Reflection on a Semester in Dazhai

Winter has arrived in Yunnan. For my last weeks in Dazhai, I spent my nights bundled up under several sweaters and my (admittedly thin) coat when I wasn’t in my room warmed by my small heater purchased on Taobao (like eBay for China, but better). Yet even during Yunnan’s harshest weeks of winter, during the day when the sun is out and shining there is little need for more than a light sweater, and even that can seem overkill during a game of basketball or a particularly heated round of ping pong. With winter has come several developments and realizations.

Dazhai Middle School ended the semester with a week of testing proceeded by two weeks of preparing to test. My students got more and more used to having a foreign teacher, leading some to feel more comfortable talking with me and others to feel more comfortable talking during my class. I completed a glasses project at the school, beginning with a massive effort to test all nine hundred students’ eyesight and ending with the distribution of free glasses to two hundred excited and somewhat self-conscious students. Construction on the new student dorm and bathroom at Dazhai neared completion, with the start of the new semester named as the perspective end date. The six month mark of my time in China came and went without much commotion. Ida’s and my spring festival travel began with a six-hour, four part journey from Gengga to Lincang (bus to Xiqian, mianbaoche to Fengqing, bus to Yunxian, bus to Lincang), where I picked up my passport and new visa, followed by a nine-hour bus odyssey to Kunming. Tomorrow we will fly to Taiwan for the start of our real spring festival travel.

Before we leave for six weeks of travel, I want to take the opportunity to reflect on the past semester, its successes and failures, and the hopes I have for the future.

Around half way through the semester, I began doing project-based learning (PBL) in my classroom. Whereas before I had stuck closely to the textbook and the material my students’ other English teachers were teaching, with PBL I introduced new material (some of it still from the textbook) which I taught through a central project requiring teamwork and creativity. The project that I did with my kids was A Day in the Life of a Dazhai Middle School Student. I taught the students English that they could use to describe their school and their daily lives, which they would then use within a small group to write a booklet about their lives at the middle school. As an incentive, I told the students that the creators of the best booklets in each class would be able to go with me to the nearby elementary school to introduce middle school life to 5^th and 6^th graders and thereby help prepare them for middle school life. Originally I planned to meet with each group or a representative of each group three times during the project for each of three units to monitor progress and improve my relationships with students. I also planned to give three tests to the students, two unit tests and one final test.

Right off the bat I faced a number of challenges. I faced the fundamental challenges that presented their fearsome faces most every class no matter the content: lack of student motivation or interest; lack of self-confidence, instilling the internal mantra of “I can’t (不会)” in many students; massive, sixty-student classes that allowed for minimal individual or even group attention. Chinese students also have very little experience in teamwork, so introducing a team-based project required an intense amount of planning, from deciding group members to assigning seating to choosing group names to describing the basics of how students should work together in a group.

Other problems presented themselves along the way. In two of my classes, time given for group work quickly degenerated into chaos, with perhaps half of the students working with the rest acting as though it were recess. A lack of resources quickly showed itself with the turning in of the first page of their booklet, almost all of which had haphazard pencil drawings instead of the neat color drawings that were expected; only a very few students had access to markers or colored pencils. My own very limited time also became painfully obvious as I tried to meet with students for the first unit. While this combined with Thanksgiving and a visa trip to Hong Kong to make for an incredibly busy two weeks, I realized that even with full weeks and groups made up of four to five students, I would not have enough time to meet with every group. 360 students split into groups of four or five made about 85 groups, which were impossible to meet with in the miniscule amount of free time given to middle school students (they have two hours for lunch and rest in the afternoon and an hour and a half for dinner in the evening – every other minute of their day is given to classes or study hall). Finally, time constraints again challenged me during the aforementioned two weeks of test-prep. I had counted on being able to teach until the week of testing, but instead found my classes taken away in order to give students practice tests, taking away my last four classes with my students along with the vital last steps of the project, including finishing their booklets and the final test.

In the end, I was able to salvage booklets of varying quality from four of my six classes, but had no time to give them grades or go to the elementary school with them (I plan to revisit the plan next semester). I was able to find time to test one class, which they did surprisingly well on considering time constraints. I saw impressive group work in a few of my classes along with several truly creative and well-written final booklets. After I started providing markers for the students to use, most groups turned in bright and colorful booklet pages. Many students were well-motivated by the project’s close connection to their lives. Some students even went so far as to retain the knowledge.

However, in two classes I had to abandon the project altogether. After 184 and 185 bans repeatedly descended into chaos during group time, I suspended the project and taught the material through tighter and stricter lessons with little to no time during which students could go wild. They still found ways, of course, yet slowly but surely I reasserted control over the classroom. I was never able to meet with all the groups. I gave two tests, but had not scheduled time to go over them with the students, rendering them much less useful than they could have been. We never made it to the elementary school (I still plan to do this next semester). Several students were wholly unmotivated by the project and continued to disrupt class whenever possible. In several groups, one or two students took control and did the project themselves with little or no help from the rest of their group members.

Even with these numerous failures, I consider the project an overall success. I have learned dozens of valuable lessons for next semester, when I plan to start another project. With the help of this experience, the support of local teachers and my program manager, and extensive planning, I believe that I can create a really successful project with my students.

Outside of the classroom, I was happy to complete a glasses project at the middle school. With the help of Education in Sight, my co-fellows, and three eye doctors from nearby Yunxian, I was able to provide free glasses to two hundred students. It was incredibly challenging at moments, which made it all the more satisfying to see my students wearing their glasses during the last weeks of school.

               Implementing the project first required applying to Education in Sight after discussing the idea with co-fellows and the school administration. Simple and straight-forward. After being informed that I had been accepted as a Sight Leader for the program, which would provide funding and support for getting glasses for my students, I had to test the eyesight of all 900 students in my school. We had to identify which students likely needed glasses, who would then be tested by the local eye doctors when they came to the school. Since I would not be able to test all the students myself, I needed the help of the banzhuren (home room teachers). A co-fellow helped me describe what help I needed during a meeting. Unfortunately, it was said at the tail end of a meeting while about half of the teachers were playing games on their cell phones, so the message was only half listened to. I had to go speak to teachers individually and attend a banzhuren meeting later in the week before I felt assured that all the banzhuren understood what I needed.

               Collecting the information about which students needed glasses from the banzhuren was another task. Some teachers gave the information to my co-fellow rather than me (an issue in communication), while others didn’t give them to anyone. I had to seek out every banzhuren over the course of a couple days to collect all the necessary information. Still I found myself lacking the eyesight information for two classes. The students informed me that they had been tested, but that they had already given their information to the eye doctors. I was very confused for a day or two until I found out that another teacher, one of the main school administrators, had brought in a friend or relative who was an eye doctor in Yunxian to give them eye tests and sell the students glasses. It became a rather awkward situation.

While we shared a desire to improve the lives of our students by improving their sight, the school administrator also wanted to provide customers for his friend. Since he was an important person in the school, I could not (and did not want to) simply say that he couldn’t do it. Instead, I had to haltingly discuss the issue with him and the principal (haltingly because of their difficult accents and dialect-filled speech) and convince them that free glasses through an unknown was better than costly glasses through a friend. I also offered to put his friend in touch with Education in Sight so that he could work with them in the future to provide glasses to students throughout the region. It was enough.

The eye doctors game a week later and tested about three hundred students throughout one day of classes. We stopped briefly for lunch and dinner, but other than that worked more or less throughout the day.  My co-fellow and I went from class to class to ask teachers if we could borrow their students for a while to have their eyesight tested. I took pictures of students being tested and trying out glasses frames and strengths. Seeing them point out places and objects on the mountains surrounding Dazhai, seemingly seeing them clearly for the first time, made the exhausting day worth it.

Two weeks later, I bused to Yunxian to pick up the glasses, and a couple days later my co-fellows and I handed two hundred students their new glasses. Many were excited. Most were self-conscious about how they looked. They all were able to see the board clearly no matter where they were sitting. It will still require more work. I plan to meet with banzhuren next semester to discuss how best to make the students wear their glasses. I personally told students that they had to wear them while in my class. I also plan to arrange a meeting of the students to discuss glasses care and how it is important that they wear them in order to preserve their eyesight. About sixty percent of the students are wearing their glasses now. I plan to bring that number up to one hundred percent next semester.

Now we are on vacation. School is over for six weeks, but it is never far from the mind. Stories of students and our work are brought up often as we introduce ourselves at the hostel in Kunming. People are surprised and interested. It is hard to explain how challenging the work is though. It is difficult to say how rewarding it is for us and yet how incredibly frustrating it is for us. We rely on stories and anecdotes.

The next semester is six weeks away, yet it is hard not to plan on how to create a better project, a better classroom, a better teacher. Both Ida and I have planned out how we will begin the semester, but there is the constant feeling that we could do more, do better.

We work to improve our Chinese in our spare time to reach personal goals. We wonder whether learning the local dialect would hurt our Chinese. We wonder how to learn the local dialect.

Most of all, we are on vacation. Tomorrow we will fly to Taiwan, the first stop in our travel plans. From there we will fly to Shanghai, where we will see my co-fellow, then on to go to Zhejiang to visit Ida’s co-fellow. Train to Beijing to see my friend at Beida and for Ida to interview for an internship before my Dad and Charlotte will fly into Beijing and we will begin our travel with them. On to Harbin for two freezing days of fun before flying to Xi’an for spring festival with Ida’s co-fellow there. Another flight to Guilin to relax and bike around the beautiful karst landscape of Yangshuo. Finally a short flight back to Kunming and a long bus ride home to Dazhai before sending my Dad and Charlotte back to Beijing and their flight home by way of Shanghai. Six weeks of travel. A wonderful adventure ahead of us. Off we go into the air.

One of the better final projects for the project we did on my students' lives at the Middle School

Taiwan meets Dylan

Now, my Dad might say that Charlotte forced him to take this picture with her near the Temple of Heaven, but we all know she was actually humoring him.

Traveling in Rural China

               It has been quite a while since my last blog post. As often happens with me and blogs, I paused for a little bit (in this case, to travel over National Holiday), and when I returned I wasn’t quite sure where to start. Part of me always wants to start where I left off, but another part of me knows that if I start there I will likely never make it to the much more pertinent present. Now, after several weeks of inaction, my own nagging as well as sweet messages from family friends and family about my blog has gotten me writing once again.

               Since my last post, I have done quite a bit of traveling. First I went to Gengga and Changning with Ida, and then, again with Ida, to Dali for National Holiday. Later I went to Lincang City for a conference with Teach for China. Most recently, I went once again to Changning to celebrate Halloween with other Teach for China Fellows.

               While I have become accustomed to getting around in rural Yunnan, it is nonetheless a fascinating, sometimes frustrating process that deserves an in-depth description. While trains are the transportation of choice in most of China, the bus reigns supreme in the great majority of Yunnan.

I should say that the bus reigns supreme as a form of mass transportation, because if looking at just transportation in general, motorcycles would undoubtedly top the charts, especially in the more remote villages. I happened to be in Ida’s very remote placement, Gengga, when parents were arriving to pick up their kids, and the traffic jam of motorcycles outside the school gates resembled a game I used to play when I was younger called Rush Hour, where you had to move cars, trucks, and vans out of the way one square at a time in order to allow the one red car to drive off the board. But in this iteration, the board was completely packed with exclusively motorcycles, and there were no open squares to move into at all. If the red car were there, it would have had to wait several hours to get to its destination.

This same phenomenon occurred in Lincang City during the Teach for China conference, but with cars (motorcycles are still common, but cars are more so due to the prosperity of the city). We were returning to our hotel from an activity when we ran into an awful traffic jam. We originally assumed it was the result of a bad car accident, but as we saw students in middle school uniforms weave in and out of the cars (some of which we now realized were empty), we realized that the six-lane road in the middle of the city had essentially been turned into a parking lot while parents were picking up their children.

Anyway, back to the bus, the king of mass transportation in Yunnan. The bus has won out over the train here in Yunnan because of Yunnan’s mountainous terrain and relatively dispersed population. It is hugely expensive to lay railroad tracks through the mountains and, compared to the rest of China, Yunnan is not very densely populated (though still much more densely populated when compared to similar areas in the United States), making railroads less economical in general, so trains only go to Yunnan’s largest and most central cities or tourist destinations (like Kunming, Dali, and Lijiang). Thus the only option to the majority of Yunnan is the bus.

In Dazhai, this option is cheap and convenient. Buses leave from Dazhai to go to Yunxian, the nearest large city, every 15 minutes from about 6:30am to 6:30pm for about $3.50. The bus has, in my experience, never filled up, making it a flexible and easy option. However, from the smaller town of Gengga, there are only three or four buses going to the nearest city of Changning each day, and they are almost always full, making it much more difficult and inconvenient to travel. That variety is part of what makes travel in Yunnan unique and, sometimes, frustrating.

Buses also serve an auxiliary role as package carrier for the villages on their route. When boarding the bus, there will often be several packages in the middle of the floor that will be dropped off throughout the trip. I often wonder who receives the money for those packages – the bus driver or the company. One time a woman stopped the bus and handed the driver an open bag of green beans and other vegetables, which he took and dropped off a dozen miles later with an older woman waiting at the side of the road. Another time several crates of chickens were strapped to the top of the bus and dropped off on the way to our destination.

Other than that, how do these buses differ from, say, Greyhound or Megabus? There are three main types of buses in China in my experience. The most common in rural China is a minibus, about two-thirds the length of a Greyhound bus with seats that are somewhat smaller and closer together and with a larger open area in the center for luggage or extra people. In between larger cities you usually find larger, Greyhound-style buses will four seats per row and luggage storage underneath. Both of these types of buses have seatbelts, which bus station officials will actually make sure you buckle before you leave (this in a society where any helmet on a motorcycle is uncommon and actual motorcycle helmets are rarer still). Finally, for long distance nighttime buses, you often find sleeper buses, which have short bunk beds (especially short for us tall Americans) rather than seats. In my recent travel, I was mostly on minibuses, with a few larger buses for longer hauls (for instance, to Dali).

In all of my travel over the past month, I have had two especially interesting experiences in my journeys. First, when Ida and I were on the bus from Changning to Dali over National Holiday, the large bus we were on got in an accident, hitting the small truck in front of us, which in turn hit the SUV in front of it. It was a bad crash for the cars involved, but luckily no one was hurt. Most interesting for me was what happened afterward. Right after the crash, the cars stayed exactly where they were in a rather dangerous, steep spot, leaving only one lane open. That lane was used by cars going in both directions, with a speed and recklessness (around a corner) that made Ida and I think that another accident would soon follow.

Most everyone on the bus ended up out on the road (mind you, this is a major road, though only two lanes across) to see the accident, get fresh air, and/or smoke. Ida and I did go out to see what had happened and actually felt safer on the side of the road after seeing what a precarious spot the bus was in with other trucks and buses zooming by with little thought of cars coming in the other direction (in the same lane). We were actually a little concerned that we might cause an accident ourselves with all the rubbernecking we got from passing drivers due to our being foreigners.

Eventually the police did arrive along with what appeared to be an official from the bus company to take pictures of the accident and write down the story. After pictures were taken, the cars were finally moved more toward the side of the road. Meanwhile, we bus passengers were left without any idea of how we would be getting to our destination. We watched and waited, hoping that we would somehow end up in Dali. Finally, about an hour and a half after the crash, another bus showed up that would take us onward. As we left the scene of the crash, we also left our old bus driver, all three crashed cars, and some police still there. I like to think that the crash was resolved without too much trouble and that the look of anguish on the drivers’ faces were due to the immediate situation rather than its effect on their future. However, I have no idea about how such things are resolved in China, so I have no way of knowing.

The second adventure in my recent travel was in my return journey from Gengga after Halloween. As I wrote before, there are only three buses to Changning from Gengga every day. Since I had to get back to Dazhai by the early evening for an evening study hall with Class 185, I took the earliest bus, at 8:00 am. However, the ride from Gengga to Changning to Yunxian to Dazhai is a long one, and the first two legs actually overlap by about 40 minutes (the road from Yunxian to Changning forks and goes to Gengga), so I determined to get off at the fork and figure out a way to get to Yunxian from there. I originally planned to wait for a bus to Yunxian to go by, which I would simply flag down and take the rest of the way. This is a common way to get around, and works well as long as the bus isn't already full.

However, as soon as I arrived at the town where the road forks to Changning and Gengga I was offered a ride to a town in between there and Yunxian by a woman driving a small silver minivan already holding four other passengers. She assured me that I could get to Yunxian from that town, so I agreed to her price of $2.50 and hopped in the front seat. The woman drove a rather frenzied pace to the town, stopping here and there to drop off people and pick up others until the car was full, when she began shaking and waving her hand at people waiting for a ride on the side of the road to show that there was no room. As she drove and passed slower cars (a necessary evil on a two lane mountain road with many slow, over-laden trucks), the driver answered called and made others herself (bus drivers are rarely better and will often smoke as well). We nonetheless made it quickly and easily, safe and sound.

She dropped me off directly next to a minibus heading from the town to Yunxian, which I hopped on just a minute before it left, nabbing the last window seat available (while the aisle offers more leg room, the window is necessary if people start smoking or if your seatmate smells particularly badly). I arrived in Yunxian quickly and easily, and was conveniently able to catch a bus to Dazhai within minutes.

While this second adventure may hardly seem an adventure to my dear readers, it was much more of one as I lived it. I felt rather like I was stepping out of a door with a blindfold on, unsure of what exactly I would land on (if anything). While I ended up finding relatively simple and easy transportation each step of the way, I could have also waited by the side of the road for an hour with only full buses going by.

But no, that is rarely how China works in my experience. It is a place where things crazily, haphazardly, wildly sort out and work out. Many ways of doing business and of living here seem like they should not work, but somehow, day after day, they do. It is something that mystifies and invigorates me about living in China. Somehow this massive, complex, diverse society gets along day by day, month by month, year by year, century by century. Things change and things stay the same, and life goes on.

 During National Holiday, Ida and I spent two nights in Changning as we waited for a bus with available tickets to take us to Dali. As we walked around one day, we ran into the one person we knew in the city of tens of thousands - Huang Laoshi, one of Ida's local teachers. He invited us to his home and then took us with his daughter to visit a really beautiful park.

A boy fishing for minnows in the park in Changning.

Unhappy campers waiting for salvation after the bus crash on the way to Dali.

The police photographing the scene of the crash.

Once in Dali, we immediately found delicious cheese and meat sandwiches to meet our cravings.

Wheat bread and cheddar with Japanese beer and a book. A good day.

I found two packages awaiting me when I returned home, this one from my Dad. What a treasure box!

And another from a close family friend, Kit. The pillow underneath the goodies was also included in the box, and now sends me softly to sleep every night. Thank you!

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.