Classwork

I don't really get to share what I do in class in that much detail, so I thought I'd share something I had my conversation class do for homework.  I asked each class to write a response to, 'If you could clone one significant figure, who would it be and why?'  Here are the results.  I did not include descriptions next to the names, but if you post a comment, I will fill you in. I am pleased to say I recognized all of the former Premiers and Presidents of China, and none of the popular singers or actors or writers.  I know these ones now though, because each student described their person in their assignment.

Person                           Class 1              Class 2              Class 3              Class 4                  Total

Zhou Enlai                      IV                     II                       III                     IV                          13

Oscar Wilde                   I                                                                                                          1

No One                          I                       I                                                 I                               1

Bai Fangli                       I                                                                                                          1

Steve Jobs                     I                        I                         I                                                       3

Oneself                         VIII                    IV                   VI                       III                           21

Confucius                      I                        I                        II                         II                            6

Albert Einstein               III                      I                         I                                                       5

Tracy McGrady             I                                                                                                           1

Friend                            I                                                                                                           1

Michael Jackson            II                       I                                                     I                            4

Audrey Hepburn            I                                                                                                            1

Deng Xiaopeng             III                                                I                         IV                            8

Mother Teresa                I                                                                                                           1

Issac Newton                 I                                                 I                                                         2

Mother                          II                                                 I                                                        3

Father                           II                                                                               I                           3

Cao Xueqin                   II                                                                               I                          3

Cheung                         I                                                                                                            1

Yuan Longping                                       I                                                        I                         2

Jackie Chan                                            I                                                                                   1

Zhu Rongji                                              I                                                                                   1

Ren Changxia                                          I                                                        I                        2

Wu Zetian                                               I                                                                                  1

Girls Generation                                      I                                                                                   1

JJ Lin                                                     I                                                                                    1

Grandparent                                            I                             II                                                   3

Sanmao                                                   I                                                                                  1

Garfield                                                   I                                                                                  1

Bill Gates                                               II                                                        I                         3

Mr Bean                                                  I                                                                                  1

Su Shi                                                      I                                                                                  1

Cat                                                          I                                                                                  1

Taylor Swift                                             I                                                                                  1

Oprah Winfrey                                         I                                                                                  1

Mao Zedong                                            I                                                                                  1

Li Bai                                                       I                                                       I                          2

Liu Bingshan                                                                             I                                                  1

Michael Jordan                                                                         I                                                  1

Dogs                                                                                        I                                                  1

Lin Dan                                                                                    I                                                  1

Alex Del Piero                                                                          I                                                  1

Yu Minhong                                                                              I                                                 1

Florence Nightingale                                                                  I                                                 1

Leonardo Da Vinci                                                                    I                                                 1

Babies who have died                                                               I                                                  1

Doraemon                                                                                 I                                                 1

Boyfriend                                                                                  I                                                  1

Martin Luther King Jr.                                                                                        I                        1

Helen Keller                                                                                                      II                        2

Jolin                                                                                                                    I                        1

Another Perspective

As you may have noticed, I am not the only one here in China.  Ben has been linking all of our blogs together, so I thought I would do the same too.  On the left hand side of the screen are Eaaf, Adam, and Ben's blogs.  If you are interested, we all are seeing some of the same stuff every day, but we tend to write about very different stuff.

Unorganized Days

I forget often to mention daily life.  When I first got here everything was so new, that there wasn't enough time to write about everything.  Now, with day to day stuff is not so new it doesn't seem important anymore.  But that doesn't change how different it is from back home, so I can elaborate now.

Most mornings I get up, have instant oatmeal or yogurt for breakfast.  Both are sold at almost all supermarkets and are easy to come by.  I also have instant coffee, which is also incredibly easy to get, lemon tea with honey, which is delicious, or hot cocoa, a recent acquisition from a new shopping center that opened this last week which has imported foods.  If I have class, I then load up my bag with the relevant text book, my homework folder, lesson plan or notes, and a thermos of lemon tea.  I place the bag in my bicycle basket then ride about three minutes to get to the building my first class is in.  During that three minute ride I might pass any of the following: people taking wedding photos in a rented suite and dress, people playing 'gate ball' something similar to croquet, someone with a trash collection cart with a large straw broom attached, cars, bikes, electric bikes, students walking.  For the last five, you may think these things happen adjacent to each other, but in fact, they all happen in the same place - on the road/side walk where I am riding.

I then teach class.  If I am in the North Foreign Language Building, during breaks if I stand on the balcony I can hear someone playing a flute.  I have yet to figure out where exactly the mysterious flute player is, only that he/she is there most mornings I am there.  Though the individual rooms are heated, the inside courtyard is not, so if I leave the classroom I must make sure I'm bundled up.  If I am in the Comprehensive Building, during breaks I often go to the stairwell where the sound of students reciting lessons, speeches, and practicing pronunciations in Chinese, English, German, and Japanese, creates a dull roar that almost cannot be heard from outside.  The bathrooms in both buildings are similar.  They are squatting toilets that are open, so that all five other occupants plus those waiting for their turn, could potentially see you at work.  There is a trough that is flushed every so often - at least once an hour.  The Foreign Language Building has a mirror by the sink, but otherwise the two buildings are the same in this respect.  There is a blue sheet with the character 女, for woman, or 男, for man, blocking the inside from view by the opposite sex.

Lunch and dinner tend to be very similar and are based entirely on my mood at the time.  Outside South Gate, there are a variety of restaurants that serve a variety of dishes on rice or noodles.  Outside East Gate are most restaurants, though perhaps owing to the fact I usually go there with students, the restaurants seem to be more specialized in specific kinds of noodle dishes.  Outside West Gate are a few restaurants, but the main appeal is the variety of stalls that sell a wide selection of foods - Korean sushi, egg and ham in steamed bread, egg vegetables and sausage in a piece of bread that looks like a tortilla, fried chicken, stinky tofu, fried balls of pumpkin dough, choose your own noodle soup.

Some days if I have time and am feeling adventurous, I go out from the campus area.  Sometimes I am with other people and we show each other stuff we have heard about.  Sometimes I am by myself, usually on my bicycle testing myself to go farther than I've been before.  Traffic is crazy, but I have come to feel no longer controlled by my fear of it.

And then at the end of the day I sleep, but depending on the time I can still hear people walking around outside, old people exercising, or fireworks at Millennium park.

Unorganized Thoughts and Updates!

This here is a little bit of an amalgam of thoughts and stories and bits and pieces of things that I originally wrote out while my reading class was taking a test.  For reasons I won't go into, the notebook I wrote it in is now in someone else's room and though I have every intention of retrieving it soon, I would like to update before doing so.


First, I would like to tell everyone that we had a real Thanksgiving in Kaifeng China.  Ben ordered a turkey off of taobao (a cross between amazon and e-bay), but otherwise most of the ingredients we collected here.  We had mashed potatoes, mashed sweet potatoes, steamed broccoli, carrot pennies, stuffing, gravy, bread, and baked apples.  We invited one of the Australian teachers, the German teacher, and the Japanese teacher and his wife as well as several Chinese students and one of the translators who works for the international affairs office.  It was quite delicious.

In other news, it is that wonderful time of the year when professors start working on finals and students start studying for them.  We have about three weeks or so till the end of the semester.  Conversation finals start early so that everyone will have enough time to have oral conversations.  Ben and I have worked together to design our final and it looks pretty, I think.

My confidence about my Chinese oscillates between being very proud to slightly embarrassed.  However, I am certain that my ability has definitely been improving steadily.  Occasionally I wonder if I studied the wrong language in college, or in high school, but it is too late.  And in all honesty, with the workout Japanese grammar gives your brain, I feel like there's not much grammatically that can intimidate me.  (The exception is Russian.  Scares the Dejesus out me.  Strangely, I still insist to myself that French would be impossible to learn.  Guess I'm going to draw the line somewhere.  Spanish however would be fun to go back and work on....)  That was a bit of a tangent.  But back to Chinese!  I am studying for about two hours a week with a student of mine, and that keeps me somewhat honest even during these intensive weeks when I spend a good deal of time reading and writing things or otherwise working.  The more time I spend working, the more time I spend using English.  And when I'm exhausted from said work, I relax by reading or watching things in English.  It is a vicious cycle.  But, my TV works fine and I have watched Chinese TV if not regularly then enough that I can talk to people about 那是我妈码 (That's my mom!), a reality show where young men go on and answer questions about their mothers' preferences and traits.  And Mona, or 豪杰(Haojie) keeps me honest by giving me and quizzing me on vocabulary and grammar.

I have been eating lunch with my students more regularly, and I am quite enjoying it.  I feel in need of a break from teaching, but the actual classes are going well.  My conversation class, which at the beginning of the semester I had no clue how to run much less make active and fun, have gone quite well the last few weeks.  I am proud of where I am now, though I somewhat wish I could go back and start the class from the beginning without the bumbling and missteps I made the first month or so of the semester.  But that was the price of growth. I know I am going to be teaching the same students next semester, though it is currently up in the air as to what I will be teaching them.

It is cold out, though not enough for snow. We had a flurry about a week ago, but no more.

This was surprisingly organized.  I did not expect it to be so.
Oh, one final note: I have been talking to my Reading classes about Native Speakers and bad grammar.  What it means about a person or character if they make certain grammar mistakes.  You can call this a conversation about dialects, or classes.  The thing I want them to remember is simply one's education level.  If someone has poor grammar and speaking skills it is assumed that they are not educated.  So, on their test I had a set of 10 sentences, which they had to mark as being said by someone well or poorly educated.  All the sentences were taken from Pirates of the Caribbean.  I'm quite pleased by how it turned out.

The Infantile Expert

This essay was written last semester for Asian Studies Senior Seminar.  I believe it holds true for China as well, so I decided to publish it here.

Playground Nearby Kansai Gaidai Dorms in Hirakatashi Japan

The Infantile Expert: Settling in Back Home After Study Abroad in Japan

In my previous abstract I talked about historical roots of culture and the effects of them imposed over a short period of time.  In this abstract I would like to speak more briefly about the similar effect that occurs to individuals who study and absorb culture over a short time in their lives.  In short, I will examine the paradox of the East Asian Studies student.

As the student travels from his or her home country to their country of focus, then back to their home country, after the initial culture shock he or she begins to settle into a role.  While abroad, the road is that of observer and inquisitor.  With child-like ignorance, the student blunders and attempts to absorb.  The process is ongoing.  Some say one must stay longer than one semester in order to move a degree beyond it.  Others say one must stay longer than a year in order to move beyond.  In truth, the student is trying to compensate for all the years they lived outside the culture in order to understand and navigate a world, even though realistically the student will always be a foreigner.

When the student returns the role is reversed.  Suddenly the student is an authority among his or her family and peers.  Having seen, breathed, and eaten things contemporaries don't know how to pronounce, the student becomes an expert.  Essays that might have been an a middle schooler's text book magically transform into advanced language study.  The student becomes a story teller, trying to spread the knowledge that they absorbed.

Certainly such experiences are important for well rounding students.  But what do they mean for the specialist?  What is it to specialize in a culture one did not grow up in?  This author can only speculate since this author is still on the first few baby steps of this journey.  It is the journey of trying to become a bridge.  How does one really 'settle' into being a bridge?  How can one settle into being half-way between worlds?  It is unsettling to realize that one may be a sage in one language and an infant in the other.  Possibly more unsettling is the knowledge that one may never really move beyond that role.  Yet there is something exotic and addictive to it as well.  There is something strange in the desire to not settle in back home, and instead return to childhood and adventure.

How the System Works

I believe previously I described the classes I am teaching as reading and conversation, but I don't think I've explained before the schools I am teaching at.  At Henan University, there are three different schools at which you can get a degree as an English major.  The first, where I teach conversation, is the Foreign Language College.  This school is particularly well known for teaching English and the students there received very high scores on their college entrance exam.  The second, where I teach reading, is Minsheng, which has the exact same curriculum and for the most part the same teachers as the Foreign Language School but the students received lower scores on their entrance exam and pay about two to three times as much as the Foreign Language School students.  The third school is the College of American and European Studies, where Eaaf teaches conversation, which is new and therefore has a less defined curriculum and has students with even lower scores and higher tuition fees.
I myself can only compare the Foreign Language School and the Minsheng students.  For the most part, I find the main difference to be personality.  The Foreign Language School students as a whole are quieter and the Minsheng students are more creative.
Their future on the other hand, at least when I talk to the Minsheng students I am friends with, is overshadowed by which level of school they were in.  I cannot imagine what it would be like to have one's future written by the score of a single test.  It frankly terrifies me.  I sincerely hope they do well in their careers in the future, because they are as a whole wonderful intelligent students.  But what I know is that on several occasions when with a friend from Minsheng, they will hesitate and point out how they did not go to the Foreign Language College, so maybe their dream of becoming a translator or English teacher will be more difficult...

Stories from Nanjing: Karma

I don't mind bugs.  I don't like to touch bugs.  I freak out if I think a bug will bite or sting me.  But if I am reasonably assured that the bug means me no harm, I am usually perfectly content watching it.
On Purple Gold Mountain, there are a number of big name tourist locations.  There is the Sun Yat Sen Memorial, and a UNESCO World Heritage Ming Dynasty tomb.  But after a long half day of walking, and of getting slightly lost going up and down, surrounded by seas and mountains of people (海人山人) I ended up in the area slightly to the East of the main attractions.  It was actually someplace that I had read was really worthwhile to visit but had given up on finding.  There were considerably fewer people.  And though I had wanted to see the Sun Yat Sen Memorial because of the historical significance of Sun Yat Sen, it was only when I got away from it that I started to enjoy myself.
I would have a conversation with a woman who picked up the trash around the food stands, which involved lots of writing and nodding.  People start conversations with you almost any time you are out in parks or other public areas and don't seem preoccupied with something.  It is something I like a lot more than in Japan, where people waited for some sort of formal connection to be made.
But before that, I visited a Buddhist temple there, in that Eastern part of Purple Gold Mountain.  Walking through gates to go further inside, I saw a bug on the ground flat on its back.  It was a beetle that had landed somehow and could not open its wings and fly.  I lowered my bag to it's legs and let it grab hold of it.  I walked farther inside the temple courtyard and assumed the beetle would just fly off.  It did not fly off, and when I checked fifteen minutes latter it remained firmly attached to my bag.  I adjusted my bag so that the beetle could walk onto the stone hand rail.  It crawled and climbed atop a stone lotus.  It stood there while I watched it, and until I walked away.