The Stuff Dreams Are Made Of

So, you might be wondering, what sort of students am I teaching? In many ways they are just like middle school students from the US, but with several key differences. The following are some of my students’ answers to a survey that I conducted during the first week of classes:

Oliver dreams of being an astronaut and likes playing ping pong.

Maya wants to join the army and likes playing badminton.

Kit wants to be a doctor and likes playing badminton.

Tybalt wants to be a doctor and likes playing basketball.

Claudio wants to be a sniper and likes playing ping pong.

Zander wants to be a police officer and likes playing chess.

Bailey wants to be a fashion designer and likes singing.

Stan wants to be an inventor and likes playing basketball.

James doesn't want to join the mafia and likes playing basketball.

Percy wants to attend college and likes playing basketball.

Serena wants to be a teacher and likes jumping rope.

Luna wants to allow her parents to live a comfortable life and likes running.

Rose wants to be a detective and likes reading.

From these few examples, you can see the broad trend of what my students like to do outside of school and what they dream of doing later in life. The most common favorite activities were basketball (by a landslide), ping pong, badminton, jump rope, singing, and listening to music. The most common dream jobs were doctor, soldier, teacher, inventor/scientist, attend college, and police officer.

For me, the answers that most revealed my students’ differences with American students were some of their favorite hobbies (ping pong and badminton especially) and some of their answers to “What is your dream job?” (allow my parents to live comfortably, soldier, and attend college especially). While I believe that one could find almost all of these answers in US middle schools (depending on where you are), their frequency and the overall attitude betray to me some part of that which is uniquely Chinese.

In other news, I received my first piece of mail today here in Dazhai. Many thanks to my Mom for sending the beautiful card that, after about three weeks in transit, arrived here today (the address works!). The card is now hanging proudly on my wall! 

The Giving of Names

               There is a mob 15 students crowded around my computer, anxiously watching what I type, not understanding a single word (until I pointed out that they had learned the word “what” when they learned the sentence “What’s this in English?”). They beg for me to play music, but other than that seem content to simply watch me type.

               It was a break in between periods of evening study hall Friday night with seventh grade Class 183 that I had been assigned just hours before. The school administration makes it so most teachers can go home early (we would consider it slightly late in the US – around 5:30) by assigning the three periods of evening study hall (this name is slightly misleading – while some teachers do just allow their students to study and do work during evening study hall, most, including me, teach lessons, though Friday is generally an exception to the rule) to one teacher per class. Thus, Friday night from 6:40 to 9:15 found me teaching seventh grade Class 183.

               While I did allow the students to study by themselves for most of the time, I spent the first period reviewing their newly given English names. Many of the students had trouble pronouncing their English names, and I had yet to give them name tags to write them down, a task that also required time and supervision (telling them explicitly how and where to write it [large, clear, and on one side, with their Chinese name on the other] and correcting any misspellings). The students also laughed at some of the names for no apparent reason (Anna, Olivia, and many more). I like to think that I would have caught any names that sound like dirty words in Chinese, but that is really just wishful thinking. Still, I do think that for a lot of them it was just strange and funny to hear the sounds their classmates and I were saying. Finally, by the end of the period all 60 kids in the class were equipped with their English names, from Allen to Walter.

The giving of English names was a task unto itself. I have around 360 students in six different classes, and I wanted, for the most part, to give a different name to each student. Moreover, if possible, I wanted to make the names significant for the student and, if possible, for me. Finally, there were some names I had to avoid do to difficulty in pronunciation or due to their meaning in Chinese (for instance, I stayed away from the name Ben or Benjamin because in Chinese笨, or ben, means stupid).

I began the process of naming by going to the surveys I gave during the first week of class. On these surveys, I had asked students to write their name, their age, the amount of time they had studied English, their parents’ jobs, their own dream job, and their hobbies. I also asked them to write down their English name if they had one, which in the end applied to about 10 out of my 360 students. With the first class I gave name to, Class 187, I tried to make English names fit to either the sound of their Chinese name or to their dream job or favorite hobbies (or better yet, both). Thus, I gave the girl whose Chinese first name was “li” the name Lisa, the girl who said she wanted to be a star and who loved to sing Adele, and the girl with the character 红or “red” the name Scarlett. This strategy worked for the first 20 to 30 students, but it was astonishing how long it took me to figure out how to read the names (the names were often messily written, and characters used in names are often used few other places in Chinese, making them difficult to recognize) and how quickly I ran out of ideas for names.

I then found myself seeking additional sources of inspiration. Enter friends and family, Harry Potter, Shakespeare, Arrested Development, Neil Gaiman, All the King’s Men, the Wheel of Time series, and a website with the most popular boys’ and girls’ names in the US in 2013. Harry Potter names alone took care of a Class 184 (I left out the strangest names like Minerva, Severus, and Albus, going only as far as Horace and Percy) while Shakespeare covered about half of the honors class, Class 188 (again, I stayed away from the very difficult names like Malvolio, Mercutio, and Benedick, but was too tempted not to name students Prospero, Cordelia, Portia, and Beatrice). Meanwhile, the website filled in any leftover names. In the end, I had around 300 unique names. While I was unable to give them all names that meant something to me or to them, I was able to give what I consider good, interesting names to the all of them. Right now, some of the names have personal or literary significance to me (like Laura or Pip) while others are just cool names (like Aspen and Zander), but I think that by the end of my two years in Dazhai, they will all mean a lot to me.

Dazhai Middle School has a scholarship that past fellows started that gives money to the top performing and best behaved students of the school. Pictured here is Principal Feng and my third year co-fellow, Yang Yue.

All the scholarship winners along with Yang Yue, Hanxiong, Principal Feng, and several vice principals.

The weather was far from ideal for the ceremony, and the grounds around the construction site (which we have to walk through to get from the dorm to the teaching building) were flooded and muddy.

My first real attempt at cooking. Those who know me well will be unsurprised to see I decided to make chocolate chip pancakes.

Pancakes, book, and a view.

A terrible translation. It is not, in fact, "Subtropical chicken tail juice," but rather passion fruit juice. Not sure where they got that translation from.

After my first haircut in Dazhai.

The barber shop floor got its first taste of blonde(-ish) hair.

Beautiful, huge local vegetables. The cucumber was about as thick as my calf.

While the rain brought muddy grounds, it also brought beautiful, dramatic skies.

Hot Plates and Home

              My Chinese co-fellow Hanxiong and I have begun to really make ourselves at home in the teacher’s dorm at Dazhai. We have our rooms arranged more or less to our liking and everything from previous fellows cleaned and made our own. Importantly, we also got our kitchen set up this weekend and have begun cooking our own food for many of our meals (so far this has meant Hanxiong cooking and me cleaning, but I will nonetheless say “we have begun cooking” with the assumption that that will alter as time goes by).

               For me there were three elements key in making the dorm home. First, the floor is made of (rather unevenly) poured concrete that seems impossible to clean fully, so buying soft puzzle tiles normally used for the floors of children’s play areas was essential to allow me to be comfortable in my living space. Second, internet is now available in our rooms, making Skype and blogging available to me at a speed and convenience that help make the room home. Finally, I hung a tapestry and many posters and pictures that helped me claim the dirty, white walls for my own. All in all, it is a good place to live.

               Buying and cleaning all the bits and pieces necessary for the kitchen also helped make the school as a whole feel more and more like home. When the fourth and final TFC fellow (a third year fellow – someone who decided to stay on past the two year program to try to achieve more) arrived at the school, we were finally able to sort through the closet of things left by past fellows to help furnish our own rooms and, more importantly, our kitchen. There were many things, from a refrigerator to pots and pans to a hot plate all waiting for us. It was less like the picking of gleaming appliances from well-ordered and clean boxes that I had, for some reason, imagined, and more like the dusty, hard work of rehabilitating things left in a drafty shed after a dust storm. Simply put, there was plenty of cleaning to do. Hanxiong and I spent a weekend washing everything and drying it the strong, high-altitude sunlight.

               One of the appliances most in need of our attention was a hot plate left by one of the previous fellows. While originally a fairly good hot plate, it had not been treated well. It looked like it had been used often and perhaps cleaned once or twice by a person unable to use more than 5 or 10 pound of force due to a recent back surgery. Anyway, it was filthy, with a thick layer of dirt and grease obscuring the brand and controls from view. I spent a good half hour scrubbing away at it with soap and hot water from our newly purchased electric kettles. Finally, it was clean. Hanxiong and I decided we should probably buy a new scrub brush after we tossed the one I had just used to clean the hot plate, but it was worth it. It was as good as new. We let it dry in the sun for an hour to make sure any water that got inside it while cleaning it was completely gone, and then we excitedly plugged it in to see what we were working with.

               But it didn’t work. Once we plugged it in and turned it on, the letters “EO” flashed on the small screen accompanied by a consistent, annoying beep. Heat did not accompany any of this, leaving the hot plate cold and lifeless. I assumed it stood for “ERROR,” and that my time spent cleaning it had been spent in vain. We played with it for a good ten minutes to no avail, and making both Hanxiong and I prepare ourselves mentally for spending the money to buy a new hot plate the next day.

               The next day was market day in Dazhai (it happens every five days, bringing dozens of sellers of appliances, vegetables, meat (mostly pork with one or two fish sellers), fruit, clothes, and most anything else you can imagine to the streets of Dazhai), so Hanxiong and I left around 11:00 am to buy needed appliances and food. We came back around 2:00 pm with a new rice cooker (the one left by the previous fellow was literally held together by string), a new hot plate, and a backpack full of a fish a many vegetables (we went out again later to get a huge bag of rice). In the end, we had gotten a good deal on a relatively good hot plate and rice cooker, and we had only spent about USD$65 on them both. We were happy with our purchases and excited to make food for ourselves for the first time. Thus, when we got back, we almost immediately wiped down the new hot plate, plugged it in, and tried it out.

               We were disappointed and confused to yet again see “EO” pop up on the hot plate, presumably meaning that this hot plate too was experiencing an error. I sighed disappointedly and unplugged it. It must be an issue with the electricity, which was probably good in terms of what it meant for the other hot plate but bad for what it meant about us cooking anytime soon. I nonetheless decided to check the instructions booklet that came with the hotplate. I turned to the page explaining the different error codes and found that what it actually said was “E0” (number 0 rather than letter O). Beside the code was an explanation saying that “E0” meant “无锅” or, in English, “No pot.” Hanxiong and I looked at each other and burst out laughing.

               We now have two hot plates.

My room more or less how it looks now. You will notice the puzzle tiles on the floor. The room used to be part of a larger room that is now divided into Hanxiong's and my bedrooms and our shared common area/kitchen. The rooms were divided using a thin metal wall that make it so Hanxiong and I can easily shout to each other through the wall asking if the other is hungry or want to play chess. Nice for communication. Bad for privacy.

Hanxiong and I had to get copies of our keys made at the market. Here you can see the very simple key duplication process taking place in front of a woman reading another woman's fortune.

Fresh tomatoes from the market. Cheap (60 cents per kilogram) and delicious!

The excellent first meal that Hanxiong prepared for us: Steamed fish, tomatoes and sugar, and tomato fried egg with rice. I was and continue to be impressed by Hanxiong's cooking. 

Hanxiong posing with his meal.

The sky on a clear, moonless night in Dazhai. Hanxiong, who is from the large city of Tsingdao in Shandong Province, was absolutely amazed by the number of stars in the sky. It was beautiful.

I left the shutter open around ten minutes for this shot of the stars over the surrounding mountains.

Moving home to Dazhai

I have moved into my dorm on the Dazhai Middle School campus! It is, all things considered, a very nice room. Hanxiong and I both get our own individual rooms and share a larger common area where we can cook and relax. Moreover, we are on the first floor, so no need to climb stairs every day. That said, we have only public showers and bathrooms that leave much to be desired. You can see a picture of the boy’s bathroom below. I will leave out the usual descriptive language, as I believe them to be both unnecessary and likely to make you stop reading now.

That said, it is a very nice housing situation. Right now, the school dorms are rather tight for teachers and extremely tight for students. The school knocked down an old dorm building earlier this year and the new dorm has yet to be built, so the students are stuffed into dorms like sardines and they are having trouble finding enough room for us teachers. For the students, the result is, I am told, about 20 students in each room, meaning that students have to share beds, sometimes with up to three kids on one bed (the size of the plank bunk-beds I stayed in at Dayao). I have yet to see the rooms with all the students in them myself, but I can only imagine the utter lack of personal space and the sweaty smell of pubescent, seldom-washed middle-schoolers when all the students are there. The new building should be finished within the next couple months, alleviating conditions significantly.

But in the meantime, I am here in my new room, and I have an address, so I can be sent things! My address is as follows:

孔德临 (Dylan Kolhoff)

中国云南省临沧市云县大寨中学 （675809），P.R. China

电话：18408858586

Dylan Kolhoff

Dazhai Middle School

Lincang Prefecture, Yun County

Yunnan Province

P.R. China

ZIP Code: 675809

               Print out both the Chinese and the English and send letters or packages through USPS. I would love to hear from people, and, especially now that I have my room, I would love care packages. If you are wondering what you can send that would be useful, I can offer a few suggestions of things I want and need (credit to Ida for many of these great ideas):

1.       A watch – Something I definitely should have invested in earlier, since it is very difficult to get through a lesson timely without knowing how much time I have left. A plain, pragmatic, and still good-looking and professional watch would be perfect.

2.       Letters and pictures and art – I have large, dirty, white walls in my new room, and messages, pictures, and art from home would go a long way in making these walls home.

3.       Postcards from your home – It would be really sweet if you could write a short message to my students on it and include it in a package or just send it by itself. Through my teaching, I would like to try to begin introducing my students to the wider world (and to the US in particular), and messages from (for them) exotic places would go a long way toward that goal.

4.       Maple syrup – I have really been longing for western breakfasts, and now that I have a place I can cook I have the ability to make it myself. And while pancakes are easily made most anywhere, pancakes without real maple syrup are barely worth making. Maple syrup would be much appreciated.

5.       Chocolate – I prefer dark chocolate, but it is all good. German chocolate (like Rittersport or Milka) and things with caramel or mint are particular favorites. Candy in general would be great, and it would be really fun to share that piece of US culture with my students (I would have to have at least 15 pieces to share with my kids) – for example, Swedish Fish or Sour Patch Kids.

6.       Peanut butter – Only available in big cities in China, and always enjoyed by me and my co-fellows.

7.       Cookie butter – From Trader Joe’s, this would be an amazing treat in rural China. Really any snacks from Trader Joe’s would be great – they last well and are delicious.

8.       Tide detergent pens – The type that you can take out and use to clean stains in the moment. I brought one of these with me to China, and it has proved invaluable as I always seem to manage to splash spicy broth from my noodles onto my shirts.

9.       Cheese – Stuff that doesn’t need to be refrigerated (parmesan, other?) would be terrific in cheese-less China.

10.   Welsh’s fruit snacks – Because they are delicious.

That said, anything at all would be so very much appreciated, from a postcard to a package. I should say, though, that I can easily get basic cleaning supplies and toiletries here in China, so while I am living with shitty toilets (Ha. Funny.) and showers, I at least have easy access to soap and toothpaste and such.

The boys bathroom. I think the picture says it all really.

And yet there is also such extraordinary beauty in Dazhai. Here is the morning view outside of the window of the hotel I just left.

My first day of middle school

Yesterday, Monday, September 1, was my students’ first day of middle school classes. In China, that means that it was their first day of seventh grade. It was a big day for them and also for me, as it was the day I taught my first class at Dazhai Middle School.

The day began with an opening ceremony that took place in the central courtyard of the teaching building. It began at 9am while the most of the courtyard was in the shade, but by the end of it around noon the sun was shining brightly on the assembled students and teachers. Interestingly, as the minutes ticked by and the cool shadows retreated to one corner of the courtyard, so did the majority of the teachers. While the students, the principal, and the vice principals sweated under the strong, hot sunlight, most of the teachers retreated to the cool shade, with many of them talking and holding conversations as if the ceremony weren’t happening.

This part in particular interested me. While I couldn’t blame them for wanting to get out of the sun (beyond the sun being very strong and hot in high-altitude Dazhai, it is necessary to know that in China, being whiter rather than being tanner is generally considered more beautiful, especially among women, so the social pressure to avoid the sun is very strong), it was strange to me how they could hold obvious side conversations and pay so little attention to the speakers. It seemed like a bad example for the students, who were having enough trouble paying attention in the sunlight seated on the concrete without the addition of talking teachers. Paying attention, or even just the pretext of paying attention, could have gone a long way toward walking the walk and not just talking the talk.

That said, it is easy to judge and difficult to understand. As I saw this happening, I was led to wonder what led to this state of affairs. First, there was the sun. Chinese cultural preferences for white skin along with blazing heat led the majority of us teachers to abandon the official central benches for a jumbled set of benches and stools in the shade. Without the pomp and circumstance of the central area, the assumed prohibition against talking seemed that much weaker.

At the same time, with no meeting the day before and with teaching schedules actually being handed out by school leaders during the ceremony, teachers found themselves with the newly discovered fate of their semester in their hands and no previous opportunity to discuss it. Meanwhile, the content of the ceremony was not all that pertinent for the teachers who already knew the information.

Finally, in my small experience, this type of ceremony or meeting is commonplace in China, and they are generally long on time and short on substance. They are often more about giving face to local officials and higher-ups than about relaying information. Thus, I imagine the general attitude toward such ceremonies and events is more relaxed, especially regarding paying attention, even when there is real information being relayed (as was the case today). So perhaps the teachers were not acting as bad examples, but rather displaying to the students exactly how to react to such events if they are to live in a ceremony-filled world. For me, nothing is obvious besides my own lack of cultural understanding.

Another interesting part of the ceremony was that, when prizes were handed out to the top performing students of the previous year, the rewards weren’t books or simple certificates as they would have been in Richmond, Virginia (or, Hanxiong confirmed, Tsingdao, Shandong, aka less rural China), but cold, hard cash. Top scorers and best-behaved students were given either 10 or 20 yuan (1.5 to 3.5 USD), often in addition to a certificate, for their reward, sometimes multiple times if they performed well in multiple areas. Both Hanxiong and I thought it was a curious system of rewards and wondered how effective it was. Personally, I remember well envying friends whose parents gave them money for good grades, but I did not remember how effectually it worked in pushing them to study. Another curious unknown.

As I wrote above, during the ceremony I was given my teaching schedule for the next semester. I was glad to see that I had the classes I had expected, twelve classes a week with six different classes of seventh graders (about 4 to 10 classes fewer than many of the teachers here – Dazhai Middle School is in desperate need of more teachers). I was somewhat surprised to see that half of my classes were during the evening study hall periods that go from 6:40 to 9:20. That seemed like a small price to pay to have only 350 students instead of 650 and to be able to see each of my classes twice a week, so I was quite satisfied with my schedule, if a little guilty for having only 12 classes per week compared to some teachers’ 20 or more. I was also happy to see that on Mondays my first class was at 6:40 and on Fridays my last class ended around noon, meaning that weekend travel would be much more doable.

My first class that I would teach was that night at 6:40, seventh grade class number 185 (each class is given a number, with the newest grade given higher numbers). I arrived in the classroom five minutes early to prepare and to write the class rules on the board. When class began a few minutes later, I turned from writing on the board to find the classroom half-empty (or was it half-full?). The class’ 班主任, or home-room teacher, came in to introduce himself and tell me that the majority of the boys were all in their dorms being taught how to make their beds, so I should wait for them to start class. Expecting the boys to come back at any moment, I told the rest of the class that they could rest for a few minutes until they returned.

After six minutes of sitting awkwardly in the front with no sigh of the boys, I announced that we would play a game while we waited for them, even as I desperately tried to think of a game we could play that would have something, anything to do with English. The only game I could think of was the flyswatter game, so I went with it and began drawing letters of the alphabet on the board. I asked two students to come up at a time and had them race to slap the letter I said, and then had the class tell me if it was capital or lower-case and then repeat the letter name several times.

I also had the class do cheers for their classmates who came to the board, which they found hilarious. I had them say “WOW!” as they spelled it out with their hands forming two W’s and their mouth forming the O. I don’t think they had ever seen a teacher jumping up and saying “WOW!” as a form of encouragement, and they both loved it and found it ridiculous. The few boys that were in the class were particularly reluctant to potentially make fools of themselves, so I had to do it several times until they got into it and enjoyed it. I also had them say “Looking good, looking good” as they brushed off their shoulders for another cheer, which they found even more ridiculous and fun.

After twenty minutes (of a forty-five minute class) of playing games and practicing cheers and still no sign of the boys, I decided to present some of my planned class even though I would have to repeat it the next class. I introduced myself as Mr. K (or 孔老师 outside of English class) and went over the class rules, their implications, and the reason why they are important for our class. Finally, as the end of class neared, I taught the kids our daily sign-out: See (point to your eyes) You (point away from you) Later (point behind you). Finally, the bell rang and, with one last “See you later,” my first class at Dazhai Middle School was finished.

The school prepared a long strong of firecrackers for the opening ceremony, which was very exciting and very loud. Also it ended only about 15 feet from some of the students.

A vice principal handing out money to some of the school's best students as rewards.

The students standing in the hot sun as a vice principal gives a speech.

The day before the opening ceremony, Hanxiong, Shuchen, another fellow at the school, and I went to the nearby larger city of Yunxian to get teaching materials and to get bank cards. We also had a great meal of western(ish) food. And yes, of course pizza is supposed to be eaten with chopsticks. Can you imagine what would have happened if DeBlasio had used chopsticks rather than just the far-too-civilized knife and fork?

I got a steak, which was lit on fire as it was served. Quite delicious, but pretty weird and not actually very western.