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.