30 April 2002:

It's almost noon; four days of underwear and a 24-hour supply of bread, peanut butter, and chocolate lie spread on the floor next to my backpack. Tomorrow is May first, Mayday, the number three holiday on the Chinese calendar, after Spring Festival and National Day. For my vacation I'm going to Shanghai, and not a moment too soon. I've completely run out of steam; I'm on the edge of a feud with my own students, and I'we reached the same point of fed-up-ness in less than three months that it took five months to get to last year.

Last night I went out for pizza and ended up bumping into seemingly half the foreign teachers in Guilin. Watching Audrey chat up first a street vendor and then her happy, cheerful students in fluent Chinese was like Bill Holm redux: why can't I be like that? Why do I have to be so isolated, to walk around under a dark cloud, when these people are delightfully integrated rays of goddamned sunshine?

Well, okay, I more or less know the answers. I'm not a hippy; I'm a tightly wound, self-contained, introverted, judgmental person. With the test scores to prove it. For me just to be in China probably represents bigger stretch, more effort relative to my personality, than perhaps they'll ever exert. So my new theme's gonna be Chris Issak's "Don't Get So Down On Yourself." (But not R.E.M.'s "Shiny Happy People." Shiny Happy People can rot in hell.)

After a particularly unrewarding day of teaching last week, I sat down and thought through my options. My basic point of frustration is that my relationship with my students is on life support if not dead. They're sick of me, and I'm frustrated by the extreme lengths they go to in order to avoid learning. In-class discussion between students in English is impossible, not because they can't but because they refuse to try. In fairness, a few students per class still make the effort, but that's not enough to break the ennui of the remaining dozen. So, my options:

1) Go home 2) Cancel classes with the students and only teach the teachers' class (Less drastic versions would include what Fram called survival mode: dittos and movies.) 3) Hold a come-to-Jesus meeting in class: "This isn't working; nobody's having any fun; what can we do to fix it?"

I've decided, I think, to go with another option, something close to survival mode: class will consist of a few minutes of announcements, student speeches (two or three three-minute speeches per class are already scheduled through the end of the semester), and then an in-class writing assignment for 20 minutes, followed by fifteen minutes of me correcting work on the overhead with a running commentary. If we can do a few weeks of this without incident, maybe a bit of learning can occur before I go home.

In other news, two students who committed plagiarism will get zeroes for the class. The Department backed me up 100%; although they asked if I would accept a partial measure such as a failing grade (which the student could replace with a retake of the final), when I held out for real consequences they supported me, even calling the dean's office to verify that my policy was acceptable: School policy is that only cheating on the final "un-seen" examination has real consequences. However, since I explained my policy - that cheating on homework will also have real consequences - and spent a whole lesson on it, and had students translate it into Chinese and had the translations checked, and cleared it with the vice-dean at the beginning of the semester, the students will face real consequences. A zero for the class, which requires a report for their file to explain the grade. I've asked that the students be allowed to see the reports and write responses which will also go in the file, and I have to admit that while fairness is my main motivation, one student's reaction was so overtly weaselly that I'm happy to hand him/her more rope.

So, armed with a backpack full of damp clothes, a few interesting maps of China (Jewish points of interest and maps from Neal Stephenson's Diamond Age), a month's salary, a train ticket in hand and assurances of a return ticket waiting at the destination, and cheerfully leaving a hundred ungraded mid-terms behind, I'm off to Shanghai for Mayday.