Anyway. The kids are fantastic. They are attentive and curious and really excited to speak English with us. I am teaching seventh grade or 初一， the first year of junior middle school. The kids are twelve or thirteen and look about nine. They just about swoon when I manage to catch a single student’s eye and smile at them. They told me that that I am very beautiful (a stretch, at best) and my handwriting is very good (an outright falsehood) and after two of the five classes I taught today I was surrounded by a swarm demanding I autograph their textbooks or notebooks or the flags that Genbao and I gave out as prizes for our most challenging activity. Our third class asked for my phone number. I said, Chinese or American? and they said Chinese of course! but none of them have called or texted me yet.
We were told to assume that the seventh graders would know next to nothing, and were pleasantly surprised to find that wasn’t true. They definitely can’t have very elevated conversations, but they can follow my instructions that have to do with the textbook and the activities in it. We asked what they wanted to be when they grow up and everyone who answered in English (we told them they could speak Chinese in the hopes that they would give us real answers and not just convenient ones, but few of them complied- I think all the teachers in the back were making them nervous too). We got quite a few “I want to be a policeman/woman. Although it is a little dangerous, the work is quite interesting.”s and another set of “I want to be a reporter. I will meet interesting people every day.”s and quite a few “I want to be an English teacher, because English is very interesting”s. I’m not sure how much of a difference we can honestly make in two class periods with each class of eighty (for a total of an hour and a half of very divided attention for each student). I am trying, and Genbao has been awesome at reminding me, to walk up and down through the classroom while I am talking and having them answer questions or practice pronunciation so that I can hear more of them and they all feel like they have been close to and approved by a Native English Speaker (more than that: An American).
Every time the class split into pairs there was always a student or two who ended up by themselves, by coincidence, their choice, or their classmates’ judgment I was never sure. It gave me the chance to pair up with them. I got a few pretty awesome facial expressions when I said “Can I be your partner?” Eyes went wide with a mixture of joy and pure terror. Most of the kids did really well for their level of English.
One boy sat in the back and didn’t understand enough to pay attention unless Genbao was translating. I did the “Is Mary doing her homework?” exercise with him one-on-one when he ended up alone. He had a lot of trouble- didn’t know any of the recent vocab, pronunciation was way off and very very hesitant. He looked at me like he was waiting for me to give up on him and move on to a smarter student- his smile seemed to shrug and his eyes apologized even while they were begging for approval. We went through a couple and he successfully said and (I really think) understood “No, she is eating dinner.” I told him good job and smiled at him so that I hope he believed me, but I don’t really think he did. Another girl I talked to one on one wasn’t too good at English, but I got the feeling it was because she didn’t care. This kid didn’t seem to think he had the right to care (I infer from kids like him I have known). He was paying attention and willing to work, and I’m sure if he had just a little extra help he’d be able to do just fine- I’m pretty confident that he will end up with no option but to go back to his home village. Kids don’t end up with expressions that hopeless if English is the only subject they’ve been convinced they’re hopeless at. I’d be angry, but there isn’t anywhere constructive to direct it, so I’m letting the anger go. There are over a thousand students in each grade, about eighty in every class. These teachers are not the best (though they are decent), or many might have chosen to live somewhere other than Bazhong. So I’m just resolved to keep trying to keep eye contact with him and the others who look like they don’t think they belong in school.
So, we were told we were coming to 中国一个非常贫困的地方－one of the poorest places in China. This is not true. Bazhong is definitely out of the way, and not one of the places that tourists generally frequent, but it is only poor and under-developed enough not to be too embarassing to the Chinese government. One of my classmates who’s also on this trip spent some time as a volunteer English teacher with an organization focused on sending teachers to poor villages. Most of her colleagues, she said, ended up in cities where they were not needed because they were not allowed into the really poor areas. The Chinese government is very sensitive to being seen as 落后 (backwards) and is growing tired of lectures on 人权 (human rights) , and wants the world to marvel when we realize that all of their problems are solved rather than continuously telling them what they do wrong (I think). This is a complicated country.
We are being banqueted (again- the school administrators already fed us very well last night, and our HNC administrator took us all out for hotpot tonight) by some higher-ups in the regional government tomorrow. I think at the expense of our time at the high school English Corner, which... would not be my choice of priorities. But one surrenders some amount of judgment about time management when entering into arrangements like a week of teaching English in China. We are actually quite sheltered from bureaucracy at our little Center, though of course we complain about what we do encounter.
The man who picked Genbao, Sean, Fan Yi and I up from the high school where we ate lunch and took us back to the middle school to teach wore an electric blue jacket with neon green and black polka dots (which, I later discovered, were carefully coordinated with electric blue plush sneakers). His hair, without any product that I could detect, put of the rest of us to shame with its rebellious and care-free volume. His ride was bright red, something like a shortened PT Cruiser. He was blasting what Sean informed me was like Tibetan techno,; it switched back and forth between an instrument I would describe as “beautiful” and “traditional” and a rousing chorus of “If you don’t give a damn, we don’t give a fuck” all over a thumping bass line. Sean asked if I had ever been to the Tibetan Plateau (which includes part of Western Sichuan and much of Qinghai province as well as Tibet itself). When I told him I had not, he helped put the song in a more 地道 (authentic) context. He said that Tibetan men –truly manly men- ride around on motorcycles, long black hair flowing out from under their cowboy hats, with techno blasting from speakers on the back of the bike. A cloud of dust, the gleam of sunlight on high cheekbones, the increasingly insistent thump of techno: this is my impression of Tibetans. I would like to get to the plateau and round it out a bit, but I’m not sure it’s in the cards this trip.
Yang Genbao and I spent about an hour and a half (close to two hours, actually) finishing our lesson plans for tomorrow. Wu Dai, who’s teaching the other 初一 class, joined us for a while. The kids’ English is seriously multiple times better than we were told to expect, so we’re trying to make our lesson plans more complex. We have three more new classes tomorrow morning (we had five today) and then have two second-time classes in the afternoon.
Teaching is hard work, eh?
Though actually each of the English teachers here is only in charge of one or two classes that meet every day, and not eight different classes five in a day with no future idea of what to expect from them. I’m sure they’re still plenty worn out when they get home.
Okay, heading to bed. It’s 11:40 and they come to pick us up at 7:50.
[Things one does not miss after leaving China: grey-black pollution boogers. I may have said this before. I seriously will not miss them at all. They seriously happen a lot. No hyperbole. Blackness. In my nose. From the air.]
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