Journal Entry - November 6, 2006
Here in Ya’an we are not completely isolated from the western world. Since our arrival there have been a few western visitors to the university. We recently had a professor from Michigan State University staying in the apartment next to ours for two weeks. MSU has a program in Turf Grass Management that is run cooperatively with four agricultural universities in China, one of which is ours. David came here to teach a two week intensive class and, as the head of the program, to make arrangements for some other professors from MSU. Since the students in this program will go to the U.S., they are given intensive English training in addition to their turf studies, and Gina and three of the other foreign teachers work with them to help them pass the TOEFL exam. David was very interested in our experiences and our insights into the students. We also spent some time just socializing and talking with an English speaker.
The parents of one of our fellow English teachers, John, also visited, and their visit overlapped with the MSU professor’s stay. John’s parents spent most of their time sightseeing, but we managed to go out for dinner with them a couple of times. One time we took them to a tea house and taught them to play mahjong.
We have started our new relationship with the Experimental Primary School, which is the one at which our friend Dai Ou works and to which she introduced us. We first went there with her and she introduced us to the headmaster. He was polite, but he made it clear that we should follow correct Chinese protocol, which requires we have a proper letter of introduction. So we went to the Foreign Affairs Office of the university, where Chen Qiong, our contact, obliged us by a writing letter.
We returned the following day with our letter. We also brought a DVD showing a typical day at Gina's school, which we gave to the headmaster to make a copy. The headmaster introduced us to two of the school’s English teachers and took us on a brief tour. We looked at a couple of classes and watched some afterschool programs. The drum and bugle corp was divided into drums and bugles, and was marching around the school yard. There were organized games of basketball, and other activities. There were a couple of classrooms full of students getting extra help with homework. It was all very lively and the students were fully engaged, except when we would walk by. In the presence of foreigners all work would come to a halt to stare and, for the braver students, to shout “hello”.
At the end of our visit we made a date to return the next week. We had told the headmaster that we wanted to come back many times to really get to know the school. We told him that we wanted to take pictures and perhaps video footage with the goal of making a DVD similar to the one of Wildwood School that we had given him. We weren't sure what he would have in mind for our next visit, so we brought a camera and a small video camera borrowed from a friend. We also brought a number of questions. When we arrived, we were met by the headmaster and an English teacher and went right to the headmaster's office. We never got around to taking any pictures. Instead we talked for at least two hours. We asked many of our questions, and the headmaster had many questions of his own about education in the United States. The conversation was very free and informative.
We also visited Dai Ou’s classroom. She and Gina designed an activity for her kindergarten class that involved walking and hopping by the children and singing by Gina. I went along as accompanist, playing my new (to me) guitar (see below). The children were quite rowdy, and since their normal call and response style of learning is done at top volume, so is there misbehavior. That combined with bare concrete floor, walls, and ceiling made it a little hard to hear. Even so, the activity was a success.
Our own pedagogical environment is changing. We had heard that the better universities have some pretty hi tech facitilites, so we were hoping to be able to make computer displays a part of our teaching and brought a lap top and a projector with us. The missing element is a portable movie screen, which is a standard element on the American scene. In fact, the university has some portable screens, but we asked for one and were told that they aren’t available to us. Instead, the university switched our classes to what is called a multi-media classroom. It’s a standard room, long multi-student desks facing the front of the room, bolted to the floor, and a raised platform with a podium at the front from which to lecture. In this case, the podium has a built in computer which is connected to a projector. Instead of a blackboard stretching across the front wall there is a large screen and a tiny blackboard off to the side. The podium has a special control panel built into it with a large number of buttons labelled in Chinese. I don’t know what it controls and can’t read any of the labels. Likewise, the computer’s operating system is all in Chinese. It’s difficult to get a translation because for the most part the Chinese that speak English don’t understand computers and the Chinese that understand computers don’t speak English. We asked for something simple and were given something else that we didn’t ask for, that is much harder to use and isn’t what we wanted. Even so, I appreciate the new capabilities and I’m sure I’ll be able to figure out how to access them, eventually.
As we become more acquainted with how things are done here, we get more and more busy. There is a tremendous demand for what I call “foreigner face time,” when Chinese students have the opportunity to speak to a native English speaker. Partly this is satisfied with English Corner, a two hour weekly session to which I and another foreign teacher go just to give students and anyone who wants it an opportunity to talk with us. The conversation is informal and free ranging, although the same questions come up over and over. “Do you like Chinese food?” “What is your favorite sport?” “Do you know Yao Ming [a Chinese player in the NBA]?” “Do you like [insert name of mindless action movie or pop star here]?” “What do you think of Ya’an/our university/China?” I patiently answer them all.
English Corner was up and running before we got here and it is very well attended, but it is a drop in the bucket compared with the number of people who want to practice their English and the collective intensity of their desire to talk to us. Apparently the regular teachers at the university aren’t in the habit of holding office hours and it hasn’t been asked of us, but we have decided to do it anyway. Every Tuedsay between 1:00 and 2:00 I sit in the lobby of the Foreign Guest House. (We have no actual office.) The first two times I did it no one showed up, but last week three students came, and four students came this week. It looks like I might have a crowd on my hands soon.
We have also told all of our students that we would have lunch in the dining hall every Wednesday. Normally the Chinese are very reluctant to intrude on our privacy, so they rarely approach us in the dining hall. As with office hours, the first week no one sat with us. Then three weeks ago two students brought their lunches to our table. The next week it was four. This last Wednesday, there were six of our students and their friends eating lunch at our table, speaking English to us and to each other. The dining hall where we usually go is near our apartment on the new campus, but there is another on the old campus across the river. We went over there on a Thursday two weeks ago and ran into a Chinese friend. Now I have added Thursday at lunch time to the list of times people can talk to us.
I have also accepted a second job. There is a vocational school in Ya’an, sort of a junior college. Like the rest of China, they are busy preparing for the 2008 Olympics. For the vocational school, that means special training programs for tour guides, waitresses, and flight attendants to handle the onslaught of foreign tourists. One of the requirements for these new jobs is English. The school decided that their Chinese English teaching staff won’t be able to give the students adequate preparation in the time remaining, so they asked our university if they would mind if one or two of the foreign teachers could teach a class or two at the vocational school. The Foreign Affairs Office put the word out, with the unspoken message that we would be doing them a favor to take the job. After a little discussion among the six of us, we decided that Lawrence and I would take one class each. We will be paid extra, although the amount is not very much.
Last week Lawrence and I met with two of the staff of the vocational school. Among other things, discovered that our students speak so little English that we will have a translator with us in the classroom. Of course, that severely limits what we can do with them, especially given that we will see them eight times before they graduate. One thing I decided right away is that I will teach them a lot of songs. I’m not exactly a sing-along kind of guy, but I think it will probably get better results than anything else I can do. Even though I’m a mediocre guitar player, I decided that I would probably get more participation from the students with a little accompaniment, so I went down to our local guitar shop to price an instrument.
I was looking for something cheap, and their bottom of the line strummable guitar was only $20. I was about to close the deal when a couple of my students passed by the shop. After we said hello I explained what I was after and asked if they thought I was getting a good deal. They said no, dickered with the shop owner in Chinese, and then turned to me and said, "Let’s go. We can get a better deal elsewhere." They dragged me out of the shop and down the street. About halfway to another guitar shop, one of them said she had a guitar that she can’t play, never plays, and never will play, and she wanted to give it to me. She wouldn’t take no for answer, and in China difficult questions about the propriety of gift giving between student and teacher just don’t come up. Besides, she’s a good student who will get a top grade anyway, so I finally gave in. A little while later, she and her friend brought the guitar over. It hadn’t been played or even tuned in many months, which lent creedence to her claimed present and future lack of competence. So now I have a guitar, yet another instrument that I’ll need to find time to practice. Compared to other guitars, this one is only so-so, but it’s a lot better than my bicycle is compared to other bicycles and it has already made itself useful.
One thing the Chinese seem to love is competitions. Almost every endeavor they engage in that happens in the public sphere is done competitively. This includes speaking English. For every competition there has to be a panel of judges, and if the contest involves English they call on the foreign teachers. The other day I was asked to judge a competition to determine who would represent the university at a Model UN event to take place later this year at a big university in the provincial capital. Before the contest the contestants were asked to prepare a two minute self introduction and told that they would have to field one or two questions from the judges. At the appointed time people gathered in a small auditorium with about a hundred seats and a row of desks in front for the judges facing an open space with a microphone at the front of the room. I was given a numbered list of the contestants with three blank columns for English fluency, stage presence, and the degree to which their speech made sense. An MC introduced the contest and reminded everyone to keep a sense of fair play and cooperation and not to feel discouraged if he or she wasn’t selected. This is said at the beginning of every contest, even the play acted contests that my English students improvise in skits. This advice is followed so completely and sincerely that I doubt it is needed. The Chinese students truly embody the notion that win or lose, everyone who competes is a winner.
After the introduction the MC called each contestant to the front by name and number. Each one had a fancy cardboard cut out number pinned to his or her clothes, which I found useful, since I am rarely able to match their spoken names to their written names. Each one immediately launched into the self introduction. The variability in each of the characteristics I was to judge was large. Some students were painfully shy and barely able to talk, others were quite self assured, and it wasn’t always correlated with their English fluency. There were five judges, two Chinese teachers from the English department, two people from the Foreign Affairs Office, and me. Before the contest started, they decided that the questions from the panel of judges would all be asked by me, and then they informed me that I would have to make them up on the spot. After all the students had spoken we were to choose eight winners to go to the Model UN. The students left and we began to discuss their performances. At first the discussion was in English, presumably for my benefit, but it became more and more Chinese as it went on, until finally I just sat and listened. In the end we were roughly in agreement about the winners, I think.
We have had a few sunny days lately, and so we’ve gone to see a couple of things that we had not yet gotten around to looking at. One is the large experimental farm at one end of the campus. Since this is an agricultural university, there is a considerable amount of agricultural research, most of it done by the students. To that end, there is a large area, over a hundred acres by my guess, devoted to all sorts of agriculture, from garden vegetables to decorative flowers to turf grass to forest. We rode down to the farm for the first time the other day. It was a hive of activity. Students were weeding, digging, planting, and harvesting, but only small patches. The real work of the farm is done by hired peasants, of which there were many. Some of them seem to live in shacks and garden sheds in the fields. The farm is criss-crossed by a maze of roadways and paths, all of which have deep concrete drainage ditches on both sides, presumably to keep the different experimental plants and chemicals from washing from one field to the next, contaminating the experiments.
The farm also includes many buildings in which various sorts of animal husbandry goes on. My Chinese teacher is a graduate student in animal nutrition named Xie Xiaojie who is currently working on an experiment involving the amino acid content of pig feed additives. Because the pigs have to be kept in controlled conditions, and because the buildings, like all buildings in China, have no automated climate control, she has to live in a small room in the building that houses her pigs in order to monitor and adjust the heating and cooling as needed. If she wants a break, for instance, to buy food, or to take a shower, she has to depend on a friend to come and babysit her pigs. On the one hand, it is a tremendous effort for her to teach me Chinese once a week. On the other hand, I imagine that is a welcome diversion from watching her pigs. Xie Xiaojie’s boyfriend is also a graduate student in animal nutrition. He is working in aquaculture and is currently doing an experiment on the effect of a certain B vitamin on the growth of carp. He also has to stay in the building where his experimental subjects live, but fortunately for the two of them it’s right across the street from Xie Xiaojie’s pigs.
We recently had our first American celebratory occasion: Halloween. We decided to hold a party. We invited all of the foreign teachers (two were out of town) and a number of Chinese friends and friends of friends. We made some soup and guests brought bread, a pear tart, and lots of cookies and things. The Chinese supermarkets all sell lots of varieties of candy in bulk by weight. The pieces are individually wrapped and perfect for Halloween, so although we didn’t expect any trick or treaters, we bought a bunch to set out at the party.
I spent most of he day looking for apple juice to make mulled cider. There are a lot of orchards around here, and just as in New England, it’s apple season. Every day at the market there are farmers with small trucks full of apples. The local apples are cheap, about fifteen cents a pound. You might expect that there would be a lot of apple juice available, but the only thing I could find was this completely artificial apple drink concentrate. It is bright green goop that is more viscous than it would normally be because it has pectin in it. I tried reconstituting it and mulling it. The results were almost completely unlike mulled cider and looked like a 1950’s mad scientist potion you might concoct for a haunted house, rather than something you might actually want to drink. Our Chinese guests had nothing to compare it to and claimed that it was good, but they are notoriously polite and most of it was still left at the end of the evening.
About two thirds of our guests came in costume. We were able to find a pumpkin and others brought three more. The pumpkins here are a mottled beige, not the bright orange we’re used to, but we carved three jack-o-lanterns anyway and put them on the balcony railing. We had a little bit of home and we introduced our Chinese friends to some real authentic American culture.
