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Friends,
Having just returned from nearly 6 weeks of travel and finding the beginning of next semester almost upon me, I hardly know how to begin this letter. Last semester seems long gone and speculating about the new semester seems hardly possible when I haven't even gotten my schedule yet. My travels, freshest in my mind, seem hardly relevant to the nature of this internship, though I assure you that the winter holiday allows ample time for exploration. Although this massive country is rather daunting when it comes to making travel plans, I managed to take in bits of both the south and the north in addition to a 10 day jaunt in Vietnam, whose history and culture is not entirely distinct from China. On the whole, I've returned to Nanjing with a better perspective of what constitutes China, though one that may take me several months to thoroughly process. I now know better how Nanjing is a city with a history in a relatively wealthy part of China. The people here are well-educated and English is more widely
spoken than in many places, excluding the larger cities. It's a city that is small enough to seem accessible on a bicycle, big enough for me to still have plenty to explore, and rather friendly. I also realize it is small enough to lack the cosmopolitan feel of Hong Kong, big enough to produce a disturbing amount of pollution, and crowded enough to make traffic somewhat terrifying. It is also seemingly a city of eternal rain. I do, on occasion, find a city in the rain rather appealing, and this one is no exception.
Teaching
After such a long vacation, I'm also thoroughly refreshed and full of new ideas for the coming semester. In many ways, this semester will be a new beginning as much as last semester was. I'll be teaching a whole new set of students. I'll have another 300 names and faces to learn, even though last term I never did really get to know all my students. Next week, I'll begin classes again by teaching rules and procedures, by introducing myself and asking my students to do the same. I'll be redecorating the classroom and rearranging desks. I'll be making new class lists and trying to gauge the personality and capabilities of 10 or more new classes.
However, having been through this once before, I have a better sense of how to go about all of this, and hopefully a more realistic notion of what to expect. Merely knowing approximately what level of English to expect from my students makes all the difference. At the end of last semester, I sat down and made a list of skills I wanted to work on with my students, and so this time around I can design lessons to teach skills such as story telling, giving directions, describing people and animals, improvising speech, and gearing speech to appropriate audiences. Sensibly, it seems that the most effective lessons last semester were ones which designed to teach a set of skills, rather than ones designed around a given subject matter, so I'm hopeful that this approach will be more successful.
I'm also coming into this semester armed with student responses to, and my own reflections on, last semester. Topping the list of things to improve upon is discipline. My students and I alike felt frustrated by the persistent noise and talking in most of my classes, which means I've got to find better means of managing things in the future. In the past, I would find myself shushing students instead of listening to those who were supposed to be speaking, and I couldn't teach for all the time I spent keeping kids quiet. I hope that by now I've got a better idea about how discipline is handled in general at the school so I can make my own policies better in accordance with them. In addition, the students have reinforced their desire to play games, listen to English music, and learn about "popular" things, all of which I hope to make into rather frequent rewards. I'm learning that I have to require the students to bring paper to class (its not a given, like I thought) and that I'm going to have to instruct
them NOT to tell their classmates the answers to a question before the student has a chance think the question through his/herself. And finally, I hope to invest more time relating to individual students and tailor my lessons to solving specific problems so that I can see students making identifiable progress. Last semester, I saw my Junior 1 students go from understanding nothing I said to understanding the majority of what I said and being able to construct their own (almost complex) sentences as well. This semester I hope to achieve and document the same sort of thing with all of my students.
In retrospect, however, I think last semester was perhaps more successful than I felt at the time. Not only am I convinced that my Junior 1 students made significant progress in both their comprehension and speaking abilities, but many other individual classes were also successful. The senior 2 students met with many of my friends from different countries as part of an international unit we were doing. My friends were impressed with them, and the students said they enjoyed the opportunity to meet new people and learn about other countries. I think my goals of making English a useful tool and allowing them to practice in smaller group situations were both met. I also think most of my friends enjoyed to opportunity to visit a school in China, so everyone learned something. We bordered on a conversation in Senior 1 class talking about stereotypes, and some of them wrote very creative skits to illustrate them. The Junior 2 students wrote excellent gingerbread stories at Christmas time, and they learned how
to set an American table by listening and following directions. There were certainly good days in every class, and their evaluations were largely positive.
I recently had the opportunity to attend an employment fair in Shandong province and hear some interviews by people applying for English teaching positions. All said, I think many of my students' English is far better than that of some of those applicants, and they are almost ready to graduate from college!! I guess I have high expectations, but my kids lived up to them pretty well. And its up to me now to figure out how to help them do even better.
Holidays
On a lighter note, these past few months have been perhaps most notable for the abundance of holidays, all duly celebrated Chinese style. From Halloween to the Lantern Festival on Feb. 15, these months have been full of festivities. From our celebrations, though, you would be hard-pressed to identify many of these "American" holidays. In some cases, the Chinese people here were hard pressed to recognize them too.
Take Halloween, for example. Our students were all well-versed in this holiday, as all children should be, and Ellen and I were greeted by a boy poking his hand though the gate as we walked to school in the morning. "Give me candy," he said. We laughed. "No, you have to say 'Trick or Treat'," we said, "and visit the library at lunch time." The book worms at our school were treated to candy on Halloween, although there was a notable dearth of jokes told that day. Unlike our students, the teachers and other adults were significantly less aware of Halloween. The subject prompted a discussion of burial rites and mean of remembering the deceased in my teachers class. One of the teachers in particular, Romeo, however, was quite baffled by my outfit-an entirely purple sweatsuit. "Emily, you usually dress so nicely, but you look like an athlete today," he said, seeming confused. "No," I replied. "I'm an eggplant. For Halloween, you know." I don't think that clarified the situation for Romeo much. It did,
however, make the whole "costume" (materials are hard to come by here) worthwhile, for it sent Ellen and I into hysterics for several minutes.
Ellen and I celebrated the next holiday, Thanksgiving, in Wuxi, watching plates full of meat dishes go around and around on the lazy-Susan in front of us. Wuxi, famous for its meat, was the destination of all 300 teachers and faculty from our school on the annual school trip. Ellen and I, being vegetarians, were none too impressed. We stayed in a nice hotel, from which we "snuck out" on Thanksgiving night to find ourselves some sustenance for which we could be truly thankful. I will always remember that Thanksgiving dinner as the one we ate sitting across from each other in a 24 hour cafeteria eating bocai (spinach) with chopsticks. I didn't miss the traditional Thanksgiving too much, though, for two days later we celebrated an entirely vegetarian Thanksgiving, complete with cranberry sauce and stuffing, in Haian with the 7 other Grinnellians residing in Jiangsu province. The only thing missing was my cousin, who always makes fun of my vegetarian diet at Thanksgiving.
Christmas was a season not soon to be forgotten, though perhaps more memorable for its general hilarity than anything else. If Christmas is commercial at home, it is doubly so here. All of the stores and hotels dutifully decorate, though sometimes is a year-round affair. There were certainly Santa Claus cutouts in restaurant windows when we arrived in August, and there still are. They are just more frequent in December. And there's no shortage of Christmas carols, either. Most of our students knew many Christmas stories and traditions, though we shared more with them as we made decorations for the annual Christmas party: Christmas "family" trees in Junior 1, Gingerbread People in Junior 2, Self-description color paper chains in Senior 1, and "hero of my heart" stars in Senior 2. We weren't the only ones preparing, though. In each of their classes, students prepared songs or short plays for the Christmas party on Dec. 24. Ellen and I judged the rehearsals with the other English teachers, an experience
which made me truly proud to be a teacher at this school. Those kids worked hard on their performances, all in English, and I'm glad to be at a school where they encourage this as much as writing papers and preparing for examinations. I was Santa Claus at the final party, where I flung peanuts, candy, and oranges to the students, said a few words, and got piles of presents beyond belief. I was disappointed to hear, however, that most of my students did not enjoy to party. They must be hard to please. I thought it was fabulous.
Christmas day, however, was less stellar, as I came down with a bad cold, had to teach in a freezing classroom, and ended up leaving the Christmas banquet early in search of medicine and sleep.
The solar new year wasn't so spectacular, though we did get the day off of school and on New Year's Eve, our students all "ran" together at Xuan Wu Lake park. Talk about Chaos. My favorite part of this holiday was being invited to one of the Junior 1 class parties, where we ate peanuts and candy, watched dances and skits, and even won door prizes. What fun!
Chinese Lunar New Year was everything that Christmas was not-a truly family time full of holiday spirit. I spent the season with various friends and their relatives in different parts of China where I witnessed fireworks exploding, made dumplings, and even got new clothes to celebrate the new year. I feel very lucky to have been welcomed into so many people's homes to share such an important holiday with them. I also feel very lucky to have avoided all contact with the fireworks that abounded and scared me at every explosion. I like living in a place where they have two calendars. Two New Years'. Two birthdays. Equal representation for both celestial bodies. It doesn't seem like a bad deal to me at all.
And Finally,
These past 4 months have been both harder and easier than the first few were. We settled into a routine, and the novelty of being in a new place started to wear off. I started to feel more comfortable being here and developed a small group people who I enjoy being with. At the same time, I began more and more to miss family and friends, the presence of people who I can truly identify with and love. I'm beginning to think that its difficult to make great friends when there are very few people around in the same position as I am. I feel older than the students here, younger than the teachers, and still obviously foreign. At school, I became more and more comfortable with my classes and job, but also less patient with myself when something went wrong. I think these are probably all things that recent graduates go through wherever they are, though perhaps being so far from home and in such a different place makes the strain greater sometimes. I also think that sometimes it makes the rewards greater. I
like the challenge of being here, of travelling. I'm still searching out ways to be a better teacher, person, and friend. I'm learning a lot, both about myself and about China. I'm living.
I have a few last words.
You know you've been living in China for a while when…
…you start referring to yourself as a foreigner.
…you look all directions when your crossing the street, even at a green light.
…you feel relieved when the zhengfan man comes back and starts selling breakfast on the street outside your dormitory again.
…you don't feel the need to apologize when you've stepped on people's feet, elbowed them in the stomach, or abused them in any such manner.
You know you're still a Grinnellian when…
…you try to figure out how to work stereotypes and NGO's into your lesson plans.
…you feel compelled to chastise people when they throw their trash on the ground, out the window, etc.
…music blaring from storefronts reminds you of Harris parties.
…you long for blue skies, orange leaves, and corn fields in autumn.
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