A Day In The Life...

I thought I would share what a typical day is like for me here at DaJing.  Of course, this isn't counting the fun excursions I take when I sneak off campus!  I just mean the daily life of the school here.  About 100 students are boarders here, but they all go home on weekends, which means right now the dorm is very quiet.

Every day, the alarm goes off in the dorm at 6 AM.  It's a long military marching song that goes on and on, with bugles and drums.  It cracks me up every time.  The kids all stumble out of bed, have a quick wash, and run down to breakfast so they can start studying by 7.  I take a little bit longer because I have to have my "quiet time" with meditation and often some yoga (yes, Suzanne, I even brought my yoga mat with me to Shanghai!) before going down to breakfast.

Here is my typical breakfast.  Hard boiled egg, sometimes some soup, hot soy milk (not shown), rice porridge which I put those pickled carrots and peppers in and then eat with chopsticks (mmm so delicious), usually some kind of bun with meat or vegetables in it, and that container of milk, which sometimes people save for later in the morning.  I really like the porridge.  I think it's just rice that you add extra water to and boil a lot (that's what some of the teachers said).  With that, I walk over to the school and check out the morning exercises.

This is one of my favorite things to watch - hundreds of kids, all doing synchronized calisthenics to music coming over the loudspeaker. The students do a lot of exercise in between all the studying and cramming for exams, and I guess they need it!  I wish we could do something like this at Northwest, but I don't think we are as co-ordinated as they are.  They also have these really cool eye exercises they do at 10 AM every day.

The morning is spent either teaching or observing classes.  I like to work in my office, high on the 14th floor.  

 I like the way it says, "Foreign Teacher's Office." DaJing is a very internationally flavored school, and they love to have foreign visitors, both teachers and students.  Shanghai itself has a history of being open to foreign ways - of course, at first it was by force, because of the Opium Wars, but they made the best of it and there were several schools founded at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries by Chinese teachers who wanted to incorporate some western methods and materials.

I spend time here making up my lesson plans, grading papers and reading the textbooks (which are pretty dumb, just between you and me).  I usually get my own materials instead of using the textbooks because I can't stand them.  I did use one story for one lesson - it's about this girl named Katie who is about to offer an old man her seat on the bus, when this other girl jumps up and offers the man her seat instead.  But then, when the bus screeches to a stop to avoid a cyclist, the girl (who has been standing up) falls over and Katie sees that she has A WOODEN LEG!  Not a prosthetic limb, an artificial leg, but a wooden leg, like a pirate!  Arrr!  Katie is amazed and murmurs, "But...your leg!  You gave your seat up and you have a ... a wooden leg!"  The girl cheerfully replies that the wooden leg has been a part of her for a long time and she doesn't mind.  Katie spends the rest of the bus ride thinking about how brave and selfless the girl with the wooden leg is.  That is the kind of story you have to read if you are learning English at DaJing.

There are all sorts of bells that go off in between classes, but they are not bells, exactly.  They are different songs to indicate that class is about to be over, and then class is about to begin.  Some of the musical selections are the Triumphal March from Aida, the William Tell Overture and some nondescript Mozart.  Students have a 15 minute break between classes, but they don't switch classrooms.  Instead, the teachers come to them.  The kids even stay in their classrooms to have lunch. I guess this is so that they won't miss a minute of studying.  Meanwhile, the teachers go and have lunch in the dorm lunchroom, where we have nondescript meat, rice, soup and vegetables.  It's pretty tasty, although when you ask what it is, a lot of times they say, "meat."

After lunch, there's more studying, and also some PE classes.  My favorite group to work with is, of course, the kids who came over to Northwest for the Oedipus at Shanghai project. We have started reading Antigone now!  They only have one period a week when they can do this, however, and it's sort of an "optional activity" period for them, since we can't take time away from their exam prep.  Everything depends on this one college entrance exam.

As you can see, Mrs. Guo and I are kind of like twins

That's pretty much it.  I go back to my dorm room and usually see my pal, Mrs. Guo.She is my go- to person for everything I need in the dorm, from coffee to laundry.   I think I already mentioned that neither of us speaks the other person's language, but that doesn't stop us from having conversations! After just one week, I have gotten used to the routine and can spend some time relaxing and sightseeing, which will be the subject of my next post.

End of My First Week- The Academic Side

This week has flown by and between teaching, observing classes and sightseeing I haven't had time to write, but there is so much to tell!  The students and teachers and I are slowly getting to know each other, engaging in conversations about life, family and, of course, our two education systems.

Students and teachers of "senior 1, class 1"

Every day (except Thursday) I have taught at least one class. Several of the Chinese teachers of English also attend my lessons, as they are eager to see how we do it differently in the United States, or at least at Northwest School.  So far, I have taught lessons on persuasive, comparative and narrative writing as well as critical reading. My favorite class, however, was when I got to teach the group of kids (not exactly a class, but a mix of kids from various Senior Two classes) who visited us in Seattle and did the Oedipus at Shanghai project.  We have started reading Antigone and are having just as much fun with that as we did with Oedipus.  It will be interesting to see if we can discuss issues like civil disobedience as we get to that part in the play next week.

I have also spent a lot of time observing English classes.  I was surprised at first to be joined by a handful of DaJing teachers each time.  I thought they were just being polite, hanging out with me, but in fact, the teachers here spend a lot of time visiting and observing each other's classes.  A LOT of time, like a couple of periods a day.  Of course, one of the main reasons for this is that the DaJing teachers only have two classes per day to teach on average.  They spend a huge amount of time on lesson planning. The rest of the time, they meet with students or observe other teachers; they consider this observation an essential part of their jobs!  It helps them to improve as teachers on a daily basis when they see what other teachers are doing.  Not only can they give feedback to their colleagues, but they can incorporate ideas from the classes they observe.  They were dumbfounded when I told them that teachers at Northwest hardly ever observe each other.  Even when we participate in the peer observation program, we might go see one or two of the other person's classes.  At least, that's what I did when I participated.  It might be different with other NWS teachers, but I simply don't have time to watch other people teach for 2-3 periods a day.  Here, though, it goes without saying that teachers will observe each other throughout the day, week and academic year. I hope, when I return, I can at least try to visit other teachers' classes a little bit more often.

12th grade exam prep

So how are our classes different?  Chinese teachers teach from textbooks, which mostly have fill-in-the-blanks or multiple choice questions.  Even if the students are trying to find, say, the main idea of a paragraph, they will have the choice of "main idea sentences" to select, which means, in English class anyway, they don't spend a lot of time putting ideas into their own words.  Many answers are copied from the text, and longer essays might be cobbled together from material they have read.  I have been "grading" a stack of papers  about holidays around the world, and was intrigued when a student wrote, "for a single dog" Valentines Day can still be fun.  Then I read another paper, and another, that used this same expression (which I guess is some sort of slang that I've never heard).  Students are encouraged to copy phrases straight from the text.  When students get into "senior three," which is the equivalent of 12th grade, they spend almost every class preparing for the big college entrance exam.  This means the teacher becomes more of an "exam coach," much like (I guess) your Kaplan or Princeton SAT coach.  They have developed techniques for the students to try out to address various types of questions on the exams.

student reaction to exam prep

 As you might imagine, this makes class tedious, repetitive and exhausting for students and teachers alike.  I joined in with the students in practicing a few of the questions and then reviewing them.  It was like doing a word puzzle, where you had to find the part of the passage they were looking for and then rearrange the words, change the grammar or copy a phrase word for word.  I got some of them wrong!  When we went over the answers, the teacher used amazingly obscure grammar points (which the students seemed to be familiar with) like "post appositive attributive" to explain how to rearrange the words.

I started wondering if the students had the opportunity in other classes to express their thoughts and opinions.  For instance, I could see how in English class, they have to be sure to understand vocabulary and grammar, and to respond to these highly specified test questions.  But what about Chinese class, which would be the equivalent of our English class?  Would they be able to write personal narratives, opinion pieces, and so forth?  Would they engage in discussion about the text? I decided to ask Mrs. Gao, the Chinese teacher, if I could come and observe her class.  She was super excited and said she would be teaching about Lao Tze, who she knows I like.  (One of the only Chinese phrases I can say is the beginning of the Tao Te Ching.)  Next week, I will go see her classes (of course, they will be in Chinese so I will only be able to get the gist of things, but it's amazing, as I said in my last post, how much gist you can get) and also spend some time shadowing other teachers and really learning about their days.  I will then be able to report more about this.  Until, then, have a great weekend and be sure to read my other posts, which will explain more about the nuts and bolts of life here as well as some of the fun activities I did this week outside of school.

First Impressions

I can't believe I have only been here two days!  It has been a whirlwind of learning and excitement (and jet lag, of course).  Most of my fears have been washed away with the friendliness and love I have been shown by everyone.

I was greeted at the airport by Sharron and Li Feng, two English teachers

There is plenty of coffee in the coffee machine, but the most important thing I had to learn upon my arrival, a piece of information nobody told me, is that Shanghai is BYOTP!  Bring your own toilet paper.  I was like, what?  How is it that in a communist country people have to supply their own TP? Even in the United States, the most greedy capitalist looking out for number one nation on earth, toilet paper is readily available to all.  But no worries, because within 12 hours Sharron had bought me a lifetime supply, as well as a power adapter (which I did need, Ben Lee!) and some laundry detergent.  Another surprise is how few people seem to speak English, apart from the English teachers and the students.  But it's also amazing how well you can communicate with people who don't speak your language.  My favorite example is Mrs. Guo, who is the "house mom" of the dorm.  Her English and my Chinese are in close competition with each other (for who knows the least), but we talk all the time anyway.  It's easy to understand what she's saying.

I have started to teach some classes, mostly academic writing and some reading.  This morning, I taught a lesson on writing a persuasive paragraph, and gave out prizes to the kids who were most persuasive.  I was observed by a lot of the English teachers, who had time to observe me because they only teach 10-12 periods a week.  When I told them I teach 24 periods a week (counting conference periods) they just about flipped out.  Of course, their classes are much larger - 35 plus kids per section.  I am currently planning a lesson on the compare/contrast (I know some of my colleagues hate that one) paragraph.  They have been studying festivals, so we are going to compare/contrast (which means to find similarities and differences between) Christmas and Chinese New Year. Meanwhile, I will compare/contrast DaJing and Northwest a little bit.  Students here are just as friendly, boisterous and delightful as my students at Northwest, but kids at NWS are much more talkative, more willing and eager to share their ideas and opinions.  Northwest students think they are stressed out, but compared to the kids here, they are living the life of Riley.  I attended the equivalent of community meeting on Monday morning, which is called the flag ceremony here.  As you can see, it's a lot more formal, with the kids all standing in rows.  Sharron asked me if we had anything like it in Seattle, and I said yes, but the kids were all sitting or lounging on the floor!  They had the same kind of announcements, and I was introduced to the community in the same way that the visitors we have are introduced to us during community meeting.  They also had some awards and announcements, just like we do.  The school building itself is MUCH bigger than Northwest, or much taller anyway.  My office is on the 14th floor.

Can you believe that's a school?

There are only three grade levels - equivalent to 10th, 11th and 12th grades, with about 300 kids in each grade.  They are then divided into sections, with each section staying the same and having its own classroom.  The kids pretty much stay in the same classroom all day, except for PE and science labs (and English classes, where they divide in half), and the teachers are the ones who move around from room to room.  At Northwest, we all move around all the time.  

I have my own VPN, which is working really well and gets me through to all the blocked sites, which they call "shielded."  I had a really interesting conversation with Sharron about the connotations of those two words.  She asked if they blocked websites in the US and I said, "No, but they spy on you all the time."  I told her about how, when I buy something online, I am then inundated with ads for that very product.  She thought that was pretty funny.  She showed me how to get to the metro and I went for a little jaunt last night (after a three hour jet-lag nap) to see East Nanjing Road at night and look across the river from the Bund to Pudong under the full moon.

Pretty cool, huh?

Getting Ready To Go

Well, in three days I will be flying from Seattle to Shanghai, China to start my teacher exchange with the DaJing High School.  We had a group of 23 students, two teachers, one vice principal and one Communist Party section chief visit us a couple of weeks ago and we spent the week reading and performing Oedipus Rex with them.  Is that crazy or what?  Even crazier, they really enjoyed it!  The students made costumes and filmed each other acting out the scenes.  It was exciting, exhausting, and exhilarating.

So why am I going over there?  To strengthen the ties between our two schools; to promote international understanding; to learn about the Chinese education system and how it differs from the US system (not that I'm really IN the US system, since Northwest is an independent school); to continue making friends with the teachers over there and invite them to our global symposium this summer (where we hope to have representatives from all five partner schools, from Spain, France, Taiwan, China and Ethiopia); and to foster relationships with the students.  I hope to do some teaching, probably mostly ESL stuff like public speaking and academic writing, MAYBE some Antigone, also have an "English corner" at lunch where we can practice conversation.  I want to shadow a couple of students and see what they do all day, shadow a couple of teachers and see what their jobs are like.  I also want to visit some old friends, parents of my old students, and make some new friends.  I'd like to be a tourist as well, check out the Bund, the older parts of the city, the newer parts, go up the high buildings, try some fancy food, take side trips to Hongzhou and Souzhou, and just watch people.

Me and the vice principal when he visited

Here is what I am packing:  clothes, walking shoes, toiletries, a whole bunch of Starbucks Vios instant coffee with mini-moos, little presents for people (mini Seattle calendars, fridge magnets, Applets and Cotlets, etc.), a couple of towels, maybe my yoga mat and extra pillow, my laptop and phone, complete with Google Translator app.  I put in some snacks, too, because I am sort of anxious about getting hungry and who is going to feed me when.  I am probably being silly, but some almonds never hurt anyone.  I am bringing the Ungame to play with the kids - there is no student who doesn't love the Ungame.

Here is what I am nervous about:  1) Ben Lee says I don't need a power adapter but I am worried.  2) I tried to get a new sim card for my phone so I could have data, especially for the translator app, but they sent me the wrong size. 3) What will I eat? Is it okay to drink the water? 4) How will I know where to go, and at what time?  5) I am simultaneously worried about being supervised too much and being left alone too much.  6) What internet sites will work or not work?  For instance, will I even be able to access this blogspot?  Ha!  That would be a laugh if I can't even post notes about what I am doing.

That's not actually too bad for a list of fears.  I am not worried about how my teaching will go, about whether I will get along with people, about what they will think of me, etc.  So that's pretty good.  My fears are all sort of mundane little business things.  Now to get my grading done so I can start packing.