The Big Qs.

Self-censorship is not an easy feat. Korea is now going through some major changes and scaring the hell out of people all over the world. A majority of the students here at RQA are Korean. Granted, the major threat is North Korea and my students are from the South, but I want to ask them how they feel, how it’s affecting them, if they see the problems or see the changes that need to happen. Do they wonder about what will happen when China doesn’t have their back any longer? Or is there any point? Are they so wrapped up in their own primary and secondary educational lives that they can’t see past the school? Do they think about the impact it will have on the world? On THEM? Did I when I was their age? So, I keep myself from asking the can-of-worm questions. I have to ask myself every day, how many waves do I want to make? And how big?

I would urge my students to have these discussions, and yet I can’t even get them to ask questions about the poems I’m assigning. “What is the author trying to tell us?” “He’s sad.” (Sigh). I guess that’s a start. But how do I get them thinking about the big picture without invoking the wrath of the Politically Correct Police? Better yet, how do I get them to CARE when it doesn’t directly affect them?

These kids are bright, but sometimes unmotivated. They often come in without having done any of their homework. I pantomime asphyxiation, but that’s not getting anywhere. I’ve threatened to call their parents. That perked their ears. The next day they did HALF the assignment. Ok, we’re making progress. What else can I threaten them with? Today the faculty had a meeting to brainstorm that very question. Our solution? Take away weekend outings to the fancy hotels and swimming pools.

When I pictured myself teaching abroad, I never considered the fact that I might be teaching privileged rich kids who were born with a silver spoon in their mouths and no natural predators to take away their play station (or whatever gadget is hot these days). Private school is a marvel: the best educational circumstances for kids who don’t always act like they deserve it.

This isn’t to say I don’t believe these kids deserve a great education. I’d never say that. EVERYONE deserves a great education. But, my golly, could you show a little interest in your brain function? And it isn’t all about being academically alert, either. I’m talking about developing a real connection with curiosity and asking the more philosophical or esoteric questions. Not everything has to be arcane, but once in a while it wouldn’t hurt to wonder. That’s all I’m saying. My fear is that we are far from seeing them as free thinking individuals.

Clean Marbles

It’s been three weeks since I started teaching in China. My typical day consists of about five classes, each made up of no more than two students. It’s refreshing and somewhat challenging to go from teaching 23 college students in one English composition class to teaching a small number of grade-schoolers from Korea. We work on grammar, speech, writing, diction, and language arts.

Two of my students just finished reading “A Wind in the Door” for our grade eight Language Arts class (the second book in the series that began with “A Wrinkle in Time”). We began the book on our first day together. Less than three weeks later we finished. It was amazing to see how much they enjoyed it. As we got closer to finishing the book, I noticed how much they picked up their reading pace. They wanted to hurry, to get to the end and find out what happened. What a change from walking into a classroom with drooping 18-year-olds who just rolled out of bed and don’t want to be there.

The freedom of lesson planning is exhilarating. I finally get to choose which authors, what books, what poems, and what writing assignments. One younger student, I found, had been assigned to memorize one poem a week in her regular school days. In learning this, I came up with an in-class assignment for her: to write about the most memorable poem. While she sat there writing about a lyrical verse that had moved her that year, my own poem memorization experiences came back to me; so, I decided to take up my own pen and join her in the assignment. Here’s what I wrote:

“The first poem I ever had to memorize was “O Captain, My Captain” by Walt Whitman. I was in second grade and didn’t understand why the assignment was given. I remember working on it for an entire week, trying to memorize it out of a very large, orange textbook. I noticed for the first time how the lines of a poem on the page don’t look at all like the lines we’d read before in books. They didn’t swim from one side of the page to the other, balancing across the white, but rather stopped at odd times to change places with emptiness. The first time I read it, I stumbled. I didn’t understand the turn of the rhyme or who was speaking. I didn’t understand why a strange sadness had come over me. Why did I care about this captain who had died? But I realized the more I read it, the more I understood what the words were trying to tell me and I recognized the rhythm I was creating by saying it out loud.”

I decided to introduce meter to another student – an eighth grader – who had never heard of scansion before. Classes I’d had as a student in high school, college, and grad school came flooding out onto the whiteboard. I tried not to cram it all into one lesson. I’d felt invigorated and excited. I wanted him to know everything I knew, then to go on and learn more. As his first introduction to iambic pentameter, I gave him a copy of Robert Browning’s “My Last Duchess” – a typical run-of-the-mill poet/poem when I was in grade nine. I thought I’d bring him in ahead of the game.

For our writing portion, a ninth grader worked on writing a poem of his own. It wasn’t great. It wasn’t even that good. But I kept pushing and he kept trying, even with much reluctance. I could tell he saw no point in the assignment, nor had any desire to do his best. He simply wanted the end result: a decent grade. We revised for several days. He balked many of my ideas and rolled his eyes when I’d ask him questions about character or motivation. Who was speaking? What did he want to tell his reader? These were simple questions which I had learned to ask long ago and had become second nature to me since. I’d forgotten what it was like to be at the fundamental level of poetry, to not understand the simplistic economic value of a line that doesn’t repeat, and of trying to convey emotion that, at such a young age, hasn’t been developed to anything more complex than “happy,” “sad,” or “angry.”

When he completed the poem, he wasn’t as elated as the other students who had done the same assignment. The same pride wasn’t there. His completed project didn’t come from wanting to do his best or to create something original. I’m not sure whether he truly listened when I talked about what it meant to write poetry, but something might have sunk in along the way…

Sometimes you don’t get very far. But sometimes you get brilliant lines like these:
“Look at her eyes. They are clean marbles.”

World Traveller Anonymous

The fun thing about China is that you never know when something will work. If there is a chance something will go wrong, it probably will. See previous post for case in point. While we may be frustrated by certain things like censorship, China remains unapologetic.

I complain about not being able to view YouTube or read many of my favorite websites, including not even being able to gain access to my own blog. These posts are actually guerrilla blogging in action. I’ve typed my blogs in Word and sent them on their merry way to the good ol’ U.S. of A. so that a friend might post them for me. Many thanks to him.

Does this remind us of anything? Say, perhaps, the German Nazi regime burning books in the squares? Banning classical literature and brilliant writings because they made us think impure democratic thoughts. So why does China not want me to see videos posted on YouTube? After all, there is no copyright law in China, so that can’t be it. And what’s wrong with reading a friend’s blog about cultural cooking? It’s just a bit too progressive for the Chinese government. What ever happened to enlightenment?

But in all sincerity, I’ve got it good in comparison.

June 4 was the 20-year anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre and China is virtually mum. All news on this end has been from outside sources. No word from the Chinese government. I kept up with stories online via the BBC and NPR, some from journalists who’ve been banned from the country. One story involved a Chinese woman in her seventies wanting answers to her son’s death two decades ago. Response from the Chinese government? We’re stilling waiting on that one…

Quarantine

I awoke this morning to the sound of soldiers marching past my building. I imagine them, four stories down, perfectly in line with each other, their green uniforms of China so neatly fitted, with red and gold bands wrapped around their hats and arms. I didn’t look. I stayed in bed and listened to the sound of their feet pounding against the pavement, the leader sounding off with the rest echoing him. Or they may have only been security guards, lining up for their morning morale boost. As yet I was only half awake and thinking about all that has happened since I’ve come to this country.

The past week has been a whirlwind. My first day in China consisted of several officials in biohazard suits keeping five or six rows of the airplane detained on the flight after we landed in Shanghai. The eleven-month-old baby sitting next to me was teething and therefore had a temperature one degree higher than normal, which is apparently unacceptable to the Chinese government. Plus, I would imagine that the giants in white space suits scared the living Christ of out her. Poor thing.



Because these men were all Chinese, I had a very hard time understanding what was happening. I assumed we were being taken into quarantine, but for how long? And where would they take us? Could I make a phone call? Thanks to a generous friend, I had an electronic translator with me and it turned out we were to be taken to a hotel while awaiting hospital results about the baby.

After waiting two hours on the plane for a decision on whether or not to take us, they filed us into a bus, where we waited another hour for who knows what reason. The bus didn’t drop us off at an airport hotel. Instead, it shifted from highway to highway before each of us slowly realized we were lost. We stopped in the middle of the highway to let our escort pee on the side of the road in plain site of all who were interested in watching.

For two hours we drove through parts of Shanghai that made it clear to me I was definitely in a developing third world country. It amazes me that the ancient world of pagodas and emperors can still exist in the modern world of skyscrapers and smartcars. You still see old women carrying crops on their backs and old men with no teeth standing next to a school girl with a bedazzled cell phone. It’s truly bizarre.

We finally arrived at the hotel. It was dilapidated and obviously had been abandoned. The government must have seized the opportunity to take it over specifically for quarantine. This was to be our home for the next 24 hours. They fed us breakfast, lunch and supper, none of which I could eat, save for a little rice. Good thing I’d packed a few Cliff bars for the road.