I wore both pants and a jacket on several occasions this week!
In class, I am doing a unit on Outer Space with my older kids. I really didn't care for how the textbook covered the topic, though. The textbook has a number of pages about what aliens might look like and what stars they might live on (STARS!). So I took this opportunity to design my own outer space unit. I kept things simple, but I also stuck to things that are scientifically true and interesting.
Something I learned while working on this unit for my kids is that the Chinese words for the planets are ridiculous. The word for Mercury is "水星", which means Water Star. Now, you may not know a whole lot about the planet Mercury. Allow me to fill you in on some key points: Firstly, and perhaps most importantly, there is no water on Mercury at all. It's too damn hot. Secondly, Mercury is not a star. It's a planet! Shuixing is literally the least accurate possible name for the planet Mercury.
Other planets feature fun names like "Gold Star" (Venus), "Wooden Star" (Jupiter), and "King of the Sea Star" (Neptune... this one at least makes sense).
I've been beefing up my classes with lots of videos featuring everyone's favorite Canadian Spaceman, Chris Hadfield. The kids have been going absolutely wild watching Hadfield floating through the ISS and showing us how he brushes his teeth and shaves his face in Zero-G. I never want this unit to end, it is so fun to teach. Another activity that we did this week was go out into the courtyard and make a "human solar system". I had the kids line up along the courtyard in distances that are relative to the distances between planets and the other major bodies of the solar system. The kids who were "Mercury", for example, were 1 step away from the "Sun" kids, while the "Kuiper belt" kids were over 100 steps away.
The activity was sort of chaotic. Letting 30 kids run around outside while shouting "LOOK HOW FAR AWAY URANUS IS" didn't work as well as I had fantasized. The kids seemed to enjoy running around though and I had fun doing a visual model, so I would declare it an overwhelming success.
My little kids have been doing assorted things with colors, shapes, body parts, numbers and the verb "to be". It's funny, I enjoy the curriculum of the older kids a lot more, but teaching the tiny kids their colors and their shapes is a lot more fun . I think it goes back to the kids themselves, the older kids are a lot more snarky and more likely to be misbehaving, while the little ones are a lot more innocent.
This is not to say that the youngest students are perfect. There is one child in particular who is an absolute menace. I am pretty sure he has a strong case of ADHD and perhaps also a learning disability. While all the other kids are paying attention and happily shouting out answers to my questions ("this cup is RED!"), he is usually in the back corner of the room, facing the wall and trying to eat his own shirt.
I feel bad for the kid, but he is also very difficult to work with. These are the sorts of things that all teachers struggle with, I suppose, and I am no exception. Something that I am confronted with a lot here is the conflict of whether or not to single any kids out. Who do I focus my time on, and who needs the most help?
For example, as I am sure you all remember from your days in school (if right now if you are also a teacher), the same 6 kids raise their hand to answer every single question in class. Day in and day out, these are the only kids who participate at all. If I focus on them, then the students who actually need the most help (and motivation) get left in the dust, but if I ignore these precocious little learners then I am ignoring the only people who are getting anything out of our time together in the first place.
There's no simple answer to this, obviously, and it is something that is debated in classrooms, meeting rooms, and government office all over the world. I don't thing that I have the answer yet, but it has been eye opening to experience the phenomenon from the other side of the teacher's desk, so to speak. Well, it's really more of a teacher's podium in my case. I do have a desk, but it's not in the classroom so the comparison is not very relevant right now.
My language studies are coming along. I have been taking several practice tests for the HSK, which is the Chinese Language proficiency exam that is standard in mainland China as well as most of the world. There are 6 HSK tests, each one exponentially more difficult than the last one. They are somewhat analogous to the CEFR tests for European Languages, if you are familiar with that.
According to my practice test scores, I can pass the HSK 1 with flying colors. This is, universally speaking, pretty small potatoes. If the HSK 6 is "Can speak Chinese completely fluently in any and every situation in their life", the HSK 1 is "Knows about Chinese and accepts that it's a real language". But I am still excited for myself personally. It means that I definitely know 150-200 words and can demonstrate that in an exam format. According to one of their websites, there are sites that administer the test in Guangzhou, and it only costs about 100 yuan to take the HSK 1 exam. So, if I am not busy in the next few weekends I may go and take it just to make it official.
The other reason I am so excited is that I've been in China for 4 months now and can pass the HSK 1 with ease. If I continue along this trend then, theoretically, I should be able to pass the HSK 3 or even 4 by the time I go back to the USA. While having the HSK1 on your resume is not that impressive beyond the novelty of it, having the HSK 3 or 4 on your resume is legitimately impressive, and for all intensive purposes it indicates that you can communicate with someone in Chinese in most basic to intermediate situations.
This entire trip has been such an unforgettable experience, but at the end of the day experience is basically all I am walking home with. Sure, I am getting paid, but not really that much. Yes, I will have a year of teaching experience under my belt, but that year is pretty useless in America without teaching certifications or experience in US classrooms. Now, I do not regret my decision to come here, and I wouldn't trade my time here in China for anything (except maybe some Cheeze-It Grooves), but being able to bring home a certification in Chinese language would go a long way in justifying my year-long interlude from a career/job perspective.
Laura and I only did one major thing of note this week, and that is that we went to Guangzhou and did the night-time cruise on the Pear River. It was a lovely evening, and it was nice and chilly. It's so bizarre how much I crave cold weather now! The cruise was about an hour long and was actually really cheap to get tickets for. I would do it again in a heartbeat. It was awesome to see all of the city lights at night from a unique vantage point, and the boat pulled up right along side the monolithic Canton Tower. The tower was beautiful at night, and had it's own little rotating color/light display show going on.
Before the cruise, Laura and I spent some time on Beijing street, which is a fancy shopping district in GZ. We didn't buy anything, but we did a lot of people watching. Speaking of watches, everyone was trying to sell us counterfeit/stolen watches. It was ridiculous! You couldn't go more than 15 yards without being approached by another person wearing baggy clothes and holding out polaroids of their wares. This was slightly annoying but it led to a really funny exchange when one of the watch-peddlers saw me and started speaking to me in Spanish. Well, he tried to anyway.
"Hey! Amigo! Amigo!", he kept shouting. I had no idea why this little Chinese man would see me and think that I was a Spanish speaker. Maybe, I thought to myself, it's because shouting about watches in English wasn't working on me.
"No!", realized Laura, "It's your mustache!". You see, I recently changed up my facial hair configuration because I felt like it was time for a change. I thought I looked really goofy for a while but I'm starting to like it. Anyway, we are pretty sure that the Chinese guy thought I was from Mexico because I am white-ish and have a mustache. Racial profiling, I tell ya!
Since I like to make these blog posts excruciatingly long (it's really just a test to see which of my friends and family like me the most. If you're still reading this then you've won!), but have run out of topical weekly things to talk about this time around, I will conclude my post with a brief "character study" about our friend/helper/roommate/guide Jason. He's an interesting fellow and I think a more in-depth look at the guy would help you to understand my life here so far, and help to provide a clearer picture of my stories going forward.
Jason
Jason describes himself as a party animal. This, above all
other things, is true.
I first met Jason on a (you guessed it) blisteringly hot
summer day in Zhaoqing, China. He had been sent to pick me and Laura up from
our old school and to take us to our new lodgings in Foshan. The first
impression I had of Jason was that his English was incredible. After spending a
month in a somewhat rural town (by Chinese standards), I had had plenty of
experiences with people who thought
they could speak English. Even my bosses and coworkers at that first school
were difficult to understand and interact with. Jason was a breath of fresh
air.
He pulled up to our hotel in Zhaoqing, hopped out of the car and ran over to us. He is rather tall (for Chinese standards), and stands at nearly my height. He has jet black hair kept in a very trendy Chinese style, and his skin is quite dark for a Han Chinese. His cheekbones are so high and sharply defined that one time I stood to close to him and my face just spontaneously started bleeding.
"Hello! I'm Jason. This is our driver Mr. Wong. Let me help you with those things". We shook hands and then hastily shoved our suitcases into the hatchback of the van with which our new school had provided Jason and Mr. Wong for the purposes of picking us up.
"We are very hungry. What places around here are good?", were the next things he said to us. This is around the time that I learned the second thing about Jason: the man can EAT. During the course of that first day with him, I shared THREE huge meals with Jason. Nevermind the fact that Laura and I had already eaten breakfast and lunch before he came and picked us up. He insisted on taking us to lunch at a nearby hotel and paying for everything (well, the school paid. It was a nice gesture though). Those three meals were all enormous family-style restaurant meals and Jason ate me under the table every single time. Wait, that doesn't sound right. Basically he eats a lot.
This is particularly frustrating because, true to Chinese form, Jason is rail thin. He's "turn-sideways-and-he'll-disappear" thin. After our second or third feast on that first day I asked Jason how he stays so skinny when he eats, easily, twice as much as I do at every single meal. "I don't know", he replied, "I play basketball sometimes".
This brings us to the third Jason attribute: he loves basketball more than anything except for maybe eating and partying. He was visibly disappointed when I told him that I am not terribly into sports, and that basketball is by far my least favorite of the traditionally American sports. Kobe Bryant is Jason's idol, and he has the posters, shoes, phone wallpaper, and Lakers jerseys to prove it. Jason spends at least two or three days per week playing basketball after school with a number of the other teachers. I still don't think this can possibly account for how tiny he is though. He is eating most of the times that I see him.
After our lunch and otherwise pleasant ride to Foshan, Jason dropped a rather major surprise on us: He was going to be our roommate.
Now, before coming to China Laura and I had both been assured that we would be living alone in our own apartment. We had previously been warned that we may have to have a roommate if the number of foreign teachers hired at the school demanded it, and we said it was fine. The thing that was surprising and upsetting was that we had been explicitly told that this was not going to be the case, and then lo and behold, here was Jason.
Jason is, altogether, a rather inconspicuous roommate. He is honestly not around that often, as he actually has his own lodgings at the school where we all work. Now that the heat is not so unbearable, Jason is around even less frequently (because he doesn't need to use the AC units in our apartment). When he is around, he usually stays in his room and watches Chinese shows on his tablet. Also, he eats, obviously.
After 3 months seeing the guy nearly every day, I have to say that I'm not entirely sure what Jason's job is. He has a number a things that he does for our school. He is a teacher in his own right, and teaches the CIPP2 classroom of Third graders. I suppose this could be considered his "main job", but he is also a bit of an errand runner for our boss Angel. He was also tasked, as I have chronicled in this blog, with helping me and the other foreign teachers getting situated in our new homes. On top of all these things, I've seen him doing a number of other odd jobs around the school, and he has also hinted that he has a few other part time jobs on the weekend.
Needless to say, he's a busy dude. He's pretty good at most of these jobs. I enjoy working with the CIPP2 kids when Jason is in there because he has a pretty commanding presence with the children. They listen to him as soon as he stands up, and he has gotten me out of a few situations already this school year.
On the other hand, he's been a bit... inconsistent in some of the other areas of his job. I chronicled the problems of our first week on here pretty in a pretty detailed post, but a brief review of that situation was as follows:
We walked around for about 12 hours in 100 degree heat, getting things like cell phones and bus cards, and then had to have our pictures taken for some secret heretounforetold visa application.
He also frequently forgets important things, like when we had to walk to the visa office/jail place and, once we got there, he realized he forgot all of our visa information. Or the time that it took over two weeks to get our clothesline installed on our porch.
But you have to take the bad with the good, and Jason is really just a fun guy to be with. He's really great to spend time with, especially on the weekends. He has a special connection with some people who own a KTV place in town, and so whenever we want to go out to Karaoke he has us covered. He is also an invaluable asset when it comes to practicing my Chinese. I have said on here before that it is somewhat difficult to strike up a conversation with a Chinese person, and that is true, but Jason has been pretty much my only resource when I want to ask about pronunciations or about word definitions.
Jason is loud and funny and has a very strange vocabulary. I would definitely classify him as "fluent" in English, but the majority of the phrases he uses comes down to the following: "Maybe" "I think so" "I don't know" and "maybe later". It's incredible just how many questions, comments, and conversation points that he can reply to with a "Maybe...... maybe later". It doesn't always make sense, but that's Jason for you. Oh yeah, and profanity. He loves English swear words and phrases, and uses them constantly. It's a good thing that his vocabulary is so predictable as well, because he has been getting harder and harder to understand since we met him. It's almost impossible to picture the Jason that we met on that first day, because I never have any idea what he is talking about anymore. I think he just mumbles when he doesn't have to be "on" in front of a class or in front of his bosses, and I think he is just comfortable with us now.
Aside from the rare language barriers, we do occasionally run into culture barriers. We often misunderstand each other even though we are fully aware of the meanings of the words each other is saying. Jason is always full of advice that doesn't make sense. When I got sick last month he pulled me aside and said "Jon you get sick because you drink cold water. You should only drink very hot water. My doctor tells me that cold water is what makes you sick". These strange cultural bumps carry over into political feelings as well. Jason is very guarded, as most Chinese people are, with how he feels about politics. Recently he asked the foreign teachers "Why so many people like to go camping in Hong Kong?", which is the extent of what most people think they know about the HK protests that are going on right now. When Nathan explained to Jason the gist of what they protests are about, he got very angry. He does not think that people should have the right to protest anything. This idea is so, literally, foreign to me that I stayed out of the conversation.
He can be annoying and he can be wonderful. I've wanted to hug him and I've wanted to shove him down a stairwell. Jason's state of dress is trendy in a way that I could never hope to be. He's never not stylishly dressed, whether he is at work, out for the evening, or even just sitting around on his bed.
After he has had a few drinks, Jason, like many people, gets extremely serious. He always pulls Laura and I aside and tells us how great we are, and that he hopes we enjoy our time in China as much as he has enjoyed getting to know us. These times are always warm and welcome. I honestly do feel similarly, though. He's a strange sort of friend, but he is definitely a friend, and one that I hope I will be able to stay in touch with even after I leave China. He does not always help us, and he is not always reliable, but he is always willing to try to help, and I think that's what matters most.
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