Where to begin? It’s been so long since I’ve written that I can’t decide if I should start by telling you about my recent travels or finish relating the end of my first semester teaching with Teach for China.
I suppose I should go chronologically and say that while my level of contentment greatly improved over December and January, my teaching didn’t get much better by the term’s end. In part it was due to my own exhaustion. I’ve decided to nix the term “lazy” from my vocabulary since whenever someone doesn’t do as much work as they should I’m convinced that it’s due to some internal incapacity, external deterrent, or lack of skills rather than a lack of desire or inertia. Who wouldn’t be as efficient as possible if there was nothing in their way? Anyway, just living is exhausting and I have to learn to deal with it better because by the time navigating my day and dealing –yes, dealing- with kids is all done, I don’t want to grade, input data, plans fun activities, or translate a lesson plan. I want to watch movies, call my mom, post youtube videos on facebook, have a cup of coffee, or go to bed.
The other aspect of my stagnation as far as effectiveness in the classroom is concerned, is, or was, that my Assistant Program Manager (APM) , himself a second-year fellow, was extremely neglectful of the teachers under him including myself. To be fair, he has a heavy workload: he teaches middle school math and physics and has never taught English and he himself wasn’t taught English until middle school. So not only is he very busy, but he could give us very little content advice from personal experience. Moreover, I’m sure that he’s more worried about what he’s going to do once the fellowship is over than supporting fellows. That’s not an excuse: you shouldn’t sign up for things (particularly that affect others) when your plate is already full, and I’m frankly more than a little miffed, but it’s some background.
Consequently, both Alden and myself were moved over to another PM’s portfolio. I’m grateful, but not thrilled, if that makes sense. The woman who’s supporting us now has two years of experience teaching small children (kindergarten) in the US under her belt. She didn’t teach them English, nor does she speak Chinese, but she at least has the exuberance and teaching methods necessary to reach very young minds. But the exuberance kills me. If you’re reading this you probably know that I am a low-key person, and will have a hard time adjusting to this new format. Hopefully working under her will at least help me be a better teacher to my students, since to her credit she works really hard with her fellows and has good intentions.
That said, my students’ final test scores were at least improved from the test scores on the last exam, and a few students even scored 100 percent! That was nice.
What else did the end of the year bring? I had to choreograph a 1-minute salsa routine for our school’s winter solstice show. The winter solstice is important in China because it’s a turning point of the seasons and a symbolic shift into happier times (since from then on the days become longer and brighter). Alden and I both thought that we would be performing with other local teachers and maybe some students. On the day-of, I received a copy of the program, which revealed that we were performing in the middle of a show that was otherwise put on exclusively by students. We were the victims of foul play, for sure.
In January, right after the New Year, I came down with a case of the flu that brought out the worst of my asthma. In the States, I would have gone to a hospital on the second day, but the nearest hospital is 1.5 hours (at least) away from our small town by bus, and I was in no way prepared to make the journey especially when the process of seeing a doctor would be a struggle in itself. Instead I laid in bed for about 4 days of serious agony, and about two weeks of subsequent cough attacks and nasal congestion. I still have a lingering cough as I write this, but at least I was able to teach the last day of classes and proctor exams before the kiddos left campus. From what I read on Yahoo Ask! (haha, but I’m serious) I was lucky to be bedridden for such a short period.
After the kids left, the local teachers also left, and Alden and I were left by ourselves at the school. It wasn’t an issue, only a little strange. The Chinese New Year holiday, known here as the Spring Festival, or 春节(Chun Jie), is a time of homecoming for Chinese families. Because so many men, boys, and even some women, from rural villages go to cities to do construction work or other types of labor that aren’t farming, our town SWELLED with young people over the past two weeks. It was cool seeing so many fathers, brothers, sons, daughters, cousins, and sisters back in town. It was also like being new in town all over again, since we began to be stared at constantly by these people who had never seen the foreign teachers before. One of the people who came back was a girl, about 19 or 20, who studies at a college in Beijing (quite the accomplishment for someone from our town). She came to visit one of the local teachers, Mao Laoshi, one evening with her little brother who studies at the middle school next door to the elementary school. Mao Laoshi, eager to get them off her hands, I’m sure, promptly ushered them to us so that we could “chat.” We did and it was quite pleasant. They said that we should cook together one day, and a couple of days later they did come, and the little brother ended up cooking us (what turned out to be a quite delicious) dinner while we just stood around awkwardly. To make a long story short, he won’t stop texting me (and if I don’t answer, Alden) to ask us to hang out , or what we’re doing, or why xyz blab la bla. His obsession with us is a bit creepy to be honest. Having a 13 year old Chinese boy with a crush on you has turned out to be quite the dilemma.
But that’s over now that I’m on vacation in CIVILIZATION!! (Civilization = American fast food chains, western style toilets, hot water in the shower, bakeries with actual bread, and shopping malls.) I’m so loving being in a city right now I can’t even describe how happy I am. And traveling alone hasn’t been as uncomfortable as I thought it would be –quite the opposite actually. And not so lonely either. As I write this I’m sitting at a table at my Kunming hostel with an Austrian girl who’s studying Chinese in Dalian (near Beijing) and has stopped here on her way to Shangri-La. She must still be in college or just graduated. She’s sort of been my buddy at the hostel since she moved into the bunk next to mine and we’re both here alone.
I think this is enough content for one post, so I’ll stop here and pick up at a later time with details of my travels!
Love,
Gloria