Finally Done

After a little over two years, I've finally finished my Teach for China commitment, and am going to be flying home tomorrow. It was a really big experience, so I'm still trying to figure out my own thoughts.

Over the past month I was a subject pedagogy trainer for the new fellows, teaching them about teaching grammar, writing, vocab, and all that good stuff. It was a really fun time. The second year fellows who decided to stick around during the summer to help out the first year fellows were all great, and permanent staff are pretty awesome too. It was really great getting to meet the new fellows, and it was pretty interesting to see how innocent, clueless, passionate, and hopeful I was two years ago. And S.I. was run a lot better than it was in my year--fellows are going to be a lot more prepared for their classrooms, but it's still going to be an incredibly hard experience. 

Looking back to my S.I. and thinking about the kind of impact I was hoping to make in my classroom makes me laugh--I just completely lacked context and understanding of what it was that I had signed up to do. I definitely did not make the impact that I thought I was going to make, but I don't have any regrets about my two years; I was a good teacher to my students, and that's what matters. I think I'm leaving TFC a lot more changed than my students are, but I think that that's true of most fellows, and I think that most of us don't regret coming out here. 

Photo Shoot

The other weekend, the Heqing (my little region) second years got together to take pictures before we all leave, and it was awesome. We went into the nearby big city, and found a photographer, and basically got to play dress-up for a couple of hours while taking ridiculous pictures. All the ladies got to spend over an hour getting made up professionally, and then we all spent a few hours with the photographer. It was definitely the kind of thing that I don't think you can do back home.

Anyways, here are a few of the pictures:

I'm really going to miss these people.

Teacher....Are you drunk?

Over the weekend, I went on an epic bike ride with some friends, and got pretty sunburned. I went to class last night, and because I was so red, my students were convinced that I must be drunk.I was not entirely successful at convincing my students that "sunburns" exist and can turn their teacher bright red. Even after showing them my nice tan-lines, some students remained skeptical.

Going to Summer Institute

After these last few weeks of teaching, I'll be heading to Summer Institute, where I'll help train the next cohort of fellows. I'll be a subject pedagogy instructor, so I'll be helping to teach the new fellows how to teach English. We had a very minimal amount of instruction in how to teach our subject during our S.I., and as a result, much of the first semester and year was spent figuring out how to make students remember vocabulary words (motivation, repetition, self-study time, checks for understanding, spiraling review, and a variety of activities), how to teach students to write essays (spelling dictations, fun sentences and sentence frames, dialogues, and scaffolding), or even how to teach the ABCs (the Chinese alphabet song is better, your handwriting needs to change to the standard Chinese way, explicitly teach word spacing, make sure students don't write 'a,' 'g,' or 'l' the way it looks when it's typed, make sure students actually cross the bottom line in their notebooks when they write 'j,' 'y', 'g,' 'p,' and 'q'.....). There's a ton of English pedagogy specific knowledge that fellows should know before they enter the classroom if they're to have any hope of giving effective English instruction.

It seems crazy to me that with only two years of experience I'll be one of the people responsible for teaching the new fellows how to do all of this. The two years of experience I have is extremely relevant to what fellows will be doing (foreigners who have taught in rural China are rare), but some days I really wish someone with more experience and knowledge was coming to help run the sessions; I'd love to be that person's assistant.

Summer Institute is going to last about a month for fellows, and I know everyone who will be working there has been spending tons of time and effort preparing, but it still seems a little crazy to me that we'll be putting new teachers in the classroom after just a month of training. Summer institute has been getting better and better every year, but there's still only so much you can teach people in a month, no matter how dedicated those people are. The first semester and year are rough for new teachers everywhere, and I think it's a reflection on the kind of people that come to TFC that only 20-30% of people quit after the first year or teaching with the minimal preparation that we're given.

One Month Left

Today marks exactly a month until I'm done teaching, and done with my two year commitment to TFC. It's weird; it feels like I haven't been doing this for very long, and yet I'll soon be moving on to the next thing. I've definitely changed a lot over these past two years, and while I'm a much better teacher than when I began, I'm still a beginner, and if I were to continue teaching, I don't think I'd really be a good teacher for another couple of years. That's really the problem with TFC's model--no foreign fellow ever keeps teaching in rural China for a third year, and only a handful of Chinese fellows have stayed, so our students never get a TFC trained fellow with the sort of experience that you need to be a truly powerful teacher. Some very few teachers might be great during their first and second year, but it's rare.

All of this is not to say that TFC fellows haven't done awesome things and been successful in the classroom. Fellows, especially Chinese fellows, have done a lot of really cool thing, both in and out of class, but I'd love to see what some of the great people that have chosen to dedicate two years to teaching rural Chinese kids could do with five or ten years of experience.

I think I've been a good teacher, especially in this second year, but I often feel like I've gotten more out of this experience than my students have.

And here's an Onion article that's too true to be funny

Teacher! Teacher! I scored! I scored!!!

Before this year started, I thought I was going to only be teaching one class, and would have plenty of free time to be working on tons of other projects. I wanted to do tutoring, and run an English corner, but the main thing that I wanted to do was start a girls' soccer team. Sadly, I haven't had time (or energy....mostly energy) to start it, but I've started occasionally taking my students out when they've been good to play soccer, and it's been awesome.

I haven't actually been trying to teach them how to be good at soccer, I just want to give them a chance to run around and play. As of now, the instructions I have given:

1. Don't use your hands. (Some of the boys have added to this: if you use your hands, you have to drop down and do push-ups.)
2. Try to use the inside of your foot when you're kicking it.
3. Kick it between the cones.

It works out surprisingly well. I let them divide up into groups, and play. It's a madhouse, but everyone has fun, and trying to organize 55 kids and teach them to actually play soccer and run drills by myself just sounds like a nightmare.

Anyways, they've been playing soccer, and it's been great to see everyone running around, especially some of the girls who just haven't had a chance to compete and are getting really into it. Getting called over to a 6v6 little game because one of the girls was so proud of getting a goal by kicking it through another girl's legs is definitely one of the happiest memories I'm going to leave here with. I've taken a few pictures, but none of them turned out very well, so I'll try again and upload them later.

(I'll also try and update this blog around once a week between now and the end of the year. I've been doing applications for next year, programming prep work, and prep work for summer institute (I'll be an instructor for next year's fellows) and I've been a little overwhelmed, but I'm getting back on top of things.)

Chinese Curriculum

The Chinese English curriculum is a funny thing. The vocabulary and topics that are students are expected to learn often borders on the ridiculous (which is something that I should probably write about at some point). That said, one of my favourite inconsistencies is that between sixth and seventh grade, the textbooks switch over from British spelling (favourite, colour) to non-British spelling (favorite, color). It's never addressed, and I just think it would be odd to be a seventh grader and be thinking that whoever wrote my elementary school textbooks wasn't very good at English or something.

"You Are EFF You!"

Last semester, one of my students learned that "Eff you!" was a bad word (probably from music or an older student). Despite my efforts to convince him that it's pronounced "funny," he continues to occasionally spit out the occasional "You are eff you" before class, and it's really hard not to laugh when he does it, because he says it with such enthusiasm, panache, and genuine happiness.

10% Annual Growth

There are thousands of articles online about the crazy pace of development in China, and I know everybody talks about the development of big cities like Beijing and Shanghai, but things are changing pretty rapidly out here too.

In the past year and a half my school has:

• Put in a new track
• Started construction on one new teacher dorm
• Started construction on another random building...(this happened a few days ago, so I'm not sure what exactly it's supposed to be)
• Got rid of our two normal trash burning pit, and made a new bigger one. 
• Redone the front gate of the school (currently in progress)
• Changed some signage
• Re-landscaped the area near the teaching buildings 
• Put in a ton of ping-pong tables
• Probably done some other stuff that I can't think of right now (Ohhh! Speed bumps. They put those in! And putting smart boards in the honors classrooms)

The  elementary school has:

• Made a new library (with support from TFC fellows!)
• Built a new teachers' dorm (not quite open yet)
• Made a little playground for the kids
• Probably done a whole lot of other things that I just don't know about or can't remember...

In the past year in Songgui (my village):

• Opened a new supermarket. (We now have two! And the new one has Gatorade!)
• Tore down the building that housed the amazing Yogurt Lady.....twice. (Her original building got torn down to make something, and then the next place she moved to had the same thing happen to it. I have no idea what she's doing now.) 
• Crazy Hair Lady's building was torn down to make something. (She's now in a new building that got built next to the new supermarket, and still has a vendetta against my sideburns)
• Paved one of the more important roads in the village
• Opened a ton of little shops, at least one restaurant (right next to the school!), and built a whole mess of new houses. 

Nearby, the county seat recently got a train station (which makes travelling to Kunming a lot nicer, which in the past year just got a new airport, which makes travelling out of Kunming more of a pain). 

I didn't actually think about much of this until the past break, where I went back home. I don't think I saw a single crane the entire time I was in the U.S., and I don't know that I even saw any buildings under construction. In a single drive near Kunming, I counted over twenty cranes before I got bored. It's really going to be crazy to come back here in a couple of years, and see how much it's changed. 

Home

It's weird to realize that at some point in the past year and a half I started thinking of Songgui as home. Even though I spent four years at Georgetown, I never felt that it was a home for me in the same way that Songgui is. I'm not really sure what the difference is--maybe having a job?--but it definitely felt good to get back here, and I know I'm going to miss this place when I leave.

I don't actually have any pictures of around Songgui, which I need to change. It's just hard to remember to take pictures of the places that you see everyday. So, instead, here's a picture of Tian Minghao, one of my students from last year:

Things I was glad to come back to

1. Great friends.
2. A good bowl of rice noodles in broth. (The ideal bowl is served under a tent by the side of the road, and has a good splash of vinegar, some pickled peppers (seriously), 3 or so spoonfuls of crushed peanuts, and a little bit of crushed hot red pepper)
3. My students + teaching
4. My toilet (as long as you're not food poisoned / have giardia, squatting is better)
5. Being able to walk everywhere

Back to school! (and the blog)

I'm back in Songgui after an awesome trip back to the States to see my family. I'm still teaching the same students, and the weather no longer makes me cry in the morning.

It feels good to be back in a lot of ways. Being at home was restful and fun, but it's nice to have more purpose and structure to my days now, and it's great to see the people who I've gotten close to over here again. I brought back a ton of food from the states (an entire suitcase full) and I know it's going to make those times when I really miss home (and food) over here better. It's good to see my students again too! They've remembered a ton over break, and it's good to be back in the classroom.

Right now, school is busy. It's the beginning of the year, so there's a ton of different things that I need to be doing: revising my review plan, planning out the semester (we got a new textbook with different units and order than last year), and getting stuff to the people who manage me. I think this weekend is going to be crucial to getting on top of what I'm doing.

Grading

Grading can be a huge pain. No matter how fast you were, it just takes a lot of time to get through 110 things--whatever those things are. What amazes me though is how willing students are to help out with it. I have students do a lot of my grading for me, and it's awesome. What boggles my mind is I don't give them any sort of reward or anything, but they're so excited to do it. Students complaining because you ran out of things for them to grade for you can really turn a rough day around.

SNICKERMEAL

I'm back! This semester has been incredibly busy, but class is still going well.

One of the things that I've found hard about living out here is eating enough food, especially protein. You just don't tend to eat big hunks of meat as often as you might in the states. When I first came out here, I lost about thirty pounds within two months (I was a little chubby) just because of the change of diet. And, while being skinny is great, I still need more calories and protein if I want to be able to work out and actually have energy afterwards, and so I have invented SNICKERMEAL.

To create SNICKERMEAL, you will need:
A big bowl of oatmeal
A silly amount of peanut butter
One handful of almonds
Two bananas
One scoop of protein powder
A few tablespoons of sugar
A big chopped up snickers bar.*

Put all of those things together. Eat it. It's over 1000 calories of awesome.


*If you have access to both American and Chinese Snickers bar, you should use a Chinese one. They're not as tasty, so you should save the better flavored American snickers for eating on its own afterwards.

Vacation!

For Mid-Autumn Festival I got to go up to the north of Yunnan with a good group of other TFC teachers to go hiking near Meili Xue Shan http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meili_Xue_Shan, a mountain in the north of Yunnan. It was really cool, but getting there was scary. The roads up north are very narrow, mostly dirt, and right next to huge cliffs that don't have any sort of guardrail. I think everybody was convinced that they were going to die--I certainly was. It was some really sketchy driving, and I'm glad to be back. Apart from being sketchy it was also really far away, so we had to spend a lot of time in buses, which meant that if you made the bad decision to look outside of the bus, the entire time you'd be stressing about your imminent demise.

The hiking was awesome. We did three days of hiking, and it was really fun. The mountains were picturesque, and the valleys and landscape was epic. It was stunning, and hiking was awesome. I don't have hiking boots in China, so I mostly hiked in my sandals, which amused a great number of Chinese hikers.

On the way up, we stopped in Shangrila, so we had a day to eat delicious food, and bike around. I just really like being able to say that I went to Shangrila....

Anyways, here are some pics!

From biking around in Shangrila

From an earlier trip to Shangrila. This big structures are everywhere, and they're used to dry out crops. This was on the way to Napa Lake

Ready to go hiking

A pic from the hike

Soccer, Sickness, Sadness, and Something Else

So far, this year has been a lot better than last year, despite the added workload. Having some experience, and knowing the curriculum really makes a huge difference, and not worrying about the kids' grades really takes a lot of the stress away. Sadly, this past week I've been a little sick, and with two classes that means that a huge amount of tests and homework has built up into a heavy and terrifying stack of sadness (see below). 

This past weekend we headed down to Dali for a professional development conference (about 5 hours closer than the conferences we had to go to last year) and got to meet all the rest of the new fellows, which was sweet! Good food and good people is an awesome combination. 

Being in Dali also meant that I had a chance to buy soccer balls for the girls' team that I want to start. Girls never seem to get a chance to play basketball or ping pong, so I really want them to have the chance to experience a sport, and all the awesome things that that can teach. Our field is really overgrown, and there's some construction going on right now, so I'm not entirely sure when I'll be able to start it, but I'm really looking forward to it.

In other unrelated news, there were a couple of relatively big earthquakes in my province, but they were pretty far away from where all the TFC fellows are, so everybody is safe and sound. 

Sadness.

Class 83

This year, I'm teaching two bans, one of which is a little more trouble than the other. Jarlene, my co-fellow, came to observe me the other day, and took some awesome pictures! In lieu of writing stuff, and out of an interest to go eat lunch, here they are:

A shot of most of the 56 students in the class. 

I have no idea what I'm doing here, but it looks pretty stupid:

an accurate depiction of how I look the entire class

Helping a weaker student with his notes. 

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.