Ready, Set, Teach English
1 comments Saturday, August 11, 2007

[backdated 7/10 1:59 am]

So, Saturday was my first day in China, but yesterday was my first day teaching. For quite a few reasons, I'm exhausted and not really in the mood to recount it, so I'll make this quick. Just a few points:

My students are seventh graders named Dona, Kathy, Bill, Jason, Isabel (that's Li Lei Lei -- it turned out to be Isabel after all), Dale, Dona, and Pandora. The boys all laughed at Pandora's name, and I tried to defend her but quickly realized that nobody would be likely to understand a hastily-rendered Greek myth without a very careful preface clarifying who the Greeks were and how the story went, so I just settled for assuring everyone it was a very good name. Drew got similarly bogged down trying to explain Noah's Ark, although eventually they got that it was a biblical reference.

Pandora, in any case, turned out to be a hotshot at English -- something I relied heavily upon while explaining activities, but which also became obnoxious when I wanted to call on other students (Dick and Dona were particularly recalcitrant) and she jumped right in instead. Bill was a similar case. I guess I know what it's like to be That Guy in a language class, though, so I'm trying to apply their abilities to the general good without squelching their enthusiasm or making it boring.

"Boring," incidentally, is a favorite word of these kids'. Isabel uses it all the time to either query my feelings or inform me of her own. On one ten minute ride into town, "Do you think is boring to go in car? I think is boring." She has surprised me with it at many other moments when it seems to me that to answer "yes" would be marking myself as a really crappy guest, though I'm eager to establish solidarity with her. I figured that her case was one of enthusiasm to use one of the fairly limited words she knows to describe the situation, but then all the kids in class set in telling me this activity was boring and that game was boring, so maybe they really are just that cynical. Or maybe they're just seventh graders, minus the slight moderating element of native-language politeness.

Posted by珍珠
at4:10 PM

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Morning Pages
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[backdated 7/8/07, 6:44 AM]

Welcome, everyone, to the morning of my second day in Chengdu. Jetlag is still reigning supreme, so I haven't managed to sleep past 5:45am. I thought a little typing might help me drift off again before my 8:00am alarm.

So, the quick rundown: we arrived almost two hours late on Friday night, which put us at about midnight in China time. Midnight in China time is early morning in California body time, so Drew and I had just finally perked back up again after a very sleepy transfer in Beijing. Just for the record, the Beijing airport is super cool. We saw our first amusing English signage there. We also stopped at a little fruit shop and had our first legitimate, if primitive, Chinese conversation. It went something like this:

Fruit Shop Girl: "Hello, American people!"
Drew: "Hello, Chinese person!"
[we peruse the fruit for a while, settling on a dragonfruit that looks ripe to me]
Shop Girl: "That one not good. Not good! This one very good. This one also very good!"
Me: [accepting Very Good Dragonfruit] "Ah, very good! Thank you!"
Shop Girl: "Dragonfruit -- in Chinese, '[something I can't remember]'."
Me and Drew: [repeat]
Shop Girl: "Very good!"
[we also select two mangosteens, a bottle of water and a Pocari Sweat, and pay by credit card]
Me and Drew: "Thank you! Good-bye!"

I think our supreme Chinese language skills probably speak for themselves here.

After our purchases, we returned to the gate to share the wealth with Luke and Erin -- but first Drew and Luke had to run into a restaurant called Flavor Tang to get us some plastic spoons. Mangosteens, for the record, are absurdly delicious things.

Anyway, back in Chengdu, we exited the baggage area and were met with a rush of beaming host families. My host parents -- whose Chinese names I forget, but who asked to be called "Lutia" and "Lakin," which at first I mistook for "Lucky" -- and my host sister, whose Chinese name is the euphonious Li Lei Lei (and whose English name I am forgetting -- either Elizabeth or Isabelle) are all very lovely indeed. I am not yet adept at assessing Chinese income, but their spacious car (with a special parking device that alerts the driver to the distance between the car and any nearby obstacles!) led me to believe they are quite well-off. I can't help but wonder what kind of politics went into the selection of eight host families out of sixty...

(There's quite a bit more I had to say, but it's only written out in sketchy note form. I'll throw it up with my other backlogged posts after we finish dinner.)

Posted by珍珠
at4:07 PM

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