It’s 2:30 AM. I am tired, hot, and grumpy as hell. I have no good will left, and so am stalking around the resort (1), a big white half-naked ball of smoldering fury, praying that someone challenges my presence. Not surprisingly, no one did. Matters were not improved when I finally emerged from the unnatural darkness and peered into the familiar glow of streetlights. I was right. It was only us.
The electricity went out at 11:00 last night, and hasn’t been back since. This means that we don’t have air conditioning in a climate where you can break a sweat while laying motionless on top of your covers. The secondary problem is that now I’m awake, and thirsty, the stores are closed, and I can’t use the electricity to boil myself some clean water. Thanks to my walk, I now knew that it wasn’t a regional blackout, but in fact very much the fault of our hotel. Ignorance may be bliss, but knowledge is a fiery inferno that keeps you company on a lonely night.
Generally speaking, I don’t consider myself a diva. I have been in much more discomfort than tonight, and in truth, my anger was not at a hotel that couldn’t keep its power on (2). My anger was at a hotel that has, over the past three days, gone out of its way to charge us for damages that we clearly did not incur, begrudgingly fed us sub-par food at inconvenient hours, closes its grocery store (our only access to water) during the “rest hours” of 9:30AM-6PM, and in general has tried to do its best to insure that we have as unpleasant an experience as possible. And now it has no power.
Allow me to widen the scope a bit.
In many ways, this vacation was a comedy of errors. Or perhaps a study in cultural contradictions. Mostly, though, I think it is just a big fatty monument to what an incompetent tool Mr. Dai is (3).
There is a great chasm that separates the Chinese and American perceptions of what a vacation should be. Americans want to “get away,” to barricade off a few days from their daily life and forget that there are such things as schedules and deadlines and bosses. Though the students have been having a lot of fun, they have spent a whirlwind three weeks blowing through the major cities and sites of China, and are ready for a little sedentary living.
Unfortunately, that is not the Chinese way. As best as I can tell, they go on vacation to get away from the routine of their days, to experience the excitement that can be found beyond the borders of their regular life. A Chinese vacation is a study in this-to-that-to-the other thing, trying to frantically squeeze it all in before the vacation ends and they board that last flight home. It might be because Chinese take fewer vacations, and so try to pack more into whatever time off they can get. It might just be a straight up inexplicable cultural thing. I don’t know. Either way, thanks to Mr. Dai’s maverick incompetence, we were saddled on a tour that we didn’t want, that wanted to keep us busy from 8AM-8PM with things that we didn’t want to see (coffee factories?), and kept us on a bus several hours a day. Thankfully we talked our way out of most of it, but every step was a struggle, every compromise the result of exhaustingly emphatic “discussion.”
It was an “all inclusive” tour, and so we couldn’t get away from the poor quality and money-grubbery that seemed indicative of every establishment that we patronized. I’m sure Hainan has delicious food, nice people, and passable accommodations, but we didn’t see any of them. We went to the tour hotels and ate the tour menus, where no one worried about what the customer wanted, because there was an endless string of tour groups still to come. Because everyone was getting kickbacks from everyone else, it was impossible to break the cycle and try to find something passable.
Which is why, at 2:30 in the morning, I was walking around the complex, livid. As a goodbye gift, the hotel tried to charge us for a toilet seat cover that someone didn’t notice was broken because they never tried to move the lid. Awesome.
(1) Ha. While technically, Haixia is, in fact, a resort, it is stretching the language to the limit. This refers strictly to the architectural layout of the facility, and is not meant in any way to infer the comfort, service, or general overall pleasantness usually associated with resorts.
(2) Or maybe who turned their power off to save energy. This was a hypothesis presented by a local, not the paranoid delusions of an over-entitled waiguoren.
(3) The Waiban representative who supervises the foreign students. In this case, he did not plan the vacation through Grins as he was asked, and did it himself. Much to our surprise and chagrin…
Showing posts with label Students. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Students. Show all posts
Thursday, October 2, 2008
Tuesday, September 9, 2008
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.
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.
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