getting-in-the-christmas-spirit extravaganza

Last Saturday night, I invited all of my students over for a pre-Christmas celebration. Several of the other foreign teachers here, all of whom are very religious, hold Christmas dinners and discussions in their homes, but I really wanted to give my students a taste of the magic which builds up throughout December. They kept telling me that they wanted to experience a "real" Christmas, and for me, half the magic is in the preparations and the build-up, so here are a few photos from my attempt to give my students a cultural peek at Christmas-time: http://uva.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2069312&l=f42da&id=1511004

Several of my senior boys were determined to dig up a tree for me, saying that a fake tree meant a fake christmas, and that they wanted me to have a real one. Normally I sort of agree with them, but I really love the fake tree that I found at a small store across town, and I think it turned out beautifully. I am a little worried that I'll wake up on Christmas morning and find a tree leaning against my front door... We decorated, made and frosted cookies, listened to christmas music (thanks Mom and Adrienne for the great Christmas mixes!!) and generally had a smashing good time. The students had fun, but it really meant the world to me because it finally felt like christmas in my home away from home.

All over the city, stores and restuarants and hotels are dressing up for Christmas and it is a bizarre feeling to be a Westerner wandering around the city right now. Many of the laoban (store owners) don't even know the word Christmas if I ask them about it, though it festoons their shop windows. When I went shopping for some decorations, I was barely noticed among the hordes of people pushing into the few stalls which had holiday decorations. A welcome, if surprising, experience.

On Thursday night the English department will be hosting an enormous Christmas 'party' for the University -- from what I can gather, party, in this situation, means a large and probably lengthy performance. I'm supposed to be singing Silent Night, but I have no idea what other representations of Christmas there will be. Maybe I should give a mini-lecture on Chanukkah, though I think it would burst their bubble a bit. Sunday night I'll be gathering with the other volunteers in Lanzhou for a salsa-licious Christmas eve, then spending the morning of with Ben and three of our closest Chinese friends. Yes of course there will be stockings. Pancakes too.

With all this, what about school you might ask? Well, I'm working on putting together exams, which I'll be giving during Christmas week. This week we're wrapping up course material and reviewing. I can't believe the semester is practically over! I've learned so much, and hopefully I'll be going into the next semester prepared to offer the students more predictable schedules and rubrics, but overall, I think I've hit on some routines that really work well, and I believe that gotten at least something from my lessons and the mad-cap role-plays we often get caught up in. Next semester I know I'll be teaching British literature to the junior english majors, and I'll be thesis advising 5 or 6 of the seniors which is supposed to be quite time consuming. I'll continue teaching listening and speaking, though I don't know yet if it will be with my sophomores or if I'll get a crack at the freshmen. It will be a much more demanding semester all together, but now that I've had my first few months of trial-by-fire, I'll be ready for it (I hope).

Luomen

This weekend I went down to a small town between Lanzhou and Tian Shui, called Luomen. Wandering down from the traintracks early on the morning of market Sunday was a total assault on the senses: music blaring, people yelling greetings, fruit and tea everywhere. Loved it! I was there in search of the Water Curtain Caves. The area is about 17 wild kimometers from the town, passing through a steep and twisty streambed before widening into a wider canyon of huge sandstone domes with temples and ancient cave paintings and carvings embedded in the cliffs. The main cliff work features a 31-m high Buddha surrounded by paintings and carvings finished in the Northern Wei dynasty (AD 386-534). Side note: our awesome taxi driver who got us out there in one piece also served as guide for us and while I certainly couldn't catch everything, I understood some of what he was saying about the history of the place! Here are a few of the pictures I took in this incredible place.

kiddie english competition

It snowed yesterday and after we, the residents of Lanzhou, had collectively ground it into a gray mush, it froze into a solid sheet of ice covering most streets and sidewalks around the city. Walking to class this morning through the single-digit cold was dangerous as I had to avoid the many chinese ladies, apparently unwilling to give up their heels, who went flying; shoes, vegetables, and papers every which way.

Last week I spent two afternoons judging an English competition. The ages of the students ranged from around 6 to 12 year olds. The first day, with the young ones, was pretty priceless. Tucked in, two to a seat, they filled the auditorium. They each recited a little story, sang a little song, and answered two of the pre-provided questions that I asked them. They were adorable, but it really provided a lot of insight into the background of my students. Something which, when we have the energy, we all fight, is the habit of our students to say Nice to meet you every time we see them. Nice to see you again seems a lost cause. Even my senior english majors will slip up in this little way if I catch them by surprise on the street. Doesn't seem like a big thing, I know, but when everyone you see always says nice to meet you, even those you see daily, it can suddenly seem like a looming grammatical point. ANYWAY, a provided "question" for me to ask these litt'luns was Nice to meet you. The answer we were looking for I presume being Thank you. Nice to meet you too. Other 'questions' in the same vein were Happy Teachers' Day. Real questions were more like holding up a few fingers and asking how many? Not how many fingers mind you. I got yelled out for that. They haven't learned the word fingers yet. And if it's not on their vocabulary lists, there's obviously no way the kids could understand, even with me wiggling my fingers and pointing at them. Well, talking about contextual learning had no place in the middle of the competition I guess.

With the older kids, the next day, I asked each of them 2-3 questions that I took from the story they recited. They probably hate me. There were few that they considered appropriately easy -- one student even said "that question is too difficult, please give me another." Someone coached her I suppose. But the thing was, they weren't hard at all... they just addressed the content of the stories, something only a few of the students were familiar with. It was frustrating for me because I think a ten year old telling a 1-2 minute story should also be required to know what they are talking about! It's a very different system over here. And yet I can't totally dismiss it because my students have enormous vocabularies and grammatical backgrounds in English, allowing me to have fun with the real communicative aspects of the language in my classes. And there is a significant difference in ability from year to year, so something is working.

Another thing which I found interesting is the degree of tracking -- each grade had around 7 classes, and the brightest/best students are in class 1, the next best in class 2, and so on. This is something that continues straight through to University. And the difference between classes is clear even among the 6 year olds, only increasing in effect among the older children. Really drove home the arguments for inclusion in classes. Students pegged to a lower numbered class in early childhood are likely to stay there right through to the level that I teach at, affecting their goals and achievements at every turn.

From a western point of view, this educational system seems stifling and almost backward at moments, apparently valuing the perkiness of an english "performance" over content, originality and communication. But it's really not that simple at all. Chinese students outperform American students in most (all?) academic areas, and by not-slim margins. They have a discipline, dedication, and respect for academics which is lacking in the states. Here it is inculcated at a very young age through constant competition, ranking, formalized testing. Three of the least inspiring methods of evaluation, and yet, successfull in many respects. Some sort of compromise between Eastern and Western education seems like an important concept, particularly as we at home seek pretty desperately to rehabilitate the American school system. And in that context, I think the wave of new charter schools in the states seems on the right track. They, like the chinese, have many extra hours built into the school day, teach discipline and scholastic 'attitude' as they teach regular subjects. But they also keep more western standards of fostering intellectual curiosity and multi-cultural conciousness, things I find lacking in many of my Chinese students, though only because they haven't been a part of their education.

Anyway, just a few thoughts as I keep puzzling things out over here.

Lanzhou: high 28 low 13, smoky

So Thanksgiving was delicious and plentiful and comradely and everything Thanksgiving away from family and the States could possibly be. Ben and I were up half the night before cooking, and I know lots of others were too. It was completely worth it -- that's just about half of the spread we had that you can see there at the bottom. In this picture we've got 15 PCV's, 4 Chinese friends, and another PCV plus some other UK friends out of the frame. From the evening we were missing just 7 of the Gansu PCVs.

Winter is here at last, and with a vengeance. After an abnormally long, wonderful, fall, it has gotten cold, and will get much colder. I've heard varying reports between -10 and -15 degrees celsius for the coldest days of January and February. I'm choosing not to convert that to farenheit, it sounds bitter enough as is. Today it was in the mid-30s and felt almost balmy. I got overheated playing pingpong outside with a student this afternoon! The entire province has been winterizing. Outdoor restaurant stands are featuring shaguo (an earthernware pot stuffed with meat and veggies that they pour water into and cook over a high flame), hot potato stands and tanghulu (candied fruits on a stick) abound, and foods considered innard-warming, like yams, are readily available in the markets. An occasional jingle-bells cell phone ring on a crowded bus makes for a good pick-me-up. While I have seen houses in the countryside decked out in drying corn and peppers, I have only just started noticing that many apartments in the city have also looped drying red peppers up in their sun porches. It's festive looking, but also a really tangible reminder of the season. I love catching a glimse of the bright, spicy, strands when I bus through some of the more run down neighborhoods in town.

Two weeks ago it started snow flurrying, and in English Corner, Einstein, one of my favorite freshman, jumped up to excitedly tell us all that he had seen his very first snow that morning. It snowed more that night and I got an ecstatic text message from him the next day that read "Snowing ! ! ! ! ! !". It was beautiful though, I wish it had accumulated a bit. A few hours out of town it did stick a bit, dusting the terraced hills and looking gorgeous. Both the English Corners that week had been about Love for some reason, and between kids taking notes on pick-up lines and uttering words of wisdom like Puff's "Love is not so much a feeling to be felt as an ation to be learned", it made for pretty interesting, if sometimes repetitive conversations.

This last Friday, Dec. 1st was World AIDS day and I conducted small lectures in English Corner and in several of my classes -- the only safe sex/HIV "education" my students have had has been from TV. With my sophomores, on the day of, we played an HIV transmission game (yeah, I feel as weird typing that as you do reading it) in order to drive home how quickly HIV and other STDs can be spread and the importance of education and praciticing safe sex, whether that means abstinence or correct condom use. They thought they'd just been having fun running around the room playing a crazy conversation game, and the looks on their faces when I told them they'd actually all been running around the classroom 'having sex with eachother' was priceless. That class was particularly receptive to the information I had for them.

Next week is the last week of classes for most of my students' courses. My classes technically have 3 more weeks each, though, since I started 2 weeks into the semester. I feel bad since most of my kids are preparing for finals in all their other classes, so I'm going to try to swing it so we review next week, they take their exams for me in class, and then we have a (English only) party for the last class. But we'll see.

In apartment news, (1)I have a mouse (mice?). I am rather impressed with it's ingenuity, in fact, since there are no apparent holes in my walls, there are screens over those of my windows that don't close flush, and my place is in the middle of a brick and concrete apartment block. (2)Next week I'm hoping to either buy a fake christmas tree downtown somewhere, or somehow borrow one from the university's grounds. The next week I'll invite all my students over to decorate it and my apt., and make christmas cookies and listen to christmas music. I'm excited!
---> Speaking of the christmas spirit, if any of you were thinking of sending packages this way, there are quite large envelopes at the post office which mail as Global Priority Mail for about $11 and get here in 7-10 days. I would be thrilled to get some of those packets of dry mix for sauces/seasonings/muffins/ranch dressing that you can pick up at the grocery store. Those, mix CD's, magazines, reese's pieces, peanut butter cups, junior mints, and any other cheap and easy way that you might want to express your love would make my christmastime that much more special.
Kristen Rush
International Office
Lanzhou University of Technology
Langongping 287
Lanzhou, Gansu, 730050
China