Christina in China

I had a week after I arrived in Jiangyou to settle in a little before I started teaching. I had to go to Chengdu (about three hours drive) for a medical exam in order to get my visa changed to a one-year visa. There’s a medical clinic that seems to exist for the purpose of making sure that foreigners entering China for over a month aren’t plagued with diseases and that Chinese that are traveling around aren’t plagued with diseases, either. I saw three other laowai there, which is more than I’d seen in one day since I’d come to Jiangyou. It was a sight to see. The medical clinic is a very strange thing. I went with Wendy (Miss Xiong) from our department, who translated things and got me water and cookies and was generally wonderful, a school driver, an official who had to go to Chengdu on business, and one of the foreign students from Thailand.

Basically, I walked from station to station, carrying a paper and having people abruptly perform various medical tasks on me. First stop: having blood drawn. They do an HIV/AIDS test and who-knows-what else on the blood. I was actually pleasantly surprised that they stuck me so quickly. No one can ever find a vein on my arm. Next stop: downstairs to have an ultrasound for some reason. The woman said, “Shirt up,” and proceeded to lift my shirt before smearing this cold wet stuff on my stomach, running some device over it, and scribbling on my paper. Then, I went to station three, where a doctor actually did an EKG on me. He was a little more descriptive: “Shirt up, bra off.” Then he stuck all these little suction cup-type things all over me. Stop 4: chest x-ray. Stop 5 (final stop) was where a man looked at my eyes, ears, and tested my smelling capabilities. Apparently, they aren’t too hot, since I misidentified alcohol as vinegar. And there we were. It was strange, no doubt, but not that bad, and Wendy and I talked about her family in Chongqing, Chinese weddings, kids playing computer games, and various other interesting things.

I started teaching a few days later and basically had little idea what to expect. CEE has a teaching curriculum, of which I’m using Book One. The book starts out with introductions and greetings and goes to various things you do and say when making friends. It teaches you to carry on a conversation in English, which is a pretty neat approach, in my opinion. The first lesson is (predictably) teacher introduction, student introductions to each other (“My name is…,” “I am from…”), class rules, filling out the ever-handy index cards, and the name game with the students’ new English names.

The students seem to get a kick out of my introduction. I tend to overexaggerate gestures to act out the words I’m saying, make goofy faces, etc. They’re all astonished at how tall my brother Paul is, that my mom is a nurse and a teacher, various things like that. Just inmy few weeks teaching, I can tell why they say China is a group-oriented culture. When I ask a question, the entire class choruses a “yes” in unison. If I ask questions to individuals, they confer with five or six of the nearest people to them before answering (although a lot of this is because they don’t understand me or the question). It’s very group-driven and yet very competitive, which plays itself out in a lot of blatant cheating. I haven’t decided how I’m going to deal with that yet. I haven’t really, since most of the things I do are in-class exercises that I just check for completion.

The hugest challenge is the varying levels of the students. In one class, I have a student who is reading Charlotte’s Web and visits my apartment to chat in English, a student who writes well and wants to be an interpreter (and who, incidentally, answers every question I ask in class…my just desserts for being a know-it-all student for years), but many more who can’t understand simple questions like, “How are you doing today?” or “What is your name?” I feel like I’m boring them and going way over their heads, often both during the same class.

CEE has a teaching curriculum, complete with already-formulated lesson plans, which I’m using and adapting a little, along with using their listening book. The CEE curriculum focuses on developing basic conversational skills in English: introductions, telling about yourself and your family, asking questions, etc. So my students are learning how to use English to make friends and carry on a conversation, which is pretty cool to me. So far, we’ve learned a “jazz” chant, which helps them with intonation, pronunciation, and rhythm, done introductions, learned about formal and informal greetings, worked on the difficult “th” sound, done some dialogues, and a listening exercise. I talk v-e-r-y s-l-o-w-l-y and use small words, which is hilarious after last year, of reading literary criticism and scholarly stuff. I feel like a refugee from academia, and I’m enjoying it.

I do like teaching, even though some people are already skipping class (which I take note of and mark them down for) and even though it’s very difficult to teach freshmen who only know a little English. But I’m definitely enjoying myself. My students (mostly all girls) have beautiful smiles, and some of them are so excited to talk to me, see pictures from home, and come to my apartment to practice their English. They like to point out their hometowns on a map and talk about the things there, and they like to teach me Chinese words. Teachers are honored here in China; a couple weeks ago, there was a holiday called Teachers’ Day, where students give teachers cards, gifts, and other little trinkets. I got a jewelry box from one of my classes, a mug that says “FBAISE” (not a word in either English or Chinese, to my knowledge) with a picture of a strawberry, and a little wind-up music box thing that has Winnie the Pooh carvings that spin around on some sort of a Ferris Wheel. Never a dull moment.

I’ve had a ton of help from Wendy and from Miss Xiao, another teacher in the department. I am in awe of Miss Xiao, in a completely different way that I’m in awe of Wendy. She is friendly but more quiet, tall and beautiful, with long hair, and she has over twenty years of experience in education. She first worked at a high school for several years and so knows a lot about English teaching. I’m impressed with the calm and graceful way she carries herself, the way she tells about things she knows while also asking me about the best way to phrase something in English, the way she is willing to help and genuinely cares about her students and their progress.

“This is a strange thing we’re doing,” Hugh remarked one day, about how we foreign teachers were here in China, teaching and navigating our way through daily life and the educational system. I have to agree with him. It’s a fun thing but a very strange thing, nonetheless.

Tags: China, Jiangyou, Sichuan, Teaching

This entry was posted on Monday, September 19th, 2005 at 11:04 pm and is filed under Jiangyou. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.