(Read it on the web, and comment, at http://aufrecht.org/content/article?id=8270)

Morning classes went fairly well. I'm beginning to get the hang of teaching. I did the same stuff as yesterday, but more tightly, and with a bit more energy, and I think kids enjoyed it more. Still a lot more to work on, of course. I suspect that this week's homework assignment was way, way too complicated, so Week 2 papers may turn into a fiasco.

Weekly Paper: Write 50 to 200 words on a topic of your choice (from the list for your class), or on the song "Poisoning Pigeons in the Park,"

* Use at least two different types of sentences from the "use" list: Declarative, Interrogative, Imperative, or Exclamatory.

* Use the first three types of sentence from the "structure" list: Simple, Compound, Complex.

* Label at least one sentence of each type (for example: I like to eat cheese (declarative). I love all kinds of cheese. Why do I like to eat cheese? (interrogative))

* Bonus: 10 points for correctly using and labeling a Compound-Complex sentence

* Scoring is the same as last week except that punctuation now counts.

After lunch I had my lesson with He Fung. He Fung is Lei Ding's cousin and Li Xu's wife. Lei Ding is my friend in Seattle who is responsible for my departure to China, and Li Xu is the director of the Office of International Cooperation. We meet three times a week to practice both English and Chinese. Today, I simply fell asleep halfway into the lesson.

Finally, at least two weeks after being told/asked, "Would you teach some classes for the middle school?" I taught my first class.

I suppose that, in perspective, I did as well as could be expected for a fairly bright, introverted person who has no teaching training whatsoever, has never taught a class of any sort until a week prior, doesn't like children, doesn't speak Chinese, didn't get any help from the local teachers, and didn't prepare nearly well enough.

Reading between the lines in Michael's feedback, I was somewhere between "well, that wasn't TOO bad," and "that was bad." I had trouble getting feedback from the teacher who sat in on the first class, in part because her English isn't very good and in part because we were surrounded by a tight cluster of twenty kids.

This cluster led to the moments that pushed me to serious consider going back to the Office and saying "give me back my passport; you don't need to take it to the Public Security Bureau tomorrow to extend the visa which expires in two days." Unable to handle the cluster of twenty kids staring at us, I stepped outside onto the exterior hallway, and kids were still staring at me, and they wouldn't stop, and I wanted to snap at them. If there's a special place reserved for my kind in the Fifth Circle of Hell, the one for the "Wrathful and Sullen," - if there's a subsection just for Those Who Keep To Themselves Too Much, today I learned its nature: Even though I don't look at it, my Abyss still looks at me.

So the teaching part wasn't too bad. It sucked, but I have a slightly better idea of the ability levels, and I can prepare better and tomorrow won't suck as much. I won't be able to do anything for the slow kids, so I can either pitch to the majority and bore the crap out of the few that know more English, or bewilder almost everybody and teach a couple of kids in each class. tommorrow's classes have forty kids each, so that won't help. But the real problem isn't so much the class as the feeling of being a zoo attraction. Not just that children point and stare, but that I'm trapped there.

I tried to find out how much trouble it would cause if I didn't do it.. The crux of the matter for the school, I have learned, is that the middle school can increase attendance, and therefore revenue, by advertising that it has a foreign teacher. If they just want a warm body with white skin .... It's not in me to show up and do a crappy job and go home. Well, that's what I did today, but I'm miserable about it. I look at someone like Brett Reynolds: http://eslsv001.esl.sakuragaoka.ac.jp/teachers/BR/index.html, an English teacher in Japan with a bunch of experience and education (who looks a bit like Mark Wahlberg), who knows what he's trying do and why and how and how to get better, someone performing at a pretty high level, and I think, "By the end of the semester, that could be me as a college teacher. And I would, I will, enjoy being a good teacher. But that's not me as a teacher of pre-teen children, and it couldn't be for a long time even if I wanted it, and I don't."

The crux of the matter for me is that the school situation is a sharper instance of the "Why am I here?" issue. Am I trying to do things that come hard to me, just for some cryptic moral edification or because it will benefit me in a Nietzschen sense? If so, is there a lower limit? If I'm doing that, shouldn't I go ahead and push myself as far as I possibly can? Ask to share my apartment with three or four other people, ask for more classes?

Am I pretending to work through my limitations, but really just keeping the dirt at arm's length? Am I staring into the Abyss, or just into a dirty puddle? (Am I giving too much power to a room full of mildly rowdy third-world pre-teens? In five months I go home to America, but they're stuck in China for a long time to come.) If so, what's wrong with that. Most of the world desperately wants to have the material wealth and ease that we take for granted. Why do we act ashamed to have it? What's wrong with knowing my comfort limits and only pushing some of them? But if I was driven here by some basic need or dissatisfaction rather than just a weak job market and an impulse decision.

When I got back to the Office, I had a pretty good bitch session with Li Xu. His one-year anniversary as Office manager is tomorrow, and he'll spend most of it in meetings to which will determine if he passed the probationary period. He's not worried.

"Nobody else wants to be manager of this office. Nobody else is that stupid."

"I know the feeling," I replied.

I wanted to get back into the Morning Exercise with Liu Tao, but he and Li Xu are planning an all nighter, Li Xu to prepare for the meetings and Liu Tao to write an article. I asked Li Xu if there was a good place to work out in the mornings.

"It would be very strange - a foreigner playing Kung Fu. You would soon be surrounded by animals watching." I think that was a metaphor. "Why don't you practice on the roof?"

"You can go on the roof?"

So he showed me. It's perfect. A finished patio, slightly irregular but with plenty of space for two or three people to practice on the concrete tiles. Shoulder-high walls. A view that I won't even attempt to describe beyond the simplest facts: lots of mountains in every direction, sun setting in the hazy so that you could stare right at it, and green fields below. Well, green fields if you skip over the half-acre of red dirt and debris that is the dumping ground for the non-stop campus construction crew. Still, it looked amazing and I felt much much better.

The Chinese Air Force continues to patrol the skies over Guilin. Perhaps they are simply engaged in a futile search for uninhabited land over which to practice?

I tromped over to the cafeteria and haggled over the possible meat content of a fried round pastry, only to realize I'd brought my phone card instead of my meal card.

The suction cup thing I got to hold my toothbrush, toothpaste, and selected other items is sticking to the tile much better than the adhesive contraption I first tried, which was not sticky enough to support any weight but more than sticky enough to stay annoyingly glued to the wall.

The big gross spider hasn't appeared in several days.

Class Prep

I just paused to browse Brett Reynold's site. He so knows what he's doing. He has a curriculum. Un-ambiguous objectives. Goals. Terminology. And in his curriculum, he spends a lot of time explaining stuff to students.

A thought just occurred to me. Part of the problem in class is the language barrier. I'm pretty skeptical of the total immersion stuff, especially for beginners. It makes me feel helpless as a teacher, and I remember as a student how frustrated I felt having to deal with Russian-only instruction from a determined instructor.

So, tomorrow I'll ask Li Xu if someone from the office can come with me to most or all lessons to translate, so that I can give instructions in Chinese. Then neither I nor the kids will feel frustrated and helpless. And Li Xu was probably planning this middle-school thing all along. If he deliberately Shanghaied me, he owes me, and I won't feel guilty on that account if I quit the middle-school. Too, maybe he just wants to be able to tout this during his one-year review tomorrow, in which case there might be graceful ways to back out next week.

Back to browsing. Hmm. Brett's curriculum is pretty dependent on computers, regular contact with the students, materials and preparation; on being a competent, supported teacher in a successful school in a rich country, rather than a figurehead for revenue generation in a school in a backwater province of China. This could limit its applicability. Drat.

Jews in the Desert

In Purgatorio, which I finally finished the other night, Dante accused the Jews lost in the desert of Slothfulness:

"The ones for whom the sea parted were dead before the Jordan saw those who had inherited its lands;"

Dante, Purgatorio, Canto XVII,

but I prefer another interpretation:

I met Moses in the tavern, and I bought him a beer

I said, "Mo, there's something that I've always wondered about. For forty years you wandered in the desert. Isn't there one among you to have thought beforehand to have brought some kind of map?"

He said, "We waited that the ones who were first into slavery, would die out, and left behind, buried in the ground. So then no one but the innocent could reach the Promised Land. We waited for the children of slavery to die."

Dan Bern, Children of the Cold War

Apply this to China in 2001. The older generation was born in poverty and survived the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. As rapid as the economic change has been and despite the massive social impacts therein, I think real political change may hinge on something like what's outlined above.