Blog 3: School teaching, new location and negotiating with China...

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Edgar in China #3
Sunday February 8th - Sunday March 1st

What can I say? The last few weeks have been a rollercoaster of nonsense, good times and bad, problems, negotiations and strangeness. Where to begin?

Firstly, Teaching Practice.
As you will hopefully remember, I left you last time as I was about to embark on my one week of teaching in Beijing. There were 5 of us, all allocated time slots for a 2 hour lesson each day in Middle School where our students were supposed to be around 14 years old and had signed up for extra English lessons as the school term didn’t start till the next week. Needless to say, I was very nervous. I planned my lessons but nothing can prepare you for the first day in a Chinese classroom.
The kids came in and were very quiet and well behaved but as it turned out, a little in shock. I was second up on the first day and there are a few things that go through your head when you first get up in front of them all.
1. I wish my hands would stop shaking....I discover that writing on a blackboard is not as easy as it looks and my handwriting has regressed about 23 years.
2. Do they even understand what I am saying? It’s so hard planning work for a class when you have no idea what they can and can’t do. Do they even understand the instructions? They certainly don’t like getting up out of their chairs. There seems to be one who is translating for the others, thats good.
3. A sea of blank looking faces. No-one is giving you anything back. You are the loneliest person in the world when you have faces that you cannot read staring at you. You’re asking for words, suggestions, vocabulary...and nothing.
4. Power on through regardless. They will come round.....fingers crossed!

So went my first lesson. It was hard work, they were very quiet and there are so many things you don’t know...but it was generally ok. Once that was done, I was ok as I now knew how to approach the rest of the week.

My second day teaching, I was first up for half an hour and this was the day we were being assessed by our trainers. I started with a general knowledge quiz about famous places around the world and they seemed to like that. From the silences I had faced the day before I had taken the executive decision that if they weren’t keen on offering words then if I made it into a competition between groups of them, that would inspire more answers. Plus they were getting used to us now and were not so shy so the lesson went really well and I was really pleased with it.

My feedback from the lovely Margaret who was our trainer was very positive - she liked my lesson, and said I was like an “elegant swan gliding around the classroom looking calm”. As we had our feedback in our groups, “elegant swan” has become my new name...elegant swan vs. Windy dragon; I guess that’s just yin and yang!!

So the rest of teaching week went well, our class were really good and I think we got the best ones. We heard horror stories from others that 20 extra pupils had turned up, that no one spoke any English at all, that some were getting 9 instead of 12 year olds, that kind of thing, but we all had fun and I set them homework and marked it (music posters) and for the last lesson I got them sweets all individually wrapped and the amount they got depended on how much effort they had put into their homework. It was a good week. We also had their Chinese English teachers come and sit in and took notes and photos of our blackboard work, and my lesson with the quiz was filmed by a Chinese teacher - all very strange but our teaching methods are very different to teaching in China. English is drilled and they just learn lists of words. Sounds awful. One of the Chinese teachers told Vikki that if a child spoke Chinese in our English lessons, we should make them stand at the front and bark like a dog. Vikki told her we did things differently in England. But Chinese discipline in schools is harsh. We were told that teachers are expected to and will hit the children, and while we were certainly not allowed to, we were also told that really all we could do was look the other way. Kicking up a stink is not going to change it and parents expect teachers to discipline their children. There was however a case last year where a teacher killer a girl by hitting her with an iron bar and throwing her out of a window. That clearly didn’t go down too well...

On our last day at the school we were given a little present each by our class - a Chinese bracelet for luck. We then had a ceremony with the headteacher and had our photos taken and were all given a wooden hangy up good luck thingymibob and then a really nice lunch.
So the end of teaching week confirmed several things for me:
1. I will enjoy teaching.
2. Teaching is hard work.
3. Chinese kids are smart arses.

The end of Spring Festival.
The full moon after Chinese new year signals the end of Chinese Spring Festival, and would you believe it, there are more fireworks. An entertaining evening was had when on a perfectly innocent trip to the 7-11 to get food supplies, we noticed (well, you can’t miss them) a couple of Chinese men setting off firecrackers on the pavement outside. We went out to do a spot of filming, but it got so loud we went back into 7-11 until they had stopped. We left and crossed the road. Everyone else was walking down the street and I took the opportunity to do a little extra filming - I had noticed the fat full moon out and the men with the firecrackers were still mincing about...I realised too late that the reason they had stopped was to light a big rocket (of the banginyourface variety) on the opposite pavement to where I was about to walk past...all I can say is it went off, I squealed like a girl, ran in blind panic, nearly took two Chinese people out walking the other way, ploughed past my little crowd who were happily ambling along well past the danger zone and who thought the whole thing that had culminated in my racing full tilt towards and then past them with fireworks hot on my tail, very funny indeed. Well. You know who your friends are..BUT, being the true professional that I am, kept the camera running the whole time. This will be included in the Beijing documentary I am currently putting together.
And that was the end of the fireworks. Since that night, I have not heard another single solitary one, and I have to confess, they are not missed at all!!

Our next trip out.
The Sunday after teaching practice we had our big day out. Firstly, we went to the summer palace, which was beautiful. It was a lovely day, clear blue skies but freezing freezing cold...we walked around the lake which was still mostly frozen. There were all kinds of things going on there - women doing tai chi with balls balanced on tennis rackets and a man painting Chinese calligraphy on the floor with a giant brush. Apparently he was writing Buddhist mantras to send out good karma across the world. There is a real spiritual side to China in these little calm pockets of the world that make you just want to stop and watch for hours.

The Summer Palace (we didn’t get to go in it) is another example, like the Forbidden City, of the extreme extravagance that the Emperors and Empresses had at their disposal. Su-shi (don’t know how to spell her name) ruled China for many years and had over 100 dishes for every meal prepared so she could choose what she wanted. Madness.

Walking around the lake at the Summer Palace was possibly the third closest I had come to dying from cold exposure, and when we got to the end, we really pissed off the people in the gift shop as 82 frozen foreign teacher interns piled into the shop as a rumour had quickly spread that there were heaters inside. There were...good times!

After a quick lunch we were taken to see the Hutongs. These are the residential housing areas around Beijing. Everyone used to live in a Hutong (basically grey concrete streets full of little houses), but a lot got knocked down for the building needed for the Olympics. Still, China has noticed the virtue in getting as much money from tourists as it possibly can and has designated some Hutong areas as protected. We all got rickshaws, which was quite a sight - 50 odd rickshaws all in a great long line pelting though the Hutongs, racing each other and generally causing a commotion. The bikes are big and old and look heavy, there are no gears so I couldn’t imagine how tiring this must be for the men doing the pedalling - and they are not great strapping young things either, they are all fairly old men who look like they need to come to my house and be fed a big fat hot dinner! Still, they were good fun. I thoroughly recommend Hutong travelling via rickshaw!

General mincing in the Hutong didn’t really turn up too much out of the ordinary, except perhaps for the dog wearing shoes. That’s all I’m going to say about that...

After the Hutongs we went to Tiananmen Square. It’s big and was possibly the coldest place on Earth when we got there. We didn’t really linger. We took photos, and Vikki took a photo of Iggle Piggle (blue teddy thing she has and is taking photos of in auspicious places) but then the police riot van came and sidled up rather conspicuously beside us so after some warming up star jumps and general jogging on the spot we decided to move on. .. It’s frightening to be somewhere like that, knowing what went on, but with the overall sense of denial about it. You have to put your bags through metal detectors to get in, there are police EVERYWHERE but our guide told us that when we are on the square, if anyone asks him about the students revolt or anything like that, he would answer that he didn’t know what we were talking about and leave it at that. There are so many plain clothes coppers you can’t say anything in case someone hears. Mind you, the plain clothes police are easy to spot. They walk in formation like regular police, except they are wearing jeans....or maybe that’s just what China WANTS us to think.....hmmmm.....it’s just bizarre that such extreme measures are taken to prevent another repeat of “what never happened” - the implicit sense of denial coupled with the explicit heavy handed security approach and blatant police presence just makes it feel quite sinister. We are all a little confused as although there is censored information across china, surely the overseas Chinese know and come back with knowledge about what has really been going on....its bizarre.

After Tiannenmen Square it was dinner and Beijing duck...meat in China is not for the feint hearted. Everything comes pretty much as it was only cooked. The heads and arms and legs and inside bits are all usually there...turns out duck head and necks make really good handles for when you’re slicing meat. Tasty though.

Then it was on to the Chinese acrobatic show which was pretty amazing and I only saw 2 people nearly fall off and seriously hurt/main/kill themselves a couple of times. Lots of bendy people jumping through very high things...it was good.

The last week in Beijing.
We saw rain for the first time on our last week. Well, this is what happened. There was a fire in one of the big TV buildings in the city and because the air was so dry, it ripped through this place and it was totally destroyed. We drove past it a few days later and it looked like if you touched it, it would collapse into a pile of ash. Well, China wasn’t happy, so they decided to make it rain. This is true, by the way...they fired rockets up into the sky - I had heard of cloud seeding in the US on the wheat plains - and basically the crap from the rockets cause water particles to collect (because you need dust in the air for there to be rain) and when enough form they make clouds and you get enough and you get rain. So we got rain. It’s not nice rain though and I felt a bit scared when it landed on my face. My teacher told us that the first time he experienced rain in Beijing he walked in it for 20 minutes to get to his school (there are no taxis when it rains, another fact), and by the time he got there, his face was burning, he had bright red cheeks for the whole day, and when he tried to read, his vision was so blurred and his eyes burning so much, he simply couldn’t for the rest of the day. Bad times!

The rain in Beijing only lasted a day, and then we got snow. Then we got more snow, and by the time it was our last day, it was about 5 inches deep. But after the rain incident, it seemed more sinister than fun...still, it looked very pretty!

During our last week we went to a vegetarian restaurant for dinner, where I think I ate the nicest food ever. It is run by a Buddhist monk, and you basically go to the back of this car park and go through a flap in the wall and there you find yourself in the most amazing place. There are drapes all over the ceiling and thick curtains instead of doors so it feels like you’re in an enormous tent. The menu has dishes with crazy names like “I will love you forever mushroom casserole”, “He who wakes early in the Spring shall appreciate the magnificence of nature noodles”, that kind of thing. It was here I saw tea on offer at over £100 a pot!

We got taken to our own private dining room which had its own music playing and a Buddhist statue...our place settings were giant leaves, we had sea shells to rest our wooden carved chopsticks on...it was gorgeous. I had shitake mushroom and bean casserole and rice with some dumplings and it was delicious. They brought in a bowl of oranges at the end in a big wooden bowl filled with dry ice, it was all very mystical and wholesome and you just felt healthy simply being there. Better than the grotty canteen, or Tenko as we have controversially been calling it.

Our Placements.
On the Tuesday of our last week, we finally found out where we were going. Vikki and I were down to go to a city called ZhongShan in Guangdong province, and we were to be posted at a university. This was a surprise as we didn’t know that universities were an option, and our training had all been aimed at younger learners. We have basically been taught how to be children’s entertainers and so the prospect of a university was exciting, but also a little intimidating. Still, it was in Guangdong which is where I wanted to go.

ZhongShan is way down in the south of China, you can spit on Hong Kong from here to give you an indication of location, (or alternatively you could also look on a map).Claire was off to ShangHai and there was a few days of people complaining, being pleased and also being generally shafted. The Mexicans and Spanish had not been told by the company that the Chinese in a nutshell, don’t like them, and the only option for them was to go further north to teach the Mongolians. They were not amused, as you can imagine. We also have one black guy on our course, Brian from Holland, and they also told him basically, there would be a problem placing him as he is black...this is the kind of information you need to know before you pay your money and move to Beijing...but I think by the end of the week people had generally got their heads around where they were going and who with.

Our Graduation and the longest day of my life.
We finished our last lesson Thursday morning. We had Thursday afternoon to pack. Thursday night was our graduation (for the theory part of the TEFL) and graduation after party - free bar till 2am. The food was average, but we went to a bar in San le tun where there was a free bar and a decent band (called the Bad Apples). As you can imagine, no one held themselves back. Now all of this is very good in theory. But actually, the reality was we had to get home and check out of our rooms by 4am (so no time for sleep, plus still rather wasted) sit in the coffee shop downstairs for 2 hours while everyone handed their keys in, get to the airport, fly 2 hours to ShangHai, wait in the airport 2 hours, then fly another 2 hours to GuangZhou to be picked up by 2 men from our university in a very nice people carrier and drive ANOTHER 2 hours to our apartment. You can imagine how tired we were. Then, on entering the apartment, we discovered the following:
1. It was very dirty.
2. It was still filled with clothes, socks, general nonsense from the interns from before
3. There was no western toilet. We have all been PROMISED a Western toilet in our apartments.

We were also told we had half an hour to “freshen up” before going to the university for a big welcome meal with the department heads and big cheeses there. Well, I will spare you the details but the situation pretty much went along the lines of:

Vikki “I’m not staying here. It’s dirty and there’s no toilet”.
Chinese man “this is the reality of China”.
Vikki “I’m not staying here”
Chinese man “But there have been 4 other western interns before you, they found it ok”
Vikki “I’m not staying here”
Chinese man “but....we live with Chinese toilets...”
Vikki “I’m not staying here”
Chinese man: Looking rather awkward..”...oh.....”.

So we trotted off to dinner in a very nice banquet room in the university, (which by the way, is a ten minute walk away from our house). We had the nicest food ever - prawns the size of horses, crab, fish, soup, fresh green veg!!!, all manner of tasty things. You get a wine glass with a very small amount of red wine that is for toasting, and every few minutes someone gets up and toasts a person or the whole table and everyone has to stop eating and neck their bit of wine and some dutiful Chinese man comes and refills everyone’s glasses and you carry on eating and then a few minutes later, usually when you have your mouth full with something, someone will come over and say “Lucy, I wish you best success and hope you enjoy your time here with your students”, and you have to stand up and drink you wine, sit back down, carry on eating, then someone else will come over, “Lucy, I wish to welcome you to our school” and you stand up and drink your wine and sit down and carry on eating....and so it goes on. Its’ a wonder any food every gets eaten here, this is going on with everyone else around me as well, it becomes quite comical, and then people start getting really drunk and it just spirals down hill from there really.

Anyway, after our dinner we got taken to our apartment and arranged to be taken to a hotel that night. Just down the road - it was gorgeous! And it had a toilet and a hot shower that stayed at a regular temperature the whole time and everything!
We were met the next morning by 2 women from the school, Melody, who is a very trendy not shy about coming forward English teacher, and a painfully shy Miss Who who didn’t speak much English but was in charge of the wallet. Anyway, they came with our text books and timetables and here was the next thing. We were both down to teach on a Sunday morning, and Vikki was working 6 days of the week, I was working 4. We had a very long breakfast-lunch with them where again, we had delicious food and generally chatted about school and England and it was all very pleasant and civilised. Their boss turned up to join us and after many phone calls to and fro it was decided that we were to stay another night in the hotel and in the meantime they would have the apartment cleaned and a western toilet built. We decided to believe it when we saw it and spent the day shopping and buying supplies.

The supermarket has its usual tanks full of live things - there were the usual turtles, fish and prawns etc but this time we also saw great big toads  yuk! And just as Vikki asked me “I wonder how they get the fish home, do you think they are still alive?” we saw one being clubbed several times over the head by a wooden spikey mallet thing, so I guess the answer is no. No they aren’t.

We went to our apartment late Sunday afternoon to find it totally spotless and the spare toilet lo and behold, contained a shiny new western toilet, complete with one of those silent closing lids! The main problem was, was that there is a bathroom in each of our bedrooms, which is the hole in the floor, but the shower head is pretty much right on top of it, so you have to virtually stand IN the toilet to take a shower. The western toilet is in the bathroom attached to the 3rd spare bedroom and so our own toilets have been ingeniously turned into wetrooms. We have bought some bbq grills to cover over the very large hole in the floor, then we have covered that with a rubber non slip mat which has perforated holes in so the water can still go down, and a plastic stool that covers where the hole is so we don’t tread on it by accident when for example, washing hair and stumbling around with soap in our eyes...which was bound to happen sooner or later, most likely to me. So in all, I am very pleased with my en suite wet room and we hailed the western toilet as a success for negotiation skills, for which I have Vikki to thank as she did all the hard work. Next all we had to tackle was the timetable, which would be easier for as it turned out, the western toilet is not a stipulation in our contract, its merely advised. The contract however, stated we work days Monday to Friday. I have some lessons that don’t finish till 9pm but that’s another issue...

Anyway, we started our lessons and I have 2 classes of freshmen (so they are around 20-21) and they want to go to New Zealand to do a bachelors. In order to do this, they need to get a score of 6 or more in the Ielts test, which is a Cambridge university devised test that looks at whether their language level is good enough for work or study abroad. This is what we’re teaching, and this is all the guidance we have had.

My first class of 14 are a very mixed bunch, a couple are really good, the rest I get the same blank faces I got in Beijing...in fact, after my first lesson I decided that the 12 year olds were actually better and I was very disheartened. Plus, as we only have 2 classes several times a week, our lesson plans have to be done every single day. Other people we know have for example, 16 classes to teach the same thing to, so they only need to plan for 1 lesson a week and just teach it 16 times. Ours is a lot more labour intensive...

Anyway, to cut it short, by the end of this week I feel I have bonded a little more with my class and I think I just have to take it back to basics with them, after all, as I have discussed with Vikki, she’s been a teacher 7 years and finds this hard, I have a grand total of 2 hours experience and no guidance or curriculum or anything, and I am also only an intern and here to do other things than sit in my room planning lessons for surly Chinese adolescents. My second class who I only get twice a week are a lot better and very friendly, and I practiced my Chinese on them at the end of our second lesson. They had no idea what I said at first but I think that’s because they were expecting Cantonese and I of course am only currently fluent in Mandarin...The general rule of thumb here is to try not to get too stressed about it, not to lose any sleep, and hope for a more fun placement next time. I have however, made friends with the security guard at the gate. I like to say hello to people - I will give a Ni Hao to the woman with the noodle vat in the shop below our apartment, to the woman selling pineapple on the road on the way into uni - and they all beam and say hello back, and I have been saying hello to the old man on the gate. The first couple of times I got a brief smile. Then I started getting a Ni Hao back, but the last 2 times, I now get a salute! He jumps up to attention with a big smile and salutes me! Its very funny and very sweet.

While this has been going on, a new Chinese English teacher has arrived and I have had 2 lessons of mine given to her and Vikki has lost 4, which means I am doing more lessons than her now and the school told Vikki on Thursday that her new lessons were ALL going to be evening ones (so till 9pm) and they were lessons the students could sign up to do so they weren’t even compulsory. Well, again the shit hit the fan and there were lots of teddies being slung around and the current situation is as follows:
I am waiting for 2 more lessons to be added to my timetable. Vikki is now still waiting for her additional 4. We are doing no more than 2 evenings per week. We will have 2 hours of Mandarin lessons a week. If it stays like this, we will battle on with it. If they continue to mess us around, Vikki is going to leave and go to Australia and I will be here on my own, which will be weird, but I actually don’t mind as it will force me to learn Mandarin a lot more quickly and I can dedicate myself to studying and lesson planning. It is after all, only until mid July and not the end of the world. So we shall see...

Yesterday, we were told we would be having lunch with Edward (our interpreter / gopher man who we like but gets treated horribly by the others) and his boss. They took us to a revolving restaurant and presented Vikki with 2 bottles of Brandy (which cost £100 each). I got nothing and have remained pretty much invisible ever since.

After lunch, they drove us around for a bit and then told us we were going for dinner at a restaurant that was changing its name and lots of big cheeses from various schools would be there. I rather feel like the show pony that gets wheeled out on special occasions but that’s ok...not too bored of it just yet. I also put my boots on on purpose so I was giant Amazon woman and the tallest person in ZhongShan last night.

We had decided we were going for a drink and although they kindly drove us there, they also stayed the whole time so our whole Saturday was completely hijacked by Chinese men...so we now know that we have to tell them we are busy and not tell them where we’re going in future!!!

Oh, outside the restaurant in the afternoon, there was a pond FULL of fish! I have never seen anything like it, we were feeding them and they were practically clambering out of the water to get to the food and swimming over each other - I have taken photos and some film. I need to put my Beijing film together and then work on my new one....

In summary: It’s been a tiring and stressful time and I hope we are over the worse and it will get better from here on in...we are just waiting for China to pull the carpet out from underneath us again...but in the meantime, it is warm and sunny and I think I may be getting a bit of a tan on my arms 

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Comments

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