The 15-minute tutor

Holes could easily be poked, I suspect, in any rationale for canceling classes for two or three weeks to meet with students individually for … 15 minutes each.

Even to me, at times, the idea didn’t seem to make much sense.

It was born out of a desire to try something different, a more intimate way of reaching all those blank faces. I could fill in the rationalizations later. In the end, they proved somewhat sound, if not entirely above skepticism.

Not much time, 15 minutes, so I had to move quickly. (Why 15? Seemed like a good number. Remember: I’m talking classes of 25 to 30 students. A normal two-hour class period allows enough time for eight individual sessions — any longer, and we’d never have finished. As it was, I had to use plenty of time outside of normal hours to get everyone in, and I did not have the time/patience/initiative to do all of the tutoring outside class hours.)

Still kicking, screaming, beating head against The Great Firewall

Observations from far side of said wall:

• The bad news: I have lost access to The China Rog-ect for reasons unknown.

• The good news: I’ll keep plugging and see what happens.

• The bad news: I’m known for having a “hot temper.”

• The good news: In China, a hot temper means one is “able,” a fellow teacher says, so I’ve got that going for me. Which is nice.

• Many things relearned may be “just like riding a bike again,” except, it seems, riding a bike again, especially when trying to give someone a lift. That’s common here. It’s nothing to see a student, even with luggage, hop on the back rack of a friend’s moving bike. Mine tips over.

• It was definitely strange to hear “Jingle Bells” at a Chinese supermarket.

• Thirty minutes later, having heard every version of the song ever recorded, being played on some kind of tape loop from hell, I was already sick of the holiday season. In China.

• Actually, Christmas is a big shopping day here for the New Year’s holiday, like the day after Thanksgiving in the States.

• It’s nice to be the one giving quizzes now.

• One of my best English speakers is one of my worst students. He got a 64 on a midterm quiz. I wrote on it: “Pay more attention in class.” Ten minutes after it was handed back to him, he was face down on his front-row desk, asleep. “You’re outta here,” I told him, teaching the class another American expression. It’s nice to be the one kicking kids out of class now.

• Yangzhou, as previously mentioned, is considered a small, almost backwater city by Chinese standards, despite of a population of 4.6 million. Westerners are few; I’m the only one at Jianghai College. English expressions on students’ clothing typically make no sense, things like “only you hear the put” and “he WS freeze real.” Naturally, returning to my apartment one day, I encountered a student in a North Carolina hoodie.

• I can hear N.C. State fans gagging. Hey, the whole country’s red, so chill.

• Once a week, I teach a writing class for the other English teachers at Jianghai. Unable to make it, one sent me a text message today: “Sorry, Roger. I’m still in the communist meeting.” Not an explanation I’m used to seeing.

• My late mother might have loved shopping in China, where just about everything is negotiable. I like the game — you always walk away thinking you got a deal — but it’s tiresome, too. You have to be patient and willing to walk away. It takes time. As one colleague put it, “Just once I would like to know their lowest price at the beginning.”

Happy holidays, all.



Another Saturday night, and I ain’t got no yuan

Then again, I really don’t know no one, neither.

No worries, though. I’m feeling full of myself, relatively speaking. Day 3: Much better. Saturday, by the way, is a school day at Jianghai College — Sundays and Mondays off — so I faced another class of juniors for the first time, EA (English and Accounting) 081.

I was determined to walk in more relaxed. More importantly, I dispensed with a lot of stiff introductory crap and went right to Bruce at the top of the program. Wrote the refrain for Springsteen’s “Hungry Heart” on the board, had the class repeat it a couple of times, fired up the laptop and the small speakers and hit the iTunes play button. Once I started belting it out, a few students tentatively joined in. Once I dusted off a few of the creaking, old white dude moves, including a spin that took, like, five minutes and 11 steps, they started laughing and getting into it.

I had, in fact, read somewhere that older English students in China expect foreign ESL teachers to be entertainers. Since I’m the only one here, the casting call has gone out: Dancing bears urgently needed. Must know their vowels and consonants.

Meanwhile, I hit it off right away with two students in the front row who were unusually eager and engaged. “Finally, someone I can relate to,” I thought. Of course, they later informed me they weren’t actually in the class. They’d just come to hang out with a couple of friends.

A few extra notes from the sweltering classroom:

• More than a few students have listed their hobby as “sleeping.” Hey, that’s mine, too!
• Asked my college soph son via Skype whether I was justified in booting the kid who had his head on the desk Friday and was practically snoring. My son’s response: “Well, was he really snoring?”
• One student in Friday’s class chose “Happiness” as her English name. Next to “my character,” she wrote: “think too much, not happy.”

From now on, you can call me Mr. Happiness.

Day 2: I officially suck

Truthfully, I do love the whole teaching-in-China thing, except for the teaching part.

Today was national Teachers’ Day, which meant I got a lovely card before my junior students in ET (English and Trade) 081 began openly despising me, mimicking my nasally, Western New York-bred accent, pulling out their cell phones and, in the case of one late-arriving student, simply laying his head on his desk and falling asleep. He’s now a Rogervdh footnote — the first student I’ve kicked out of class.

Let the record show, in the interest of settling a few friendly wagers out there, that the meltdown came approximately 170 minutes into my Jianghai College career. Less than three hours. It was shortly after 9:00 a.m. when I grabbed a piece of chalk and wrote in large letters on the blackboard: “BULLSHIT.” I’m not even sure what I was thinking, other than expressing my frustration at getting absolutely nowhere with them.

Oh, but they loved that. Got a full response from the class of 45, loudly chanted, then a few volunteered the Chinese translation: 废话, fèihuà (meaning literally “superfluous words”), or 胡说, húshuo (“talk nonsense” — you can see little lines of B.S. emanating from the second character). If you separate the two characters, it comes out: “Mustache (or beard) said.” Hey, I’m not saying anyone with a mustache or beard is full of it. Evidently, the Chinese are.

Do you want to learn English? (Wrote that on the board.) Why do you want to learn English? (Wrote that on the board.) Why are we here? What is the meaning of life? Where is God? And why can’t I stop sweating?

Blank stares.

Amid the pregnant pauses, the English eloquence of many students continues to astound me. I broke the class into four groups — by the way, what ever happened to the 25-30 class sizes I was promised? — and assigned each group to come up with at least five sentences or questions on a particular theme. For Group A, it was five questions about America. The second group was told to list at least five things I should know about China or the Chinese people. The third had five places I should visit while in China. The fourth group was asked to describe five favorite foods or dishes.

Among the things I should know about China: “West Lake in Hangzhou is beautiful, and a moving love story about BaiNiangzi and XuXian happened there.” One student, Lily, then gave me a moving and detailed description of the ancient Chinese tale, sort of a Romeo-and-Juliet doomed romance between a man and, well, a snake. Madame White Snake transforms into a woman to fall in love with a mortal man. Long story short: It didn’t work out. It’s difficult even today for a man and a snake, though many women would describe that as a snake-snake relationship.

Lily patiently, and in very good English, answered my questions and discussed the story’s many themes, though they seem to boil down to: Don’t judge a book by its cover.

Moral of today’s classroom story: I had better learn to relax (and teach), or this is going to be a very long year.

P.S. — Forgot to erase “BULLSHIT” before the next teacher arrived. Was that a bad thing?

ET 091 = rvdh(screwed²)

Victims of ET 091

And I thought the clock moved slowly in seventh-grade biology.  I just spent five-and-a-half hours teaching my first English class from 2:00 to 3:40 p.m. today at Jianghai College.

ET 091 is a sophomore class. The “ET” stands for English and Trade, as in I’d trade my right arm not to have to teach any more English classes to Chinese college students. The ad said: “Teaching job for native English speaker, no experience necessary.” Why do I feel as if I just bought a timeshare at a Superfund site?

Given my teaching background — none — I was already sweating bullets going into the first class. So, it was a good thing the humidity in Yangzhou was down to 463% and the temperature to a cool 99°. I swear, you could have poured liquid nitrogen on me, and it would have felt like Coppertone. Ten minutes in, my shirt was soaked through. Next class? Wearing a Speedo. Don’t care anymore.

I had been warned, through other sources and by Lily Han of the foreign language department here, that it would be a challenge to get the students to open up. ESL (English as a second language) materials generally recommend that the teacher do as little talking as possible. There’s even a negative acronym — TTT (teacher talking time) — for the lecture-dominated style.

But that’s exactly what most Chinese students are used to. Nevertheless, I plunged ahead with a carefully thought-out lesson plan derived from cramming and my extensive teaching background.

ET 091 lesson plan, 2-3:40 p.m. Sept. 9, 2010 (34 students — more than I had been told, by the way — who already had several years of English coursework behind them). The first class would focus on asking questions in English to learn about someone. Interviewing, in other words.

15-20 minutes:

Introduce self, write name on board, give background, why I came to China, etc., followed by rules and expectations, how students will be graded.

Blank stares.

Stress importance of participation. State clearly that there are no bad questions or terrible answers, that I hope to learn as much from them as they do from me. Ask students a few questions about my background to see what they absorbed, then offer them a chance to think of questions they would like to ask me.

Blank stares.

20-30 minutes:

Have students write names on slips of paper (almost all choose American-ized versions of their actual names) and introduce themselves to me, one by one.

Blank stares, intense embarrassment, no responses. Teacher calls early break between periods, mentally begins making flight reservations. Clearly, the time has come to deviate from the plan.

Having viewed the textbook as a last resort, I now reached for it as if it were a plank of driftwood on a stormy sea. I asked the class to turn to page 10 and instructed them to repeat after me as I slowly read a list of questions right from the book. A few voices repeated the first one softly. By the third question, they were chanting each one loudly and perfectly. By the fourth, they were no longer paying any attention to me and simply reading aloud, pronouncing one after the other almost flawlessly.

Gee, maybe they’re a little more comfortable reciting as a group. Other slap-me-upside-the-head realizations: If I approached a student individually, literally standing inches away, he or she would almost inaudibly try to give an answer to my question in what I can only describe as very accomplished English. They are far better than they think they are.

Next, I broke them into a groups of five to eight. Each group was assigned to find out as much as they could about one member of the group by asking questions in English, and by paying attention to answers given in English. (I think I’m going to have to lighten up a little on the no-Chinese-speaking rule.) Most of the students proved to be more comfortable writing out their questions first, though some of the questions were directed at me, as in, “Why did you pick China?”

Tough one to answer after today. Because it wanted me?

Meeting the college president

I am being treated like a visiting dignitary. At 10:30 a.m., the Jianghai Polytechnic College president, the dean of languages program, the director of foreign languages study and another English teacher who is acting as my guide all arrived at my door.

In short order, following initial pleasantries and polite conversation (all but the prez are bilingual), they were speaking simultaneously in rapid Chinese while struggling to put up a mosquito net over my bed. I was trying not to laugh, though it was hilarious. I was thinking, “I’m causing an international incident already, and I just unpacked.”

My hosts could not be kinder. Jianghai is primarily a vocational college with approximately 6,000 students whom my guide, Jian, describes as “clever.” She took me to lunch at the school canteen, where we ate some sort of meal, I’m not sure what, except for the rice — 6 yuan and change, or about a buck.

Oh, and the dean, Mr. Chen, informed me that a typhoon is on the way. Welcome to China.

(Truth alert! I have subsequently learned that it was the director of the foreign affairs office, not the college president, who came to my campus apartment that first day. Guess my natural tendency toward hyperbole kicked in. Never let the truth get in the way of a good story.)

It’s all Frisian to me

Gee, for a guy who has spent his entire adult life working with written English, I didn’t know doodly-squat — I checked; it’s a word — about the language’s origins. According to the third module of my TEFLOnline course, English is derived from the Germanic languages. Around 500 A.D., West Germanic invaders began coming to Britain from Jutland, southern Denmark and western, present-day Netherlands. (I knew it. Everything can be traced back to the Netherlands. It’s like Kevin Bacon.)

Anyway, the Angles, Saxons, Jutes and Frisians all spoke what came to be known as Anglo-Saxon, or Old English. (The Beatles, of course, later paid tribute to one of those groups with the song, “Hey, Jute.”)

In fact, Old English is similar to modern Frisian, still spoken by approximately 400,000 people in western areas of Holland, according to TEFLOnline’s “A brief history of the English language.” Even today, Frisian is the Germanic language most closely related to English.

Postscript: China is letting me in to the country. FedEx delivered my passport with the F visa stamp from the Chinese embassy. The die is cast.