Lost in Sanya

IECS

Langfang Teachers College is closed for the winter break so that means it is time for all the teachers and students to travel.  Most all of the students have already left the campus and boarded a train for their respective homes.  A few students have stayed around Langfang to find part-time work during the holiday.  There isn’t much for me to do around here now...  So, it is time to travel.

First stop on the list of destinations was Sanya City on the Island of Hainan.  Hainan is a rather large tropical island off the southern coast of China and the eastern coast of Vietnam.  It’s a beautiful tropical paradise with white sands, blue waters, and tall mountains covered in lush green palm trees.  It’s warm and sunny, which is quite a contrast to Langfang.  But my trip down to Hainan wasn’t all leisure.  I was traveling down there for the annual IECS winter staff conference.  All of the IECS teachers in China were in attendance.

The travel experience was a story in and of itself.  It all started on Saturday morning a little over a week ago.  The three IECS teachers from Tainjin, along with Jess (the IECS state-side secretary), came to Langfang to spend a couple of days with Jaime and I.  We were planning on all leaving for Hainan together.  However, we failed to take into account that this is the busiest time of the year in China to travel.  We left for the train station nearly an hour and a half early but it didn’t matter.  The tickets lines were enormous!  It took us an hour and a half just to get our tickets!  By that time our train had already come and gone.  But that’s okay.  It just meant that we needed to exchange our tickets for a later train.  However, this quickly became a problem.  The clerk tried to exchange the tickets but the computer wasn’t working properly.  After a while the station manager finally came over and she tried to fix the machine.  But nothing would help.  Finally the station manager pulled out a pen and a piece of blank paper.  She proceeded to write down something in Chinese and then told me to show the note to a security guard at the entrance.  I did as I was told.

The security guard merely laughed when he saw the paper than called another guard over to have a look.  The second guard laughed as well.  Then the two guards opened the gate and escorted us to the front of the line.  I was shocked!  The stewardess at the boarding gate looked at my hand written note, chuckled, and then ushered the six of us onto the next train.  We were finally on our way to Beijing!  However, I wonder what that note said...? 

Most of the IECS teachers came together in Beijing before leaving for Sanya.  They had a nice dinner and went shopping.  I, however, was suffering from food poisoning and spent most of Saturday in Jim’s hotel bathroom.  Not fun!  I was really worried that I might have the flu and that meant that flying the next day was going to be really tough.  However, I felt a lot better in the morning and the flight down to Hainan went smoothly.

It was great getting to the Sanya airport and immediately shedding two layers of clothes.  That morning we had left in the snow and now I was standing in the sun with a t-shirt and shorts.  We all made our way to the Baohang Hotel and joined up with the rest of the IECS teachers who had arrived earlier.

The conference kept us fairly busy but there was plenty of time to hit the beach.  It was great just to lie in the beach chairs and soak up the sun.  The ocean was fairly warm and getting to swim in the blue waters was great!  There was an abundance of tropical fruit everywhere!  It was easy to get your fill of pineapples, mangoes, bananas, and coconuts.  At nighttime they had live music on the beach and even a few places that played English songs.  We arrived one night just in time to hear “Hotel California.” 

One of the coolest things that happened during our time in Sanya was getting to visit a resort with over 60 different hot springs.  Each pool had its own special property.  There was a hot spring filled with rose petals, one filled with lemon slices, and one that was even filled with coffee!  The weirdest of them all was the therapeutic fish spring.  This was a special pool with hundreds of tiny fish that could live in hot water.  The fish would actually swim up to you and eat off the dead skin from your body.  It was super ticklish.  They said that it’s a great way to exfoliate your skin.  All I can say is that it feels really weird.  But I had to try it so I got in.  Within a minute I had a couple dozen fish sucking away at my skin.  The girls tried it too at it was great seeing them freak out! Ha ha...

Another great thing that happened was getting to meet one of Beth’s students.  This young man goes to school in Tianjin but actually comes from Hainan.  Beth had invited him to join us for day at the beach.  Bob is a really great guy.  He’s super energetic and always smiling.  He and I hit it off really quick and we spent most of the day together.  We swam together, did Tai Chi on the beach, and even had pizza together.  It started getting late and I knew that Bob had a long drive home.  Neither Beth nor I really wanted him to go so I invited him to share the second bed in my hotel room.  He agreed and we ended up staying up really late watching Mission Imposable: Ghost Protocol in Mandarin.  I'm glad there were English subtitles. 

The best part of the whole week happened on the beach.  Each day I would head to the beach to practice my Tai Chi.  I just love practicing in time with the sound of the crashing waves.  A lot of Chinese tourists would walk by, they would see me practicing and then they would want to take a picture with me.  Some of them would even want me to teach them some of the basic moves.  It seems rather funny to me that I, as an American, was teaching Tai Chi, a Chinese martial art, to Chinese people!

During my time practicing Tai Chi, one older man came up and was watching me quite intently.  He seemed to be studying my form.  Finally he came over and introduced himself as Grandmaster Wu Bin.  I had no idea who that was at the time but a Chinese friend explained to me that this old man was the wushu coach that trained Li Lian Jie.  I didn’t know who that was either.  My Chinese friend then explained to me that Li Lian Jie is a famous movie star.  Yet, I still didn’t know the name… How foolish I was in that moment.  Li Lian Jie is known to most Americans as Jet Li... yes, the Jet Li from such movies as "Hero" and "Romeo Must Die."  I was actually standing on the beach talking to the man that trained Jet Li!  Then the old man invited me to join him as together we practiced Tai Chi on the beach.  It was really cool.  Afterwards he then did a demonstration of wushu and it was very impressive!

I’m back in Langfang now and it feels good to be back in a familiar environment.  However, I big part of me still would like to be laying on the beach soaking up the sun.  Oh, well.  Back to winter coats and snow shovels!  

Bob and I

Baohong Hotel

"Everyone, on the bus!"

Streets of Sanya

Streets of Sanya

The Hot Springs Resort

The Hot Springs Resort

The Hot Springs Resort

Waterpark at the Hot Springs Resort

Fish Therapeutic Spring...

The Hot Springs Resort

Who is that guy?

A sign explaining the fish therapeutic spring.

The Hot Springs Resort

The Beach

The Beach

Enjoying the Hot Springs

Enjoying the Hot Springs

Fun! Fun! Fun!

A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words

It is fairly common here in China to find shop signs in both English and Chinese.  However, sometimes the English can be a little lacking.  It reminds me of the old adage which goes, "A picture is worth a thousand words."  However, that old adage takes on a whole new meaning here in China.  So today I've added a bunch of photos of these delightfully funny signs.  These photos were collected by both IECS team members and friends of IECS.

Time for Finals!

 

“I never teach my pupils, I only attempt to provide the conditions in which they can learn.”
― Albert Einstein

The past two days have been a grueling experience.  I’ve devoted my body, my mind, and my time to the academic duty of giving FINAL EXAMS!  It’s seems like only yesterday that I was preparing for my own set of final exams to take.  I can remember the nervous jitters, the mad rush to get everything done at the last minute, and the overwhelming doubt that there was something I had missed.  Hmm… Strange how not much has changed since then!

Don’t get me wrong, I was a good student and I did fairly well on my own final exams.  However, that never absolved the fear that I just might fail the next one.  Call me a pessimist when it came to predicting my own future.  I’m only an optimist with other people’s futures!

Anyway, I’m on the other side of the desk now with all those nasty final exams behind me.  Now it’s my turn to give the final exams rather than to receive (Clearly this is a case where it is better to give than to receive).  But, I can’t feel a little bit of empathetic nervousness for my students.  Perhaps it’s my post-traumatic stress syndrome kicking in from my own college days.  Whatever it is, I still want my students to do well.

I’ve been trying really hard the past few days to capture my feelings in words.  It’s been tough.  The closet thing I can come up with sounds like the noise some makes when they get their hand slammed in the car door, “grrrbfft.”  Okay, Shakespeare, I’m not.  There’s just something about setting and giving a final exam that’s a bit daunting.  The final exam is meant to be a test of everything the students have learnt up to this point.  As a teacher, I hope that I have given the students everything that they need to pass the final exam.  I’m like the master handing the tools to the apprentice.  It’s now their responsibility to use the tools properly and not screw it up.  However, the doubt that I feel is one of whether or not I’ve really prepared them to use the tools.  After all, I don’t want them to screw up the English language anymore.  It’s already screwed up enough!  Safe to say, I feel like the time that I’ve had this term with my students has been so limited.  I have almost 140 students and I’ve only got a total of eight hours a week to help them all.  It’s a highly improbably task…  But it’s still my task.

I’m quite thankful that I got the responsibility of setting my class’s final exam.  The textbook I was given to teach this class was absolute rubbish and I would have hated to have to give a standardized test from that piece of nonsense.  So that relieves some pressure.  The final is what I say it is!  So I designed it to be a real test of what they learned this term.

The focus of these courses was on oral English.  It’s about talking.  So, I taught them how to talk.  Now, you might not think that’s a tough assignment but what does one talk about anyway?  Sure, it’s easy enough to talk when we have something to say but what should we say?  It’s was my goal this semester to give the students something to talk about.  That way they could really practice their English.  That’s why we looked at everything from relationships, to food, to culture, and so much more.  Whatever the students wanted to talk about, we talked about… and in English!  So now, the question is whether or not my chaotic teaching methods would prove worthy.  That’s why we have final exams… Yes, the final exam: the ultimate test of both the student and the teacher. 

I set the final exam to work like a human-to-human conversation.  Each student would enter the classroom alone and speak solely to me.  I would ask them to talk about a topic and it was their job to talk about that topic.  Now, I did let them know the topics beforehand.  This is intermediate English after all and they needed time to prepare their thoughts.  I asked them questions about culture, English, relationships, food, and I even asked what they planned to do in the future when they graduate.  All of my students are freshmen and I’m their first real college examination experience.  Safe to say, they were all extremely nervous.  Some of the students were so nervous that they were literally shaking.  I knew they would be nervous so I mixed into the final a couple of fun and easy questions to put them at ease.  I asked questions about what they had done over the holiday weekend or whether or not they had seen any good movies recently.  They all seemed to settle down once they felt comfortable.  It’s hard to relax in the middle of an inquisition but it’s easy to relax if you’re talking with a friend over lunch.  I tried to give them a similar environment as the later.

I’m very pleased to report that a large majority of my students did extremely well with this final exam.  It showed that they had put a large amount of effort into preparing their answers.  Some of the presentations were a little bit shaky but most did really well.  Of course, there are always a couple of rotten apples in the bunch.  I had some students that put little-to-no time into preparing for this final.  Most of the slackers managed just enough proper English to squeak by with narrowly passing grade.  However, there were a few who were not so lucky.  I was really hoping I wouldn’t have to fail anyone.  But, that was not the case.

I’m not really surprised a handful of students failed.  I merely hopped that they would have done better.  The problem is that this handful of students is led by young woman who doubts my authority to teach English.  She has questioned my methods from day one and blatantly refused to do any of the work.  I’ve tired appealing to her reason and I even thought I was making some headway.  However, today’s final exam proved differently.  She approached the final exam with a flippant attitude and even laughed when she failed to come up with the correct words.  I didn’t see anything funny with the inability to construct a sentence.  The problem was that this student’s attitude has spread to her posse.  They too were treating the whole ordeal rather flippantly.  I’m not sure what they thought was going to happen.  It’s merely speculation and conjecture on my part but perhaps they thought their buddy, the English teacher, would spare them a failing grade.  Oh, how little they know me!

I failed the lot of them.  I think the initial shock of being failed was disbelief.  However, quickly they soon realized that I was dead serious.  It took only a moment of silence before the students were begging for another chance.  They all had tears in their eyes and even the ring leader of the posse said to me, “Do you know what it means for a Chinese student to fail?”

I looked at her and replied, “Yes I do.  Do you?”

I was really torn in this moment.  In a way I felt saddened that these students hadn’t even cared enough to give a mediocre effort, let alone a good effort.  It saddened me because I knew they could do better.  I’ve seen them in class really make some progress.  However, today was a major setback.  This final exam is worth 60% of their grade.  Why wouldn’t they work for that?  Maybe it’s a spirit of entitlement, maybe of laziness, but I don’t think they thought I would fail them.  From my position, this is probably the easiest exam they will ever get in college… and yet they still failed.

Now, the Chinese education system has certain rules and failure isn’t really an option for teachers.  The school will just make me give the students another chance.  However, the students don’t know this.  So I felt it might be best to bring home a little fear of failure for the night.  I told the students that I would “consider” giving them another chance.  However, they would have to write a 1-page paper apologizing for their poor effort and give me a detailed list of what they will do to improve themselves as students.  Within hours I had four papers waiting in my inbox.

These bad apples are a drastic contrast with some of the better students.  In my final exam study guide I gave fifteen possible exam questions.  I only used four of them.  However, I gave directions for the students to prepare conversation points on each of the topics.  One of my students actually researched each point, wrote a composition on each point, and memorized each of her compositions word-for-word.  Now, I’d say that what she did was above and beyond the call of duty.  I was very impressed.  Safe to say, she got an A+.

Teaching is not easy.  It’s a challenge to give the students an environment where they can learn on their own.  I could lecture them for hours and not a single bit of knowledge would sink in.  On the other hand, homeschooling has taught me that efficient teaching is to teach the student how to teach themselves.  Basically a good teacher is constantly striving to work themselves out of job.  A good student should only need the teacher so long as they don’t know how to teach themselves.  That’s what I’m trying to do with these students.  I feel like I’ve succeeded with most.  They’ve improved their English, they’ve grown in their skill to communicate, they’ve learned how to voice their opinions, and they’ve learned how to get over their shyness.  That’s why I’ve very pleased with most all of them.  They’ve really been a great bunch of students to teach.  I hope I will get to teach them again next term.