Class Thus Far

So, I'm currently on my second day of class (OK, that's a lie, but I wrote this when I was on my second day of class, so it totally counts), and I'm really excited about how things are going already. I've got a much better idea of what I need to be doing in the classroom, and getting started out on the right foot is going to make such a difference this year. Kids aren't going to want to give up at the beginning because they're convinced it's too hard, and both my classes seem like they're pretty on top of their game.

The other exciting thing is that I've got kids who were taught by other TFC fellows (Tim, Laura, Sasha) so those kids are pretty excited about English, and already know a decent amount. It's going to be fun to talk with them about how their former students are doing, and I think they're going to do great. One girl, Rachel, whom Sasha taught, has already really impressed me by greeting me, asking how I was doing, and being able to tell me her name in English. That's a lot, and it's awesome that she's being brave on the first day. 

The schedule is manageable as well. While I'm spending a lot more time in the classroom, I don't need to do as much prep work as I did last year. Grading is going to be tough, but I'll hopefully be able to come up with a system that has students doing some of the work, or, alternatively, I just won't have a life. 

Sleeping in Train Stations

So, on my trip back to my little town from the states, my flight from Beijing to Kunming (the capital of Yunnan, my province) got delayed, so we got in at around 2a.m. which was apparently a pretty regular time for flights to get in. Buses were still running by the time everyone got their checked bags, and there were plenty of flights that were just getting in then. Rather than get a hotel room, I decided to just hang out at the train station until the morning so I could get on the train back to Heqing, and I was really surprised when I got to the train station how many other people had made the exact same decision as I did. There were sleeping people everywhere! People just stretched out on cardboard or newspapers and conked out all over the station. I ended up deciding that, because I was foreign and travelling alone, it would probably be foolish to sleep, so I just hung out in a 24 hour dicos (kind of similar to KFC) with a whole bunch of other people, none of whom, it seemed, had actually ordered any food. 

My train left at 10am the next morning, and by the time I got to my town, I'd been awake for about 48 hours straight, other than the 2 hrs that I managed to catch on the international flight over. I was pretty dead, but I managed to rally myself, and after hibernating for about 12 hours, I headed to Shangrila with some friends, and got to spend more time on a cramped bus. 

The entire time I was travelling, I was carrying around a bag that had books that I brought back to study....it was a little heavy:

I believe I've said before that my bed it only about five feet long, and a little hard, but here are two pictures showing it. 

Headed to Shangrila on a sleeper bus (during the day)

Road Warrior: Tractor Edition

One of the things that people first notice when they come to rural Yunnan is the number of tractors that are clogging the roads. Tractors will be slowly chugging up hills with loads of gravel, bricks, people, crops, pigs, or anything else you can think of loaded inside them. They can go really slowly, so I get to feel really cool whenever I pass one on my bike. Most people around here are farmers, so tractors are really important.

While they can be frustrating when you're trying to get somewhere in a hurry and your bus is stuck behind one, they are pretty cool looking. Most have all their moving parts (including the engine) exposed, and they look like something out of a movie about a post-apocalyptic future. I went for a walk the other day to take pictures of tractors, and all of the following pictures are of tractors that I found on one short stretch of road. There are a much greater variety of tractors than these, and I still occasionally see new varieties of tractor.

This is the most popular kind of tractor on the roads around here. I'd estimate that 85% or so of tractors around here are this kind. 

When people are going to the field, or students are coming to school, they'll just all ride standing up in the back of one of these. 

This is the second most popular kind of tractor. It's more powerful and bigger, so you see these hauling bigger loads. 

This is my favorite kind of tractor. 

Another awesome tractor, clearly inferior to the last one because it doesn't have a sun roof. 

And yet another type of tractor! 

This isn't a tractor, but people drive these a lot too. They're three wheeled motorcycles (I want to call them tricycles, but that sounds weird) so you can put loads in the back. Most of the 'taxis' in the nearby big city are these, so you just hop in the back of one of these that's set up for people, and they'll take you wherever you want. 

Double the Trouble

I got back to school about a week ago after a great summer, and things have really changed. Our old principal (who was awesome) got promoted, and our new principal (who is also awesome) is really young. Some teachers are leaving with the principal, and other teachers are taking a semester off because of pregnancy or sickness, meaning that we're short several teachers, and Jarlene (my co-fellow) and I are both picking up extra classes. Jarlene is teaching two classes of eighth grade, and I (with my weaker Chinese ability) will be doing two classes of seventh. Basically, both of us have twice as many kids, and twice as many hours of class-time as last year. (and twice as many piles of homework and tests)

I was originally planning on trying to do a lot of extracurricular stuff at school this semester, like tutoring, English corner, football, and trying to start a girls' soccer team, but I don't think any of that is going to happen. I was also planning on blogging more.....we'll see how that goes.

The seventh graders still aren't back to school (although the eighth and ninth graders are) so I still have a few more days to finish prepping, and enjoying a little bit of free-time before the semester starts.

Things I will post about soon:

1. Travelling in Shangrila
2. Tractors!
3. How tired I am (....I'm just assuming I will be)
4. Sleeping in train stations

A Visitor!

My Uncle Mark recently visited me, and he wrote up a post about the
experience. Here it is!

I consider myself well traveled and have been in many different places
and cultures, but I did not realize 1) just how far away Will's
village is, 2) or just how beautiful it would be in Yunnan Province.

Will was kind enough to travel several hours by bus to meet my plane
landing in Lijiang Airport.  The airport is nice - a sleek modern
airport.   Lijiang is a modern city that has an incredible "ancient
city" filled with wooden homes, cobble stone streets, stone bridges
and greenery. It has some of the most amazing street scenes, food
vendors, and the main palace is probably one of the best I have seen
in Asia.  Will and I had dinner there Sunday evening and spent Tuesday
wandering the streets and climbing to the top of a hill overlooking
the old city (a good 45 minutes of stairs, every step of which was
handled with more vigor by Will than me).

The day intervening Sunday and Tuesday, was of course, Monday.  Monday
was one of  the best of the trip and I was able to spend the day in
Will's village and attend some of his classes.    The village is about
90 minutes South of Lijiang and has about 6,000 inhabitants.  Will had
arranged transportation for me from my hotel and we met for breakfast
- a bowl of piping hot noodles in a spicy broth - at a roadside stand
beside the main thoroughfare.   As we ate, scooters, trucks, and
tractors that looked like they had been featured in Road Warrior all
chugged by.  Clearly though, no one was out for a morning drive but
everyone was already hard at work.

After breakfast, I was able to attend Will's second session of the
day.  The kids in Will's class all wear matching jump suits and just
beam as they wrestle with English pronunciation and sentence patterns.
 Will is a dynamic teacher and after introducing me, and after  the
kids asked me questions such as what is your favorite color, how old
are you, how old is my wife (the answer that I was single was pretty
horrifying to the kids) and my favorite, what's your favorite country?
 (I gave the only acceptable answer to that last question).  After my
moment as a star, Will got down to business and had his students work
on vocabulary, phrases, simple conversations and quiet study time.
Will walks around as he teaches and does an amazing job keeping
students of varying abilities, language backgrounds, and interest
engaged, especially given the class size of around 60.

The school itself is much larger than I would have expected.   It's
pretty bare bones, with unheated and un-airconditioned class rooms and
living quarters.   The dorms for the children house 10 to a room, and
the rooms aren't that big.  The children are under far more pressure
than I ever was with classes going from 7:00 am until the day ends at
9:00 pm.  Learning English, Math, Science, and of course Mandarin
doesn't leave a lot of free time.   Will is doing a great job though
and the kids seem to really enjoy his class.  I think his goal of
transformational teaching, and inspiring the kids, or at least some of
the kids, to go as far they can with education is one that he is
achieving.

Will also had me sit in later in the week in classes taught by two of
the other Fellows from the US- Jarlene and Tim.  The Fourth teacher
from the US, Laura, had a difficult class behavior wise, so I skipped
it as my presence would have been distracting to the kids.

When I was  joined Jarlene's class, it had a number of the kids I had
already met.   Jarlene and Will had combined their classes and then
split the combined classes into weaker and stronger students so they
could focus on helping both groups do as well as they can on their
upcoming exams.  Jarlene is a pretty no nonsense teacher, and as I
walked around looking at the kids' papers it was clear that many of
them had a good idea of the concepts even if they were terrified to
speak English with a foreigner (or at least me).

Tim teaches at the elementary school and has a group of about 30 5th
graders.  Will and I had the chance to talk with some of the kids
before class started.   Will was asking the kids what sound a goat
made, what sound a cow made, and then when he asked what sound a dog
made, Tim let off a ferocious "BARK, BARK, BARK" which scared the crap
out of everyone, except for Tim and Will, who had set the whole thing
up.   Tim's kids are pretty cute and tried to teach me some Chinese.
Tim is also an excellent teacher and conducts his class mostly in
Chinese which is impressive as he did not speak any Chinese when he
entered the program.    Even with the class being taught in Chinese, I
picked up a finer point of English, which as a native speaker I knew,
but had never really thought about there actually being a rule in
place.

Will organized two dinners with most of the American and Chinese
fellows in the area: both of which were fun.   Clearly they are a
group of quality people, very much dedicated to transforming the kids'
lives as much as possible.  They very much all think about how to
engage the kids and develop them into leaders and to also develop
project development and management skills.  One of the Chinese
fellows, Sam, has been working on setting up a mini-library program
for the kids while they are on summer break.   He has the kids working
on how the program will work, selecting the number of books out of the
available stock that will go to each village, who will be responsible
for caring for the books in each village and tracking loans of the
books.   Other fellows were talking about selecting team capitals, and
different ways of engaging kids - the TFC fellows are clearly here to
do much more than teach English.

As I sit here in the Lijiang airport beginning my journey back to San
Francisco where I live, I am glad I came.  This is a part of China
that I never would have visited otherwise.  Now I know that it is
filled with hardworking kids that have a lot of obstacles in their
path, parents that are working hard to provide for their families,
teachers that are working hard to make a difference, and that the
kids, the parents, the teachers, and the fellows are all working
together to make their future a better one.


Added bonus: a few pictures of his trip!

High School Entrance Exams

Are a really big deal. It's not affecting my kids because they're only seventh graders, but the ninth graders are having a really rough time of it. They have class every day until 10:15 p.m. now, which is adding an hour onto an already unrealistically tough schedule, and they've been having class every weekend. They just don't seem to ever get a break. Those test scores are just so important to both the individual students, and to the school.

The entrance exam to college is even more intense though. There were headlines a while back because there were kids hooked up to IVs so that they could keep studying longer and harder. I mean, it makes a certain kind of logic to hook yourself up to a drip to keep your energy up, but I'm glad I never had to do anything like that in high school.

Speaking of IVs, it's totally what you do any time you aren't feeling so hot. Just go to the local clinic, and get them to hook you up with a drip for a couple of hours. Apparently it works great, but I haven't yet been brave enough to go try it.

p.s. Here's a link about the IV drip studying stuff.  http://behindthewall.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/05/07/11580943-chinese-students-use-iv-drips-while-test-cramming?lite

Update + More on Drought

School's still going well. Right now TFC fellow at my school and at two other elementary schools are working on a group research project where students go to their villages, interview people, and learn about something (customs, jobs, farming, local problems...) that they find interesting and with guidance from a local teacher put together a project. The winning group gets to go on a trip to Kunming (which is a big deal) and 2nd and 3rd place get recognition and prizes as well, so that's cool. 

Summer camp planning is going along well. Right now I'm trying to pick which kids from my class I'm going to choose to apply to summer camp: I only get to choose three so it's a really hard choice because there's a lot of interest. 

In terms of the drought--it's been raining for the past couple days here for the first time since I got to this region, so that's a really good sign. The weather's miserable, but I think people are happy because everybody seems to have water again. The water that we use comes form a nearby reservoir, so hopefully the constant rain has been replenishing a little of the water that we've been using.  

Also, TKK commented on the last post, and it was interesting, so here it is:

Drought is terrifying. I know that I personally take the stability of my life entirely for granted. In Ghana, one of the people in our group asked the former mayor of Accra what he was most proud of, and he said the continued existence of the country. And it really is a hugely impressive accomplishment considering the challenges the country has faced domestically and the regional instability...
Yeah, drought is really terrifying. Where do most people in Yunnan (or, you know, your particular area), typically get their water? I mean, river, aquifer, rain...? Also, the article said that money was being allocated for drought relief--what does that mean in practice? Shipping water in?

Congratulations on the compliment!!!!! I know you've worked for it. :) 

And I think that that means shipping water in. Huge 50L bottles of water have been getting dropped off at a lot of the local business, and I assume at some people's homes as well.