The Best Clark Kent That I Can Be

I am frequently asked, “So, how is teaching?”
I usually respond with, “Err…”

It’s not that I am uncertain about what I am doing and how I feel about it. It’s just that I would hesitate to call it “teaching.”

I teach 9 classes of 40-60 students, who I see for 90 minutes once a week. That comes out to 360 – 540 students, once a week. On top of that, I am teaching ‘conversation.’ Conversation is an interesting subject, and I think is actually closer to an art class than, say, history or math. I’m not speaking in any sort of qualitative measure, but in methodology, but in purpose. I am not so much imparting knowledge as I am developing (1) a skill. Unlike art, though, I have the only frame for what sounds right, and therefore must be personally involved in everything that happens in class. Doing the rough math, in 90 minutes I could hear each person speak for between a minute and a half and two minutes and fifteen seconds. Awesome.

There are days when the lesson plans go well, the students are engaged, they are asking good questions, and I get to hear some interesting opinions. Even on those days, though, am I actually teaching anything? Is anyone getting more conversant? How would I even know?

All of the real teachers out there will probably tell me how foolhardy this is, but I’ve come to realize that I teach out of pure force of personality. I am more a conductor than a professor, more a performer than educator. I project so much that I can hear my over-enunciated syllables bounce back at me; I fill the room with my voice. I am learning to dig deep trenches of silence to foul the steps of a wandering mind, then my words erupt again: first clipped and precise and then lower and drawn out, the percussion to arrest their attention and the flow to bring them in. I am becoming a good orator, I will give myself that (2). But are they learning?

I see their eyes locked on me as I present the material, and then watch them lower when I ask them to respond. I call names and they respond, their words stiff like a marionette, a puppet master still struggling with the strings. Rome was not built in a day, but was it built on two sentences a week (2)? Today I paired them up and gave parameters for a short conversation, asking that there be no Chinese spoken for 3 minutes.

They lasted 45 seconds. I timed it.

I think we are all in denial. I hear the teachers talk about the interesting topics brought up by this or that student, but know that they are just the over embellished pearl stolen from a gross, hairy hog’s snout of a day. I do it myself. I make dragons out of windmills, for fear that the truth might reveal that my fight against poor conversational skills is insignificant, empty, and foolish.

In the end, the students who want to learn will make the effort to speak in class and those who don’t will hide at the corners and bow their heads in silent shame when they are called on. I can’t make them try, and forced compliance only makes them look stupid and me feel like a jerk. Maybe I’m copping out. It doesn’t feel good to accept someone else’s lethargy, but it feels right. Most of the time. I guess that if I can’t be Superman, I might as well become the best Clark Kent that I can (4).

(1) Trying to develop… sigh.
(2) We discussed William Blake’s The Poison Tree, and at the end of class I read it as I thought it should be read. I got a standing ovation, a nice little ego stroke for the end of the day.
(3) That is, if you are one of the 10% of the students who get called on…
(4) Caveat time. I can’t accept this. Maybe I’m still too young and idealistic. There is truth in it, and now that I look at it again, it’s kindof a DC comics version of the Serenity Prayer (5). But I cannot accept that we don’t have within us the capacity to become more than mortal. Some small seed that may remain dormant for a lifetime, but also that may, under the right conditions, erupt with blinding fury, transforming us and all around us. A grain of sand, dreaming the dreams of stars...
(5) God, give us grace to accept with serenity the things that cannot be changed, courage to change the things that should be changed, and the wisdom to distinguish the one from the other.

The Sino-American War in Me

I just got sucker punched by Karma, and now I’ve been laid out for a day.

SPU got here on Sunday, and as soon as they arrived, my lazy afternoons turned into frantic translation-fests. It’s really good to be busy. Sunday was a blur of room assignments and welcome-to-the-campus pomp and pageantry. On Monday I went on a long hike that, at five hours and 2,000 feet of elevation gain via uneven stone steps, was a bit more than I was planning on. Monday evening involved a bar, and I had a good time because I was enjoying getting to know everyone. Tuesday I left the apartment at 7:30, and did not get back until 11:30. The day was pretty mundane: trips to the market, trips to the grocery store, trips to the bakery, where my job was to roam around and speak Chinese whenever someone pulled my string (or that’s how it felt). When we sat down at a snack shop at about 3:30, I realized that I had skipped lunch and that this was the first time I had sat down all day long. Tuesday night also involved a bar.

So, come Wednesday, I found my legs stiff with overexertion, my head sore with exhaustion, and my voice nonexistent from overuse. I was doing my best to act responsibly, even sleeping about 7 hours a night, but my body had become accustomed to its Chinese lifestyle and was resenting this intrusion of American ideology.

A meal in China is the building block upon which relationships are built. To know someone is to share a meal with them. It seems that every “Business in China” book makes particular mention of the “business banquet,” where people are weighed and measured, deals are struck or destroyed, and the eating, if not an afterthought, is more a medium than an end in itself. This ethos is not restricted to official gatherings, but tends to be scaled down according to context, all the way down to the humble fare of which our daily routine now consists. As such, they tend to be languid affairs. The food takes a long time to come, it is eaten slowly, and it is not uncommon for half an hour to pass between the last morsel eaten and when the check is finally called for.

Not so now. Lunches are now eating with purpose, the food is consumed, the tables soon vacated. I must confess that up until this week, I tended to be the pointedly check his watch or clear his throat and ask what everyone’s plan for the day was. But one day I was left at the table, solitarily picking at the last peanuts out of the Kung Pao Chicken as everyone else rushed off to their mid day naps. Seriously. I was filled with a strange anti-patriotic regret that Chinese food is often relegated to the sub-strata of take-out. If everything someone eats reminds her or him of Panda Express, how can you blame that person for eating it quickly? Maybe I should commend them learning the names of things instead of trying to order the “Special For Two With Extra Spring Rolls.”

I have also grown to love my xioxi (rest) time. Xioxi time extends from noon until 2:30, where very little is open, and even if it is open, then the shopkeeper is probably asleep on a stool. This may be due to the Chinese habit of eating a light breakfast and then a heavy lunch. It seems reasonable that a mornings activity, fueled only by a piece of bread, then followed by a large, greasy meal could knock your system to its knees for a few hours. Bottom line is, I don’t know why we xioxi, but I like it. And, apparently, have come to depend on it.

Many of the SPU’ers, tired from their travels, have adopted the xioxi, unwittingly paying homage to their new cultural host. However, with 33 of them, someone is always doing something at any given time. And those things tend to involve translating. A moment of silence for my dearly departed xioxi time.

I think the coup-de-gras to my system was actually the bars. Now I’m going to cut you off before anyone starts waving blue and white flags or picketing… whatever it is you might feel the urge to picket. (That means you, God-squaders) This has nothing to do with alcohol, dancing, or any other of the devil’s delights. This has simply to do with loud music. (Crap. Rock n’ Roll. Fine. Only one of the devil’s delights) I’m a talker. It’s my own fault, really, but I enjoy talking, no matter how loud, and at the end of the night, my throat is pretty torn up. Factor in a mountain hike in the pollution two days ago, throw in a karaoke song or two (It’s China, I get amnesty. Especially when I’m singing Sinatra) and should I even be surprised that I can’t talk?

Part of me is detached and curious. Which lifestyle will emerge dominant? I have lamented the solitude of the last month, and wistfully remembered my American days of unending motion. Now, though, I am not so sure. Apparently being busy means I don’t have time to read or write. Being busy means that I am running around, translating for one mundane task or another, while doing nothing of consequence for myself. I’m a little curious to see which way the pendulum swings for these next three months.

Curiosity or no, the fact of the matter is that I am sitting here in between my peanut butter crackers and my empty bowl of instant noodles (closest thing to chicken noodle), sipping hot water like it’s going out of style. I guess in the end, it’s not really karma, but causality that that has been my downfall. Stupid consequences…

PS There is a cricket on my living room floor. How did it get to the fourth floor? And now, as I watch the tiny cricket hopping around the bare expanse of my living room, I can't help but sing to myself, "I'm a big, big girl, in a big, big world..."  

Pure Awesomeness

Sometimes there are moments that I wish I was being filmed. There are isolated moments where every splash of color looks as if it were off of a palate, where every progressive movement builds on itself as if conducted by an invisible maestro. Every detail complements the whole, and that whole can be described as nothing other than pure, condensed, unadulterated awesomeness.

The wind whistled through my hair, the motorcycle gasped and sputtered underneath me. I tried to ignore the fact that I was riding behind a man (1). As we honked and zipped our way in between a bus and a dump truck, I took a sip of my coffee. That’s right, coffee. I hadn’t finished my coffee this morning, and, loathe to waste such a precious commodity, I just brought my mug (2) along.

Mother, it might be best to stop reading here.

The cars ahead of us slowed down, and then stopped (3). There was a traffic jam. Mae yo wen ti! (No problems!) We just crossed into the oncoming traffic. So, a quick recap: I am sitting (with my bag in my lap) on the back of a motorcycle, not wearing a helmet, drinking coffee out of a glass mug, as we go head to head with the traffic, trusting the horn and everyone else’s sense of self-preservation. Best morning ever.

(1) We would never say, “straddle,” even though if you were to draw out a description based on a dictionary’s definition, it would probably look a lot like what I was doing. Aware of this, I put my bag in between the driver and I to placate my lingering sense of homophobia.
(2) This was no convenient, practical, spillproof mug, either. It was heavy, glass, and open mouthed. The kind you wrapped your hands around on a cold day and then buried your face in the steam. Also the kind that shatters on impact and often results in five stitches. That kind of mug.
(3) Actually, that is an inaccurate description. Functionally speaking, cars were only “ahead” of us for a second or two until they whizzed backwards past us to become “behind us.” When I say that they “slowed down,” I really mean that, as we were keeping the same speed, we started to pass them even faster. High five to physics.

Betrayed by the Ground Upon Which They Stood

To be honest, I hadn’t thought about the May 12th earthquake for quite some time. We hear the news, we lament the tragedy, we might even pray, but when the buildings stop falling, the cameras stop rolling, and the tragedy of millions is eclipsed by the hopes of two presidential candidates. Yet, as we drove further out of the city, the earthquake slowly and incrementally took form in my mind.

All around Chengdu was the shadow of a memory; a cracked wall, a half-built house whose builders suddenly had more important things to build, small things that all hinted at … something … and yet the city ground on. Even now I sit at a restaurant with a painting of a cowboy on the wall, listening to salsa music as I wait for my biscuits and gravy. What earthquake?

We left the highways for cracked asphalt roads, and the memory no longer seemed so distant. We passed temporary houses for those whose lives had been just as rent and broken as the landscape upon which they lived, and the memory now became a present reality. The earth stopped shaking long ago. When would they?

Finally, when we arrived at our destination, the earthquake gained a face. It gained a hundred faces.

The village leader was quick to smile, but it barely touched his eyes. There was genuine joy there, but it was not like the thin joy that I experience whenever I am able to forget my problems. It was a hard-won joy that must look out every day at the senseless destruction, and still say that there are things to be thankful for. The generosity of others. The buildings now being slowly and cautiously erected. Life. Sometimes it takes death to remind us that as long as there is life, there is always something to be thankful for.

~~~

I met three brothers: the eldest, confined to a wheelchair, and two twins born a few years later. When the world shook and the house fell, the family thought the eldest crushed by the rubble, but found him 16 hours later. 16 hours, without food and water, in a body that could not save itself, and the world thought him dead. Their father, the village secretary (government representative), had a subtly different look to his eyes. They too, were eyes that had seen much grief, but they were the eyes of a survivor. He didn’t smile as much, and the tough joy of the village leader was replaced by grim determination. Life had hit him hard more than once, but here he stood, and there was work to be done. There were houses to be built, mouths to feed; there was a village that needed his resilience.

~~~

We went up to the village for the Mid-Autumn Festival, and the children were out of school. Running up and down the street, dodging trucks laden with sand, the children darted in, around, and through the rubble that was their home – is their home. They were … children, but the earthquake had left its mark on them as indelibly as it had their elders. These were children who had seen the world – once thought stable and immutable – fall down around their ears, and then woken up the next morning to live in it. In many ways, they already know life in a way that I cannot. They know it to be beautiful, vibrant, precious, but fragile. So very fragile.

Life goes on. When everything – everything – is taken away, you are forced to readjust your framework for viewing life. To say that they have lost their houses and need new ones is to skip many important steps. They need water. They need food.

One lady, bent almost double with age, stepped outside of her tent to talk to us. Five months after the earthquake, she is still eating instant noodles. The extent of the devastation is such that one must provide not only for what we would consider the most basic of needs – shelter – but must first look to the foundational elements of those needs.

I do not mean to diminish the work that has been done. Much has been accomplished. There is a makeshift water pipe bringing water down from a mountain stream. The majority of people live in government-provided tents, but peppered among these are Black Diamond and REI hiking tents that have been donated. In between the blue government tents is now a long tarp that people can use as a communal gathering ground, as well as a place to prepare food in the rain. Houses are being erected. A month and a half ago there was only rubble, but now three houses are completed and occupied. Much has been accomplished, but there is still so far to go.

As we were leaving, we passed another old lady carrying vegetables across her back. She was a classic Chinese woman – the mountain life had hardened her, and her face was deeply wrinkled by the many days out in the sun. She gave a wordless smile and grabbed my father’s arm and motioned towards me. I was holding a camera, so I thought she wanted a picture. Then she left my father and came towards me and grabbed my arm as she had my father’s. I thought she had wanted something, but the only thing she wanted was to shake our hands, to express her gratitude for what little help we brought. Then she moved on to distribute her vegetables to those in the tent city behind us. There was work to be done.

I find myself looking for a way to summarize this experience, and am at a loss for words. How can one summarize something that is yet ongoing? We left, and my father and I had dinner at Zoe’s, an American Café in Chengdu. I ordered myself a chili cheese burger, but ate it somewhat guiltily, sobered by the knowledge that that the old lady up in the mountains was probably boiling water for her instant noodles.

Chengdu Bound

It had only been two hours, and I had to pee. I did not know if the bus would pause on its four-hour journey to Chendu, but I was becoming increasingly keen on finding out the answer. There was the possibility that the unmarked door hid a bathroom, but no one else had even stood up to stretch, and I felt bad waking up the person next to me. Option C involved the empty bottle lying at my feet. Option C was only barely an option, but it beat death by bladder infection (Option F). 

The thinking only made it worse, and I had to try the mystery door, fool or no. I stumbled over my neighbor, waking him up and knocking his soda bottle to the floor. In the silent bus, it sounded like dice in a tin cup. All eyes were on me as I went to the door and gingerly tried the handle. It was a bathroom. A small choir of angels burs into song. Take that, Option C.

Five minutes after I emerged from the smelly and faucetless bathroom, the bus stopped at a beautifully renovated rest area.

First Day of Teaching

Today was the first day of class, but it held more mysteries than known quantities. How much English would the students know? We were teaching the first period of the day at 8:00, would the rooms even be open? Would the classrooms have the audio / visual components that we were promised? How old would the students be? Would they respond to humor, or did they want something more serious? Were they willing to even try speaking English? My class sizes range between 40 and 60, but how many students would actually show up?

I found out the answer to that last question was 9. Of the five teachers, three of them had full classrooms, I had nine students, and Ash had none. His classroom wasn’t even open. Ash sat down in the teacher’s lounge (1) to bunker down until his 10:30 class, and I set to teaching the students that I had. The lesson plan that I had prepared for fifty-five students went much more quickly with nine. I had hoped to gauge their creativity by having them play a form of “Two Truths and a Lie.” I think the concept was lost on them, and I did not hear a single lie. On top of that, it’s hard to get lost in a crowd of nine, and the students were far too nervous to get any response other than silent, slightly quizzical stares. No voices, no laughter. I was alone with 9 furrowed brows.

At 8:30 there was a commotion in the hall. A river of students seemed to materialize and flow past my door, making it difficult to hear the already soft-spoken students. I stepped outside under the guise of quieting the commotion, but I think what I really wanted was to escape the mind-numbing monotony of my sabotaged lesson plan.

I step outside to see Mr. Wang, my boss, frantically moving through the students. Apparently there was a miscommunication, and Ash’s students finally arrived. I called him, and told him the good(ish) news, but not all of the hundred-or-so students could be his. I asked one student, and it turned out they were mine. I told him where to go, and when I stepped into my classroom for the second time that day, I saw many, many students. Then the bell rang for the mid-class break, and there was nothing I could do but put my head down on the podium. Then the students laughed.

Class was back in. My lesson shot to hell, I had nothing to do but repeat the information that I gave in the first class. This time the class was much more responsive, and it was a lot more fun. It would be futile to try to stick to the original plan, so I improvised with some free-form conversation, and got a few people to talk.

Left with too little time for my plan and too much time to fill by myself, I dismissed the class 10 minutes early. Nobody moved. I repeated myself, and again, barely a ripple. This was the strangest class I had ever been in. I decided I might as well wander around the room and see if I could get some individual conversations going. Apparently they had a class in the same room the next period. Well, at least they weren’t just freakishly studious, because that would be weird.

The next class period (Geology students) went much better. Everyone showed up, and apparently the lesson plan turned out to actually be pretty decent. Two Truths and a Lie was still a bust, though. Can’t win ‘em all, I guess.

(1) An empty room with wooden chairs. Still, better than a chairless room full of people, which China seems to be full of.

Strife

Life amongst the English teachers has smelled of a harmonious utopia, and I was getting sick of the bullshit. Tonight held its first touch of conflict. And it felt so good.

Monday was the day that we were handed our curriculum. Monday was the day that we found out that we had curriculum. For some, this was a weight off of their shoulders, but others felt shackled by the questionable vocabulary and farcical situations. Do grad students really want to learn how to navigate their way around a phone booth in English? When I first read through it, my first instinct involved lighter fluid and a match. It was so comprehensive and detailed (inanely restrictive) that I think a monkey could do a very good job teaching not very good English [sic]. I was chagrinned when Mr. Wang informed us that this book was the sole resource for the English competency exam.

Fast forward to today, when Grins and I were riding a turtle bus back towards our house. She was telling me how useless she thought the curriculum was. I agreed. She then told me how she would give a courtesy nod to the curriculum, but then teach something more interesting that would spark the students’ interest. I should have agreed. The nice thing would have been to agree. But I was sick of walking on eggshells.

Instead, I questioned if she was departing from the curriculum for her sake, or because she didn’t want to get bored. I asked her what she thought her students needed, and told her that I thought what they needed was to pass the test. I said that, being grad students, they already had four years of education where they had the opportunity to learn English if they had so desired. I said that, as a matter of integrity, we had an obligation to the students to prepare them for what they needed to succeed, even if that was not the most interesting or efficient way of teaching English. I said that, though it is a formality, and though there is a good chance that the grade people get on the competency exam will make little real difference (who is going to give a brilliant chemist a hard time because his English isn’t perfect?), that we couldn’t act on the assumption of the University waiving its own standards of competency. I said that to do so would be to gamble with other people’s future, and that would not be fair.

I wanted to say that it would be ludicrous to claim any real passion for “teaching English,” because if we wanted to lay any claim to the sanctity of the language, that we would have studied ESL in school. But I had already said enough.

The conversation spurted and spluttered after that like the flames from an empty gas canister. Eventually it was just easier to let it fade away into the darkness. I wondered if I should have held my tongue, but I was tired of homogeny. There can be no harmony when everyone is playing the same note. No one has expressed any frustrations about anyone else in the group, and many minor offenses had already been allowed to fly under the radar. It was more complicated with Grins and I, though. As the only two Christians in an outspokenly anti-Christian group, there was an unspoken expectation of camaraderie, the thought that “we need to hold the line for Jesus.” We were two very different people, but since we both love Jesus, we should always agree, right?

I now had a greater appreciation for the plight of teaching in America. What do we do when the standards by which our students succeed or fail run counter to their education? At the same time, what good does it do the student to be properly educated if they cannot advance? When do our lesson plans and aspirations become less about the needs of the students and more about our desire to be an ‘interesting teacher?’ On one hand, I agree with Grins, and I think we could teach this better were we given a looser leash. On the other, I think we need to play the hand that we are dealt with the players that we have been given. Namely, that we will be teaching a group of nominally interested graduate students who have a heavy and specialized course load, but who need to pass a general ed competency course based solely on the curriculum provided. I will be thrilled to be proven wrong, but that’s what it sounds like from people who know better than I.

Home was still fifteen minutes away, and there were a few attempts at small talk, but conversation was strained. By voicing disagreement, I had broken a taboo, and neither of us were sure how to get around it. I want to think that I provoked some thoughtful introspection, but I wonder if I might have just established myself as a soapboxing asshole. We walked the last five minutes without speaking, the wind whistling through the trees, mocking our silence.