Final thoughts on Bazhong

I’m not really sure where to start updating you about the rest of the week. Definitely the best and most important part was working with the kidsI think pretty much all of them were excited about my class simply because it took them away from normal assignments and classwork (as any self-respecting seventh grader should be) and many were also excited to meet us.

Playing Jeopardy in our second lesson with each class was hilarious. It wasn’t exactly Jeopardy, we had lots of questions about US culture and such divided into two groups: Easy and Hard. When I explained the game, I first told them that I’d be asking them questions and some of them would be hard, then that they were in groups, then that each group would choose either an easy question or a hard one. Whenever Genbao finished translating that, everyone would yell “Easy!” and I would put my hands up and say “but! And easy question is worth ten points, and a hard question is worth thirty” and a hush would be followed by whispers of “三十”[thirty]and sometimes a round of yelled “Hard!” They were attentive and excited about the questions. I didn’t tell anyone out loud if they were right or not- half the time looking back at the kids anxiously before doing so. The scores were always greeting with cheers and groans.

I think I mentioned before that Genbao was a fantastic co-teacher. He helped a lot (one could also say “did most of the work”) lesson planning, and then the night before we first taught he said “I think that because you are native speaker, you should teach. And I- I will translate!” He was great.

We got a good reputation because we spent a lot of time of phonics the first day- all the teachers who sat in on our class did all the phonics work along with me and the kids.

The more ridiculous things are usually a better story, but I’m afraid that focusing on them too easily gives a skewed vision of my life in China.

Ridiculous Thing 1, I already mentioned, was in my mind the fact that we met with the mayor and local Communist Party Secretariat. They wanted to meet with us to support our visit, and possibly the fellowship that’s supposed to be happening in Bazhong next year. It was a kind gesture, overall, but still a strange one.

Ridiculous Thing 2 involved our return trip. On the way there I and three other classmates rode a train to Guangyuan, the nearest train station. We rode the public bus, which is scheduled to take three and a half hours, driving on mountain rodes and stopping now and then to let passangers off. Our trip back to Guangyuan took only a little more than two hours. Why, you ask? And I will tell you. We took a different road, a highway. Why does the public bus not use this highway? Well, I’ll tell you that too. It isn’t finished. No one uses it. We loaded onto a bus, our luggage crammed in around us, with two students in a small silver sedan along with the school’s headmaster leading the way. The sedan and our bus flashed their hazard lights the whole way- “foreigners on board-foreigners on board-attention.” We breezed past a family car stopped at the blockade and onto the unopened section of the highway. We had to turn around on one overpass, the middle of which was blocked off with piles of construction materials, sending us down an entrance ramp and back up the other side. We passed many groups of construction workers who got out of the way for us to pass.

Overall, the trip was awesome. I got closer to some classmates, got to interact with a bunch of really bright students both in my classes in the middle school and at the high school English Corner. I returned worn out but very happy.