicly humiliating and kicking out one liar was enough to kick the rest in line. It’s hard to tell me you don’t have access to a computer when you just had a conversation with me on QQ (not QQ mobile) an hour before class. Additionally, if I see you reading printed speeches for your competition while in class, it’s hard to tell me you don’t know where to find a printer.

Then came the next hurdle. I returned home that night only to be downright assaulted by a mass number of QQ messages from students saying they didn’t understand which section of the speech was theirs, in fact many were freaking out that they thought they would have to read a whole speech. And this is how I got harassed into creating 41 different word documents, one for each student containing their Chinese and English names, speech section and number. I planned two class periods for them to speak and two class periods for teacher assistance. Essentially I wanted to read everyone’s speech so they could listen for rhythm, pronunciation, and emphasis but this just turned into me spending two 2hr classes giving the speeches they would give with no extra time for me to help them. I knew many of them would see this as an opening to invalidate this as their final and thus I began the hunt for video of these speeches that I would be able to send to them…inside of the great firewall of china…

Not surprisingly I was able to find the Nixon speeches and Jobs speech but nothing else was in sight. I ended up ripping the videos off YouTube and posting them on Youku. I wasn’t expecting much and was already researching other methods to get the video to the students when my videos on Youku actually went through review and were posted. So…if I ever disappear in China, we know why.

As a foreigner, you may feel lost and confused in China. It's not just you, the Chinese have no idea whats going on either.