Third Semester, Fall 2007

The biggest thing that happened at the beginning of the semester was the arrival of the Gansu 13s at site! We got a really great group. Down to earth, committed, and fun – I think Gansu will finally be in good hands after the upheavals and sudden departures of the last year. Together the 12s and 13s up here make a really mixed group, personality and background-wise, but despite that (or because of it!) I think we’re solid through and through. My site-mate’s name is Brendon. He just graduated from Georgetown (another history major), and is from New Mexico. We have fairly similar temperaments, so we get along well, though his self-discipline when it comes to studying Chinese and keeping the dust out far outweighs mine! Luckily, I’ve got experience on my side! I was so used to being the only volunteer at my school (with Ben pitching in when I needed help), that it’s nice to have such a self-sufficient site-mate.

I’ve been pretty boring this semester, though never bored. School started September 1, and I spent the first month working to get my classes into a good groove for the semester. For the first time I was able to really plan out 2 of my 3 courses in advance, with a really complete set of syllabi and planned assessments – it felt good, and definitely paid off over the semester. My American Literature class I couldn’t plan in it’s entirely; never having taught the class and not having much to work off of, I wasn’t sure how fast we’d be able to move, and how much material we’d be able to cover. I didn’t travel during the October Holiday, taking the time to clean and finish settling myself into the semester.

My Poetry course has been the academic highlight of the semester for me. There was no textbook, and the elective course-taught once every two years-has never really been taught successfully before as far as I can tell. So I was given a completely free hand in designing the class. Even with a class twice as big as I’d been told to expect (65 students altogether), I think we managed to pull it off, if with less discussion than I’d hoped for. We moved through basic tools for reading poetry, some of the most important poetic forms, and into reading and analysis by topic: poetry of identity, of childhood, of love, of gender, of loss… and finally poetry as performance. There was no final exam – I have 65 portfolios sitting in my living room, and I’m keeping my fingers crossed that when I start grading them, my feelings about the class are upheld by the students’ work and their reflections.

A ragged second to the Poetry class is American Literature – not because I didn’t love teaching the subject (I did), but because this course is for seniors, and passing it is a requirement for them to be able to graduate. This in a semester when seniors are gone for weeks at a time looking for jobs, and when teachers are asked to essentially forgive failure when it comes to their academic work. I’m working my ass off to get these kids to pass, because I refuse to change their grades. You might be saying: duh, of course you wouldn’t change grades, this is the real world. But the students had every expectation that they could not fail this class – they told me so point blank. I had to burst that bubble, because while my department would certainly ask me to consider being lenient after grades are totaled, they will (they say) back me up if I a student well and truly fails. Of course, getting in the way of a student graduating is the last thing I’m here to do, hence the stress.

Hand in hand with the difficulties of keeping everyone in the game when seniors are absent every time a company that is hiring comes to town, is the cheating. Well, cheating by my standards. Students are literally told by some of their teachers just not to make copying and pasting from the internet obvious… they take bits and pieces from 8 websites, slap them together, and hand it in. Even those that have put together their own argument (ish. The idea of a thesis is somehow still elusive to many) have huge sections of their papers lifted directly from their textbook or the web. What I discovered, belatedly, was that my senior English majors have never learned how to use citations properly. In their first drafts, 1 out of the 60 odd papers had 1 citation. Weeks, several mini-lessons, and a lot of editing later, it’s still a problem.

I’ve written about this before, but there is a widely-held belief among the students (those whom I’ve encountered at least), that what is printed in books or on the internet is more correct than anything they could come up with (in terms of grammar, vocabulary, and ideas), and therefore not to use those materials simply makes no sense to many. Even gentle suggestions of cheating or plagiarism sometimes cause tears; students are horrified that we would think of him/her as a cheater (despite the fact that they tell me all the time about how other classmates cheated more…). ::sigh:: Truly, despite my attempts at commitment to academic integrity, and the innumerable talks I’ve had with students about this, in the end it seems to me that it is simply their bad luck that they have a teacher from 'outside the system' for a class they need to pass in order to graduate. Anyway, I’ve said far more than enough on this topic, it’s just something that I’ve really wrestled with this semester.

Advanced Practical Skills Oral English has been generally fun, and ridiculously laid-back, since that was a class of only 17 seniors, met in the evenings, and was usually decimated by the job hunt for most of the semester. I have been especially proud, though, of the improvement in two of the men in this class.

Other than classes, let’s see. Ben’s heat/water/sewage has been broken for months so he’s been spending lots of weekends at my place. I can’t complain :) It’s just been fixed, though, thus ending a prolonged period of few showers and shitting in plastic bags.

I’ve been working on a few secondary projects in the last few months, culminating in a BUSY weekend towards the end of the semester. For World AIDS Day on December 1, I went on a student’s radio show to do a talk with her on HIV/AIDS, and gave a big presentation on the West Campus at Friday Night English Corner that week. The presentation was a total teaching high for me – 80-100 kids from the lowest to highest levels of English, and I think they were all really engaged. Brendon and I had both been talking to our classes all weeks about HIV/AIDS awareness, and on December 1, about 90 students came out to show their understanding and stand together in saying that AIDS must be stopped. They formed a human-AIDS ribbon on the steps of our main teaching building. Several other universities did the same thing, at the same time, on the same day. I think the moment of it made a real impact on the students.

That same weekend my department held an experimental teaching workshop for a self-selected group of the seniors. I worked with my dean, Daisy, to create a 2-day format and select session topics that we believed would be most useful. Then we held a meeting of the foreign and Chinese English teachers in our department and had one foreign and one Chinese teacher sign up for each topic (something I thought crucial after our experiences at summer project). Unfortunately, the weekend of the workshop a big job fair opened in town, and only about half the students who’d signed up to come actually showed up for the training. Still, those 13 included a few who want to be teachers, and the rest were good students who knew this was a great professional training opportunity. They presented lessons and received feedback the second day, and most did a really great job. I’m hoping that we’ll be able to expand this in the Spring semester for the juniors, changing the format slightly to allow more time for workshop sessions and for more students to be able to participate. A good start, for sure, and a great peer-development exercise among department teachers. Peace Corps has been really supportive of this, and is currently stamping certificates for the students who took part in the workshop.

Thanksgiving was delicious and well-attended, with 30 people of 4 nationalities present. And Christmas is (truly) around the corner. My tree is up, my living room is red-and-green ribbon-lined, and I’ve been experimenting with cookie recipes in preparation for next week. On the 22^nd, I have students coming over to make dumplings (apparently on the winter solstice, as at all other dates of import it seems, it’s traditional to eat dumplings), and that night Lanzhou PCVs will gather for a Mexican potluck Christmas. The next night the Foreign Languages Dept. at my school will be throwing the big Christmas shindig, and on Christmas Eve I have invited all the teachers in my department and their families to come by my place for cookies and music and Christmas cheer (wine). The province is holding a big dinner for all Gansu foreigners on the 28^th, so we’ll be able to look forward to the further-flung of the Gansu PCVs as well.

Tomorrow I will hold a big review session for literature, and that is officially my last class of the semester. I have huge stacks of essays and portfolios to keep me busy until the lit kids take their exam a few days after Christmas – but I should be free and clear by the second week of January. And after that? Islands in Thailand, and hiking in Yunnan province. Oh, and my last semester as a Peace Corps China volunteer, and teacher at Gong Da. Crazy.

Summer 2007

My new goal is not to have to apologize at the beginning of each post. These last 6 months have been a completely egregious gap in the blog, and, as always, I’ll try to do better. I left off at the end of the spring semester last year, in mid-July, so I’ll pick back up there, with Summer Project.

Summer Project
On July 20, all the Gansu PCVs headed North and West to Jiuquan (means, literally, wine springs), a medium-sized town near the desert, and just 20 minutes from the very end of the Great Wall. There we spent two weeks running a teacher training program for about 200 teachers from the general area. We worked with a VSO volunteer from the UK – her job for the last year and a half had been attempting teacher training and while she’d experienced plenty of frustrations (as well as high points!) that mirrored our own over the course of the two weeks, her familiarity with the teachers, the job demands, and the Chinese education bosses was invaluable. Every morning, in pairs, we rotated to a new class of teachers. The first week, all of our lessons focused on specific English teaching methods, such as using story-telling and poetry in a lesson, using activities in a lesson, etc. The second week, all of our lessons focused on using social issues/topics to enliven their classes -- for example, using the Generation Gap, minorities/migration, the environment, etc. to engage students’ interest and make them more active in class. Each afternoon, a different volunteer gave a presentation and ran breakout activities/discussions on a variety of topics from multiple intelligences to HIV/AIDS and safe sex – things we thought the teachers would be interested in and might prove useful to them.

As I look back now, finally, it is the high points that stick out for me. A particularly successful lesson with a very difficult, lower-level group. A discussion with some of the advanced female teachers on their roles in society and in the family. Seeing other volunteers in teaching-mode. Dinners out with some of the trainees. Crazy evenings with the other volunteers, preparing, stressing out, telling stories from the day, and unwinding. During summer project though, we ran into enormous frustrations. Logistically, though Michelle, Kari, and I had been planning for months, the small things were never quite right (they were largely out of our hands). We all had to be very quick on our feet throughout, living and breathing Peace Corps’ “Be Flexible” mantra as we constantly revised plans in the face of locked doors, lack of facilities, trainees’ job schedules, etc. We had to deal with the reality that after running a really successful lesson, the average trainee would still not be convinced to take all or parts of it back to their own classrooms, and their own students.

Middle and high school teaching jobs here are so exam-based (with monetary penalties, in Jiuquan at least, for teachers if students don’t pass), so text-based, that while most of them have heard of general western-methodologies, it just doesn’t seem, to them, to be something they can reasonably start innovating with. And having foreign teachers running around the front of the classroom telling them they CAN engage their students, do interesting things in class, and still have students pass the exams? Well, they enjoyed the lessons, but it was clearly not convincing for a majority of the teacher trainees. If China is serious about changing teaching (especially language teaching) in this country, I think they need to have teams of really excellent Chinese teachers whose students HAVE scored highly on exams running these trainings all over the country in order to convince the average teacher Chinese teacher to try new things in their class. Many that we met have never made a lesson plan before, and their idea of a warm-up is to read the title of the lesson after the students have opened their books. As everywhere in the world these days, there is clearly room for improvement. A final mess when it came to getting certificates stamped by the Education Bureau (crucial for the teachers to get credit for spending their entire summer holiday in our training, often involuntarily), left many of us with a sour taste in our mouths as we had to say goodbye and move on with our summers.

Family Visit
As we were making our way through the twists and turns of summer project, I had another big thing on my mind: my family was in China! Arriving less than a week after we began our teacher training, my parents and sister arrived in Shanghai, and, via Beijing and Xi’an, began to head Northwest. One more week later, and I was picking them up at the airport in Jiayuguan, and taking them back to Summer Project to meet Ben, the other volunteers, and some of the trainees. It had been just over a year since I’d said goodbye to them, and it was more than a little surreal to have them here in China with me!

We made a whirlwind of the next 10 days. After spending the last two days with the other PCVs at summer project, I brought them home to Lanzhou. From Lanzhou, we took a weekend trip down to beautiful Xiahe, at the edge of the Tibetan Plateau, and spent an incredibly special afternoon in the grasslands. The next morning, we walked the kora together, circumambulating Labrang monastery. From Lanzhou, we said goodbye to Ben and flew to Chongqing where we boarded the Dragon Boat for a 2 and a half day cruise down the Yangtze River to the Three Gorges Dam.

This catch-up blog is going to be long enough at is, so I’ll let it suffice to say that from start to finish, the cruise was fabulous. First of all, I felt so fancy in the cabin I shared with my sister! We had a little teeny deck off the back of it. Each day there were day trips, one to a series of cool Taoist temples (for the King of the Dead!), and another up a very small tributary to the traditional area of the Tujia minority. We went through the Dam at night, and it was completely dramatic -- the sheer magnitude of the construction feat was pretty breath-taking. Throughout the trip we could see clearly where towns had been relocated upwards, and where the water line would eventually be.

The morning after the Dam, we disembarked at Yichang, and hopped on a train for Hangzhou. After a great 20 hour train ride which involved a lot of map-studying on the part of Dad, and a lot of catchphrase on all of our parts, we arrived in Hangzhou. West Lake was mesmerizing as promised. After getting stranded by our boat on a far island the first evening, Dad and Adrienne and I walked back along the bridges spanning the lake. They spoiled me with Pizza Hut that night. The next day we went to the Lingyin Temple area… skipping the pricey temple itself, we took a cable car up to the peak behind it for panoramic views of Hanzhou, and then spend a few hours scrambling through ancient Buddhist grottoes and paths all over the hill below. Had a great dinner that night, after a little trial and error at a restaurant downtown.

As it came time for my family to go home, we made the quick hop back into Shanghai. That night we met up with my Chinese friend Wondering for dinner, and then had a last stroll along the Bund, all lit up and gorgeous as always. The next day we spent a very full afternoon shopping for all the friends and family at home, and as we came back to the hotel, my sister told me it had been perfect – there wasn’t anything she’d dreamed of doing that she hadn’t gotten to do, nothing she’d really fallen in love with that she hadn’t been able to buy cheaply. I think that after a 20 day trip in China, they were sated. The next day, I took them to the airport, waited with them through the long check-in lines, said goodbye, and headed back into the city.

Post-Fam Summer Travel
That night, I started my train marathon. Took the first one overnight from Shanghai to Beijing, where I met up for the afternoon and evening with my friend Lee, a fellow veteran of many China history, culture, and language classes at UVA. That night, another overnight train from Beijing to Datong, where a student of mine lives. She and her dad met me at the station, and we spent the day first at the stunning Yungang Caves, and afterwards, wandering around town. The Yungang caves were cut back into the cliff wall just outside Datong, and are filled with beautiful paintings and imposing (enormous!) Buddhas. My student remembers that when she was young, she could climb right up into the laps of some of the towering statues.

After being walked onto the platform and waved into the distance by my student and her dad, I was off again for my third overnight train, bringing me home again to Lanzhou. I think I had about a day and a half for laundry before hopping on another overnighter, this time with Ben, to Chengdu. It was unbelievably hot on the train, and we sweat buckets all the way there. Once there, though, we met up with Pierce, my old sitemate, who was now sporting a really scraggly-looking beard, and had just returned from visiting his lady in Kyrgyzstan (she’s Peace Corps too). With Pierce, we headed, by overnight train again, to Tongren, Pierce’s new site down in Guizhou province. From Tongren, we went to Kaili where we visited with a few other volunteers, including on of the China 10s who had done some of our training when we first arrived and was back at his old site, visiting old friends. From Kaili we left – in the pouring rain – for an all-day bus trip(s) up and around and over and through the (very) mountainous terrain. We finally found ourselves that night in a small Dong minority village.

The country down there is all mountains and hills cloaked in mist at the top, just dripping with brilliant green, and valleys in between filled with rice paddies. The houses way down in the Southeast are made all of wood, most without any nails. They have lots of decks and open air drying platforms and rooms, and most of them are set up on stilts on the sides of the mountains. It rained a lot when we were there, but when it wasn’t raining, we walked around the town, hung out on the bridges with all the old guys, and did some fantastic hiking up among the rice paddies which cling all the way up the sides of the mountains. We also sweat a lot. Guizhou is gorgeous, but seems to sit at maximum possible humidity from what we experienced.

On our way home, we stopped by Xijiang, thought to be the largest of the Miao minority villages (the Miao people are ethnically Hmong), where we spent the night in a pristine little hostel. The next morning, we walked all over this village set entirely upon a hill which in turn sits in the middle of a natural basin surrounded by rice-paddied hills. It was beautiful and incredibly peaceful.

We had to head back to Tongren at this point, and spent a day taking a boat down the river with Pierce and his friend from college, Mahfuz. After a few hours of boat, we were dropped off at the foot of a mountain with a famous cave up at the top. We walked around the base of the mountain for a while, eventually coming to a teeny waterfall and swimming hole where we relaxed until a storm chased us back to the river to find a bus to take us home. That night we train-ed back to Chengdu, where Ben and I had our yearly physicals with the med staff and got to go to the dentist(!) and eat lots of Pete’s Tex-Mex. We also had the chance to spend a little time with the new China 13 volunteers who were going to be coming up to Gansu, and I got to chat with my old language tutor. Finally, it was time to admit that the summer had come to an end, and we hopped on the train one last time to take us home to begin our 3^rd semester.