It's the room the sun and the sky

Writing goal number three* for this year is the most informal. It's basically just to keep my pen on paper; not to let things I need to express pile up because I'm not sure how or when to say them. I've journaled to keep myself sane since I was about ten years old, I think. I have a paper journal for which this might often be more appropriate, but I'm going to try to just write down something about HOW my life is every week. This will also allow me to keep titling entries with song lyrics that probably only relate to the post's content in my head. Win all around, really.

To begin with, here's a bit about what it feels like to teach afterschool English at Hado Elementary School on Jeju Island:

The fifth and sixth grades are often the easiest to relate to, but also the classes where power struggles are most likely. I'm hoping this will continue getting better as I figure out what games they like and they feel they can trust me to have a point to what I want them to do ("point" here probably also being a game). Sixth grade was excited about the game "four corners" for about two solid weeks. I haven't played it in a little while because I want it to still be exciting. The only thing I've gotten the fifth grade excited about so far is telling scary stories. Which was awesome-- I said "What is a scary story?" and they immediately listed about twenty possible characters, starting with Dracula and kumiho. I've been using them to teach the past tense, and am hoping I can find some more things they'll be interested in so they don't get tired of them. They are the class that chose names like "Valkyrie," "Black Hole," and "Dark Knight," for which I can do nothing but congratulate them, but they are clearly too cool for school most of the time. There's hope for a future full of English practice involving video game characters and tales of violent death, but there will be rocks along the way.

Fourth grade is my smallest class and third grade is my largest (with 5 and 11 students, respectively. All my classes are beautifully small). Fourth grade has been the easiest so far-- they've been happy with the activities I've planned for them-- they've been feeling the power of being able to spell things by sounding them out phonetically, I think, and really like playing Uno even if they have to describe their cards in English to play each turn. The range of language level in my third grade class is challenging. There is one girl who has complained a number of times to my co-teacher that she ALWAYS raises her hand and ALWAYS knows the answer and I NEVER call on her. I do call on her, sometimes, but I know that she really does always know the answer very fast, and a few of her classmates generally need the question repeated and/or re-explained.

First and second grade have the most trouble finding value in sitting in a chair for forty minutes at a time, but they might still be my favorites. They are all young enough to just "know" that all adults understand everything they are saying all the time, so they speak to me in Korean all the time. I have them kind of fooled so far, by luck. I always have a Korean co-teacher in class who fields their relevant questions, and thus far the only questions they've asked me outside of class concern where I'm going-- one of the ten or so things I understand. Thus far they still believe that I respond in English to challenge them and make them keep practicing, and not because I only speak about twenty words of Korean.

Only a couple of the other teachers in my school have had real conversations with me. Most don't speak English well enough (or aren't confident, at least). But a couple of teachers who don't really speak English have brought me coffee a couple of friday afternoons while I lesson plan in the library, so overall it's nice to be there.

*er, goals one and two start next week. They're more scheduled. You'll be seeing them. Transmission ended.

Title is from "Lazy Eye" by the Silversun Pickups

Beginnings on Jeju Island

I am safe on Jeju, and apologize for not updating here sooner! Our first five days on the island were spent finishing out orientation at a hotel with no wifi, and my evenings were spent wandering around Jeju-si or sleeping.

I stayed with Christian for about a week, as his room at our "pension"* was open way before mine. First, though, he had to fly to Osaka at the last minute to get a new visa because of some poorly worded forms at the Consulate in Chicago.

Our rooms are right next to each other, the only ones in the building on this side of the cluster of structures that our landlord (who was introduced to us as "the Master") owns. There is a waterwheel and a gazebo in the middle, and a bench swing to the side of my window, next to the hole in the wall that houses our washing machine. My place consists of one large room-- kitchen, bedroom, and living room in one-- and a small bathroom. There are plenty of windows and we get a lovely breeze, so when it's not crazy hot outside they're open.

I've only taught one day so far, and will head to my second day of classes in a couple of hours. My intended first day was canceled by a typhoon, which in the end turned out to be just spotty gusts of wind and a few downpours. I definitely haven't gotten a good handle on my students' abilities yet. We've just made namecards (and picked English names!) and gone over class rules. My first graders think I'm super cool, my fourth graders may stage a revolt before too long.

It feels SO GOOD to have my own place, and now a cellphone and internet, and soon a desk and chair. I'm calming down from last year in China and from traveling all over the place this summer. I think it's gonna be a really good year.


*this is the first time I've heard the word 'pension' used to describe something not to do with money after retirement. Here it means "vacation house," something like "bed and breakfast" which is rented out by the day during tourist season, and much cheaper by the month in the off season.

She may cry but her tears will dry when I hand her the keys to a shiney new Australia

Welp, I have some major updates on the status on my brain and future plans.

Update Eins: I did not get into grad school. Despite the feelings of numerous friends and relatives, I do not seem to be the end-all, be-all of prospective researchers. Since I’d decided that I NEED some time away from school, this is really okay. My ego remains slightly bruised, but my ego generally needs to be taken down a notch or two.

Update Zwei: I am planning on moving to Korea in the fall to teach English for a year. This will give me some more experience teaching, and hopefully help me decide if I’m aiming to teach kids or older students. After I get the lesson planning figured out, it will also give me lots of time to work on other projects and figure myself out.

Update Drei: I’m afraid that right now I’m not planning on coming back to the US this summer. Plane tickets are expensive, and I’ve decided to use the money to travel around China since I’ll still have a visa to be here the rest of the summer. This I’m traveling with a Canadian friend and then visiting Xiaoxuan’s family in Hebei Province, near Beijing.

Update Vier: I love you!

Title is from "Dr Horrible's Sing-a-long Blog"

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.

Eigentlich konnten wir uns freuen

A good first day of teaching! Although I really don’t know what to do with the teachers and their expectations- as far as they are concerned this trip has been one of misunderstandings and silly expectations- the kids are fantastic. Teachers (at least two, up to five) sat in on every one of our classes today. Genbao kept saying how nervous it made him during our breaks, and I kept telling him not to worry about them; just focus on the kids. The teachers stared at us pretty stonily most of the time, but I managed to ignore them pretty effectively. Apparently one of the high school teachers pulled aside one of the HNC students teaching there and asked if we were teaching majors. No. No, we are not. We are English speakers, and that’s all we got. I think they’re expecting us to revolutionize their teaching methods. Whatever. I’m sure someone saw that we are from the Hopkins-Nanjing Center for Chinese and American Studies and decided they wanted us to be teaching majors and passed that wish along.

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.]

Xavier Naidoo's "Eigentlich Gut"