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. 

Drought

So, there's a drought happening in Yunnan province* that's been going on for a while, and it's getting relatively serious in my region. A lot of the time now, you'll turn on a tap and nothing will come out. In nearby areas that are harder hit, bottled water is being used for everything. In my town, huge water barrels are being sold to all the business so that they won't run out of water during the day. I'm not really that affected on a day to day basis--worst case scenario for me is not getting to do laundry, or shower. But for people who depend on water for agriculture, and watering livestock, I know that this drought is really scary.

In other news, I was cleaning up after my class, and one of my kids came up and told me that I'm now a much better teacher than I was at the beginning of the year (when I was awful) and wondered about what made me get better. It made me all warm and happy inside. I just wish I'd been able to start off the year how I am now--the students would be in such a better place, and I think that I lost some students first semester because they got poor grades, didn't understand, and just got disheartened. It's sad to think that if I had done a better job, kids that are now not paying attention, or have given up on my class might be paying attention and be excited about (or at least slightly interested in) English. On the other hand, it does get me excited about next year, and the rest of this year for that matter.

*There are 22 provinces in China, as well as a lot more people, so each province is a good deal bigger than most states. Yunnan province has a population of roughly 46 million, so it's a big place, and a drought here affects a ton of people. In February, the Kunming (capital) government said that over 3 million people don't have enough drinking water. 3 million people. That's more than the population of some US states. http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/china/2012-02/27/c_131434576.htm

Still Chugging Along

It's Sunday night here, and I'm about finished up preparing for classes this week. Things have definitely gotten a lot easier since the first couple weeks when I was just starting out and had no idea what I was doing,, which is pretty sweet.

Today, I went to get a haircut, and it was really cool. During the first semester, I'd gone to this same lady to get a hair cut, and had no idea what she was saying. I managed to figure out that she was going to cut my hair, and it was going to be short, and, as that was what I was aiming for, I was fine with it. Today, when I went back, I actually was able to understand what she was saying, and got to have a nice conversation with her. I guess I've slowly gotten more accustomed to the accent here, so I'm better able to pick out words. It's not something that I've been able to notice on a day to day basis, but to be able to go from not being able to communicate at all, to having a conversation feels pretty sweet.

Not related to language, but this lady hasn't really encountered that many beards before, and decided that the beard hair and the head hair shouldn't meet up, so she was nice enough to fix that for me.

No sideburns for me. 

Exciting Things!

1. I got a new fly swatter! The old one was getting really floppy, and was designed with the letters "A,B,C,D" across the face of it. Sadly, only the "D" now remains, so many flies were escaping through the gaping hole. I splurged on a nicer swatter--it's really whippy, and a little heavier, and it makes me really happy.

2. I saw Avengers! It was great! We took a bus to Lijiang to see it, and it was totally worth it. It was dubbed in Chinese, so we didn't understand any part of the plot, but that didn't matter. According to my Mom, we just ended up missing out on a lot of dull speechifying....and I can deal with that.

3. My students did decently on the midterm. Average was high, and plenty of students got good scores. They're still not where I want them to be, but it's nice to not be stressing about grades any more.

Basketball!

Recently I've gotten really into basketball. Like, really into basketball. I'm definitely one of those people that gets intensely into one thing for short period of time, and right now it's basketball. There's a group of teachers that plays every day after dinner, so whenever I don't have class I go out and mess around with them. They all have been playing for a lot longer than the two or so seasons I did in elementary school, but I've got a couple of inches on everyone so it works out nicely. I like hearing the complaint: "He's too tall!" Hopefully by the end of these two years I'll actually have some skills to go along with my height.

I think it's kind of funny that the two sports that I never really participated in growing up--football and basketball--are the ones that I'm most involved in. I'm also not looking forward to going back to the states and realizing that I'm actually not any good at basketball. That'll be sad.