Today as I was leaving school, I happened to be walking out right behind one of my students and his uncle. His uncle asked him what his English name was, and how to spell it, but the kid is so young he doesn’t know how to spell it himself. He turned around and saw me there, so I told him the spelling anyway, and then corrected his uncle several times because he kept repeating it incorrectly.

When we got outside, the student turned to me and said in Chinese “Teacher, I’ve heard you speak Chinese very well.” His uncle, without looking and before I could respond said “Nonsense ["废话," which, incidentally one of my favorite Chinese words]! Look at him!” I figured what the hell, and said to the student (in Chinese), “My Chinese is OK….not good enough, I think, though.”

Needless to say the uncle was pretty floored, but he got over it quickly and during the half-block that we walked together he started asking me about ways to study English. We stopped at the intersection and as we were chatting, the student looked up and me and said “I can’t tell if he is Chinese or a foreigner.” The Chinese he used made it clear that he meant it was clear whether I looked like a Chinese person or a foreigner; although he’s only 6 I think he might have been taking a clever stab at his uncle for having said “Look at him!” earlier (the implication, of course, of his uncle’s sentence was ‘he’s a foreigner so there’s no way he can speak Chinese’).

Ah, sometimes being a foreigner in China is truly amusing.

Anyway, in site news, you may have noticed I have added a category to the menu on the left called Best Posts. These are the posts that, in my opinion, are the funniest, most interesting, most poignant, most original, and/or the posts that took me a long time to write. You may think all of them are crap, but in the future all posts I think are good will be added to this category, and I have already put all previous posts that are good into it, so if you click on it now, you will see the posts I think are the most essential. If you’re new to the site but don’t want to read through the big backlog, start there!

(P.S. Comment! Is anyone still reading this blog?)

Happy 2009 everyone. In honor of the new year, here is some terrifying footage of children in a Chinese school, followed by some hilarious footage of a new “song” created by the Chinese Navy’s Political Art Department (oh yes, that exists) to spur on the navy’s efforts to fight pirates around Somalia. [The translations are stolen from China Digital Times and Black and White Cat, respectively]

2009, Go China!
Lead: Snowstorm, freely falling down to earth, like western values
Lead: Despair fills the sky, ice covers the earth

Lead: Did China retreat?
All: No. The Olympics were a success! We are victorious!
Lead: Hot blood and iron will of Chinese people, lighten up the dark world like burning the holy flame
All: The rivers and mountains, ever more colorful and beautiful

Lead: Earthquakes, shifting back and forth like the positions of Sarkozy, with his dirty tricks, trying to shake the great China
Lead: Did China retreat?
All: No. The Shenzhou-7 launched. We are victorious!
Lead: Pathetic Europe will never stop the insurmountable force of our great dynasty
All: Just the aftershocks from the earthquake would destroy France!

Lead: The happy flowers flourish in the oil fields on Tarim Basin
Lead: The suona [musical instrument] sings aloud in the Tawang district of the Himalayas
Lead: Historically accumulated resentment fill the Ryukyu Trench
All: Smiles in Sun Moon Lake became a miraculous flower in the Pacific Ocean

Lead: Do not waver, do not slow down, do not make big changes
Lead: Do not change the flag, Do not turn back
All: Step ruthlessly over all anti-China forces

Lead: The giant ship full of patches, raise up the brand new sail
All: Spirits are high, crash through the waves, the wind is at our back
Lead: 2009
All: Go China
Lead: 2009
All: China the Greatest

(If the embedded player above doesn’t work, click this link.)
MAKE HASTE TO SOMALIA
Lyrics: Wang Lei
Music: Lei Yu
Make haste to Somalia, cruise the Gulf of Aden
With lofty sentiments, the Chinese navy heads for the deep blue
Braving wind and waves, the warship’s flag flutters,
The Chinese navy, a bright sword to harmonize the ocean.

Chinese warriors, valiant men with iron wills,
Intrepid journey, 600 years after Zheng He.
Heroic sailors, forge bravely ahead,
Bearing heavy responsibility, the motherland will see our triumphant return.

I rarely, if ever, use Chinese in the classroom. It’s a distraction from what’s supposed to be an English environment, and what’s more, it’s a useful tool in gauging how the students are feeling about something if you overhear chatter they think you can’t understand. Before today, I’d used Chinese occasionally–a word or two–the explain the meaning of a word if students didn’t understand an English explanation, but I’d certainly never used it for discipline.

The college classes I currently teach here come in two types. The first are once-a-week speaking practice classes that students choose voluntarily. These are generally OK. The second are one-time “foreign teacher classes” that happen once or twice a semester as part of a regular (daily) English class that’s normally taught by a Chinese English teacher. In other words, these One-Time classes are different students every week; I rarely see the same group twice, so it’s essentially me and a group of 70 or so college students with no real agenda for two hours. The Chinese teacher doesn’t stay in class, so there’s no one to check students’ attendance or anything.

As you can imagine given this sort of situation, results may vary. Some classes are extremely quiet and attentive, others more rambunctious, but until today they had all been generally manageable. Today’s class was about 70 students. A few were quiet, but most would start chatting amongst themselves the instant I opened my mouth. This was true from the beginning of class on. Every time I stopped talking they would stop too so it wasn’t obvious who they were, but as soon as they heard me start again they would also start up.

I addressed this in English several times, everyone said OK, and then went right back to exactly what they were doing before. Now, I don’t expect every student to be enthralled with my classes, or even to be interested in English. I do expect, though, that a college student ought to be able to at least sit quietly (and that one who wasn’t willing to do that might have the common decency to leave so that other students could actually have class). Anyway, these students weren’t. I can honestly say they were worse than most of the elementary school kids I teach.

Near the end of the first half of class (there’s a break in the middle) I had finally had enough. I paused for a second so that everyone got quiet, and then yelled at them (in Chinese):

“If you don’t want to be in class, what are you coming to class for? To talk? You can talk to your friends somewhere else! Coming here to talk wastes my time, it wastes your time, and worst of all, it wastes your classmates time! If you don’t want to have class then don’t come; I don’t care if you come or not but if you do come, don’t just sit there talking to friends. We’ll have a ten minute break now, if you just want to talk and don’t want to have class, DO NOT come back after the break.”

They sat there silent for a while, until I reminded them again that it was time for break. When I started class again for the second half, a few students were gone and I didn’t have any problems at all.

One of the main reasons I’m even living in China is to improve my Chinese. While I speak more fluently than I did a few months ago, and some of the rust has come off, I find that I’m really not improving much, and it’s time to take things a bit more seriously.

That left me with three options. I could step up my studying on my own time, enroll in a school program, or find a tutor. I’ve already proven myself to be fairly lazy, and my work schedule makes attending any kind of school more or less impossible. Chinese tutors, though, are plentiful and inexpensive, so that’s the road I’ll be taking.

The problem with that is that unless you get really lucky and find a great one, you still need to more or less design your own course of study. Choosing a textbook is at least partially your decision, as is exactly what you study and how the tutoring sessions work. That affords a lot of customization, but it does mean you have to be extra careful you’re not wasting your time, too.

The first step, as I see it, is choosing a textbook. It’s tough to know exactly what fits with your level; I’m making my judgement based primarily on vocabulary. But even then, you need to figure out how the sessions will run. Will you read the textbook aloud? Practice the vocab/grammar? Prepare the text beforehand and then discuss it together/get quizzed on it by the tutor? It depends on your goals, I guess, my hope is to improve my active vocabulary (i.e., the vocabulary I know well enough to use myself when speaking) significantly, so I’m planning to prepare each lesson beforehand, and spend the tutoring session discussing questions I have with the grammar, being quizzed on the content, and discussing related issues more freely to practice my speaking and listening.

Once a week, I plan to dedicate a tutoring session to pure pronunciation for the first half, and pure conversation for the second half. I’ll read from simple texts and have my tutor correct any pronunciation mistakes; then we’ll discuss whatever topic I’ve prepared for the day and he will help me express anything I’m not sure how to say.

My current plan is to have about 4 hours/week, which will cost me 100RMB/week. I’m hoping the expense will keep me on the ball enough to actually work outside of the tutoring sessions. My school also offers two hours of free lessons every week, which I’ll probably dedicate to more relaxed, informal study. I’ve got a textbook here called Chinese Idiomatic Phrases for Foreign Students, I think I may do some lessons from that or just discuss whatever’s in the news recently.

Teaching English. It is the classic expatriate profession, the long-popular escape for nationals of any English-speaking country with an itch to travel and a semi-respectable command of the English language. But what is teaching English actually like? It’s sort of a hellish language, really, full of contradictory spelling rules, labyrintian grammatical constructions and sometimes-nonsensical pronunciations (if you don’t know what I’m talking about, refer to the classic “ghoti” example). It’s especially difficult for Chinese students in that it’s essentially the opposite of Chinese, which has a simple grammar and no verb conjugation at all. So how do they learn it, and how do expats, most of whom speak no Chinese, teach them?

First of all, English is almost always taught by Chinese-speaking teachers, at least in part. It is a required part of the curriculum for all students beginning in middle school; most Chinese students of English won’t encounter a foreign teacher until college. Even then, their main teachers are still generally Chinese people rather than native speakers, except at the most prestigious schools. The college I teach at, for example, has plenty of regular English classes, almost all taught by Chinese people. Foreigners are brought in for special “speaking practice” classes and also Spoken English seminars. So at the college level, my priority as an English teacher is generally just to get them to actually talk, and work on their pronunciation a bit on the assumption that their regular English teachers will iron out grammatical errors, although I do correct the major ones whenever they crop up.

For those students lucky enough to be able to afford to attend a private English school (like the one I work for) before learning English in their regular schools, the approach is different. At our school, we teach with Chinese TAs who help translate whenever it’s needed and take care of some of the administrative stuff (God bless them, they also deal with parents for the most part). Most students start with no English, so the early stuff is mostly teaching them set phrases: hello, goodbye, how are you today, etc. My younger kids don’t, for the most part, have any idea what conjugation is or that there are rules that exist to govern it. They just know that you have to say “I am”, but “he is”, “we are”, etc. They don’t know why.

College students most common problems tend to be with pronunciation, fluency, and memorizing the vast variety of different words that get thrown at them. Many of them can read and write at a much higher level than they can speak. The young children I teach are almost exactly the opposite, their issues tend to pop up most often when they’re trying to read and spell, but often they can respond to questions they hear fairly well.

Students at both levels, and even adult speakers with fairly good English, often struggle with the sounds in English that don’t exist in Chinese, especially the “th” sound in “thanks” and the “v” sound in “very”. The word “usually” also becomes “urally” frequently, although I’m not sure why. I try to drill these sounds frequently with my little kids, but it’s a constant struggle, especially when they get old enough that they are taking regular English classes in school, since most of those English teachers also can’t say the sound correctly.

Still, their English is a hell of a lot better than most Americans’ Chinese…

Lest my father (and others) think that all semblance of the traditional respect for education in China is dead, I should tell you that yesterday was “Teachers’ Day”. I got a quilt as a gift from the school I work for, and one of my university students gave me a coupon for some free honey. Lots of people wished me a happy teachers’ day.

On a larger scale, the government has passed a couple of measures to ensure teachers nationwide are paid better, and some the unqualified, temporary teachers currently working are either tested and qualified or removed from their positions. Premier Wen Jiabao apparently said, “Teaching is the most splendid profession under the sun.”

I am a teacher. My parents are both teachers; I was raised on the campus of a school. My grandparents–on both sides–were teachers. Perhaps, then, it stands to reason that I spend a fair amount of time thinking about education.

Working in China, of course, exposes you to a variety of different educational philosophies. Students–and school–are different here, as I’ve touched on in previous posts. The ways are myriad, but today I’d like to get into two specific examples from my own experience here.

The first comes from my experience teaching college students at H.U.S.T. (哈尔滨理工大学). Although I am now teaching some regular courses there, many of the first classes I taught were one-time “speaking” classes. Essentially, I was given nothing but a classroom of students–as many as 60 students–and two hours to do whatever I could to help them practice their speaking. The students, for their part, seemed to be required to attend, but certainly hadn’t been encouraged to care much. One student walked into one of my classes and pulled out headphones and a PSP before I had even started talking.

I understand that with “resources” (i.e., foreigners) as limited as there are here in Harbin, large class sizes are probably unavoidable, but why are they paying me to teach students who don’t want to learn English? This is a waste of my time and the students’ time, not to mention the school’s money. At best, these students simply sleep; at worst, they are disruptive and make it even more difficult for other students to learn than it already is.

I didn’t know this, but apparently admission into a Chinese college virtually guarantees graduation. Parents want their money’s worth for tuition, so students who foreign teachers “fail” rarely actually receive Fs on their transcripts. Somewhere in the whole “red tape” process, the grades get cleaned up to make sure everyone passes. Not everyone passes with good grades, but apparently it’s pretty damn difficult, perhaps impossible, to fail out of college here. This makes sense from a financial standpoint, but not really from an educational one.

At the private school I do most of my teaching at–which I’m not going to name–similar rules apply. Because the school is a business, part of my salary (really just whether or not I receive a bonus) is decided by how my students review my class. This applies in all of my classes; thus, part of my salary is determined by how popular I am with a bunch of five year olds.

On the one hand, if the students don’t like the class, they stop coming and the school loses money. On the other hand, though, this system doesn’t take into account at all whether nor not the students have actually learned anything. A teacher who lets the kids run around and do what they like could theoretically get better reviews than a teacher who’s relatively strict so that the kids’ language skills actually progress. I’m not sure how common an occurrence that is, but I do think that generally, when evaluating teachers, how well they teach should be factored into the equation, whether they are popular should not.

Then again, it’s thanks to this sort of policy that I live in a giant apartment and collected a surprisingly significant paycheck today, so how much can I really complain? Teachers need to get paid. It’s just sad that the sacrifice educators make for economics is so often education itself.

The saga of my obnoxious roommate reached a new level today. During the break in one of the classes, I was in the teachers’ office talking to a colleague, and my roommate was sitting in the corner on the computer. My colleague and I were having a tongue-in-cheek conversation about how frustrating student apathy can be, when he suddenly blurted in with his opinion: if we have “that attitude” about our students, then we “aren’t cut out to be teachers.”

Even though this was mainly addressed at me, my colleague tried to point out that we were joking around, and that venting our frustrations outside of class helps keep us from taking them out on the students when we are in class. Not good enough, apparently if you ever have a negative thought about your students; if you’re ever frustrated they haven’t prepared properly or annoyed when they don’t care, then “you aren’t cut out to be a teacher.”

I told him that both my parents were teachers, that I had grown up around teachers, and that I was pretty sure that kind of lighthearted complaining was a perfectly normal part of being a teacher. His response? If the teachers I knew talked or thought negatively about their students, ever, then “they were probably shit teachers.”

Think about that for a second. Think about the extreme level of arrogance it takes to, as a teacher with less than a month of experience (much of which has been spent training rather than teaching), assume that you know better than the lifetime’s worth of teachers I grew up with, including my parents who, between the two of them, have something like thirty years of teaching experience (in fact, it may be closer to forty).

Then there’s the fact that he, the man who killed someone’s pet and then lectured the owner about how his culture was wrong, has the gall to lecture me about my attitude towards anything.

I didn’t really respond to him (because what’s the point?), just went back to class, had lunch and came home. I’m still pretty angry about it, but my day was improved somewhat by stopping and chatting with some of my neighbors on the way home. These are the guys who work at a restaurant downstairs; I interviewed one of them about the olympics so a bunch of them are in the video in the post below this.

Yesterday, they shared some watermelon with me after one of them accidentally hit me in the chest with a large piece. (It was unintentional; still, one never expects to be hit by watermelon.) Today I just stopped on my way home because I was frustrated and wanted to talk about the roommate thing with someone. They asked me to sit down, so I sat for a while and chatted with them about that, my work, and then a bit about the Olympics.

Since they’re all male (all my Chinese teachers have been women)–and since my Chinese isn’t actually that good–I have a hard time keeping up with them sometimes. It’s good practice, but it makes me feel very stupid sometimes. They ask me a question, and then have to explain their meaning five different ways before I answer…maybe by the time I’m done here I’ll have it down to four or three.