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Published: March 2nd 2010
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Pizza Hut Helper
Pizza Hut, without a doubt, wins all titles when it comes to business uniforms -- even a solid two months before Christmas and the spirit is hard to beat! As we prepare to head back to teach for a second term, a few reflections, rants, and stories from our teaching experiences this past semester seem appropriate. Here goes --
*A pretty nice bathroom is one that provides toilet paper; always save your napkins from McDonald’s. The napkins at Pizza Hut are especially nice. An exquisite bathroom also provides soap and a hand dryer - paper towels would be too much free paper for any one customer.
*The tricycle no longer applies to kids to young (or adults too old) for training wheels. Most tricycle owners live by the “Grinch that Stole Christmas” mantra - any tricycle, of any size, electric or leg propelled, can easily carry cargo four times as large as the trike itself.
*An electric mo-ped is not just a personal bike; more often than not, it can carry upwards of four people and is often a family vehicle. Forget the mini-van with a child seat - go ride a bike instead.
*Knee-high leather boots, coupled with the ever-sexy 3” stiletto heels, meet most standards of women’s dress here at school and are a completely appropriate choice of footwear to don while in front of the
classroom. Add a mini-skirt if you like - many of the educators consider this standard uniform.
In and Around the School The landscaping, primarily composed of one stinky “creek”, a handful of trees, and a lot of concrete naturally separates the older kids from the younger kids through the creation of more or less two campuses. The majority of the foreign teachers teach in the elementary grades (1-6), and I (Elizabeth) am the 6th grade teacher. Every once and a while, I start thinking of my students as older than they are because they are geographically speaking, the oldest on their side of the campus.
Of course thinking that 12 year-olds are ready for sex, drugs, and rock and roll, is just plain silly… but if one starts thinking in relative terms, one’s perspective twists, china-style, and things once deemed crazy seem
nearly normal. Sometimes I assume their maturity level incorrectly and on more than one occasion I am reminded by them, in not so subtle ways, that they are not quite as “ready for the adult world” as I expect them to be. Some ways more subtle than others - the
Drying Pork Next to Our Bicycles
"Any old place will due, Jim, just make sure those heads are dry by Tuesday." least subtle, of course, is breaking down in the classroom and crying. Over nothing.
In particular, two occasions of the senseless falling of tears did well enough to float to the top of the vat of classroom shenanigans. In one case, a student was reading a book he had hidden under his desk. Every kid, sometime in their life has been slow to clear their desk when asked… and so it started off as a typical not-ready-for-Elizabeth’s-oral-english-class behavior. However, after starting class by asking students to clear their desks, I then confiscate the books, notes, toys, money, food, or whatever else they are using to entertain themselves. I took the kid’s book nicely and within the minute, another book appeared on his desk; this too found its way into my pile of seized paraphernalia. I went on to teaching about something important, like the weather, or something, when I noticed this student was emptying all of his desks’ contents on top of his desk while at the same time tearing up. Asking, “What are you doing?!?” only produced more visible tears. Like reading one of those old “Choose Your Own Adventure” books, I stood there thinking, “Great, now what
Shanghai Dating Service
Set in the heart of the People's Park of Shanghai, every Saturday and Sunday proud parents post "classified" adds in attempt to find a sole-mate for their son or daughter. 1.62 m tall, brown eyes, female, earns $200 a month and likes long walks on the beach... should I do?” Do I comfort this boy? Do I send him to the teachers’ office? And then like the rapid clearing of clouds after a storm, the boy’s tear ducts dried up, he put his books back into his desk, and the lesson continued.
The second incident, due to a missing chair, caused more than one lesson’s worth of commotion. At the start of class I noticed a boy squatting chair-less behind his desk. He insisted that he didn’t have a chair, no other chair would do, and that nobody was able to provide him with any worthy substitute. And so there he squatted. No one in class seemed to be bothered by the student’s lack of sitting equipment nor were they able to express the location of or reason for the absence of this confounded chair. Trying to get class started without making any big scene, I took a chair from an absent student’s desk and offered it in the missing chair’s stay. After asking my usual beginning of class questions like, “What’s the weather today?” I realized my problem solving skills hadn’t quite done the trick and saw the boy squatting beside the past-offered chair. Apparently
Yangzhou Drive Through..
Who needs to store front when you can just install a drive through tunnel in your building?! my chair wasn’t good enough or had cooties or didn’t work well with the color of his eyes - hell, I don’t know what the kid was thinking - but he wasn’t going to sit in that chair for all the rice in China. After checking to make sure the chair wasn’t dirty or broken, I told him to sit in the chair, and apparently my requests were too much to handle. Requests lead to demands and those demands only led to tears, and there we found ourselves in a bit of a quandary. Thankfully the classmates informed me that it was neither my fault nor that of the chairs; I’m still confused about this one. I’m not a scary person, and I work quite hard at teaching non-tear inducing questions about the weather.
A Very Welcome Birthday Bash Towards the end of the term, when everyone was quite ready to finish up and leave, my birthday arrived as it does every year, on the morning of the 19th of January. This year, however, it was celebrated quite differently. The school has a policy of giving every employee either a cake or flowers for their
The birthday cake
Look at that beautiful chocolate/dragon fruit cake! special day. With a body of employees numbering over a thousand, a daily and quite steady flow of three-ish cakes/flower bouquets make their way through the school gate -- so many in fact that the school has one full time employee dealing with nothing more than cakes and flowers. In the land of infinite workers and a nearly infinite amount of work to be done, this almost seems normal…
At any rate, I received a beautiful cake complete with dragon fruit and chocolate frosting. Later that evening the whole foreign language team went out on the town for dinner. A complimentary attitude to that of Texan’s, here in China bigger is almost always better, and so alongside our dinner of peking duck, its pancakes, and later its fried bones, we had enjoyed nearly thirty dishes of food. To top it all off, the weather was just nice enough to ride bicycles to and from the party. What a great way to celebrate a birthday away from home.
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Peter Maxwell Bower
non-member comment
Cool
Thanks for this blog. It was good to read.