Work and Play in Olde Shanghai

I have been gallivanting around Hangzhou this weekend, but will have to save that for my next post.  First, I must fill you in on what happened during my second week of teaching at DaJing, as well as some of the sights I saw around town on  my day off.  I have continued teaching several classes per day, usually observed by a few English teachers.  I have a number of lessons that they like to have me do: "Seven Steps to Critical Reading," during which we examine a newspaper article comparing the Chinese and American High School education systems and see whether the claims the author makes are true; Narrative Writing, in which we look at the structure of a narrative and then try to make up our own (this has been somewhat unsuccessful because the students usually can't think of anything to write in a personal narrative, the only exception being the kids who came to Northwest for a week); and Persuasive Writing, during which I coach them on writing a convincing paragraph on why foreigners should visit Shanghai.  When I taught persuasive writing in the 11th grade, I made the topic a little more challenging, changing it to "Is technology making us more isolated?"  I thought that was pretty good.

On Thursday, my "day off," I spent some time sightseeing again.  I tried to see something old and something new in the same day.  My first stop was the Shanghai Museum in People's Square, which everyone says is simply the best museum in Shanghai.

The Shanghai Museum, designed by architect Ying Tonghe in the shape of an ancient bronze vessel

It was very impressive.  My favorite parts were the bronzes, the paintings and the statues.  They also had this really cool collection of Silk Road coins, in other words, coins from all the various places and times along the Silk Road, from China to the Middle East to India and Persia.

I thought these were some of the most beautiful and impressive pieces, so I took pictures of them.  I love that Boddhisatva there, just relaxing in such a receptive pose.  And those roosters are also pretty awesome.  I know I'm not using a lot of technical art history expressions, just telling you what I liked.  "Look at this!  Look at this!" is my favorite expression to use, as you know.

After the morning at the museum, I decided to get a view of the city from the Bund, which is the older part of Shanghai, where all the buildings from the European "concession" are built.  I selected a restaurant to have lunch, Kathleen's, which was founded by an American, Kathleen Lau.  She had first opened a restaurant in Guangzhou and then moved to Shanghai - of course I had never heard of her, but she's famous in the expatriate community here.  Plus, honestly, I wanted some non-Chinese food.  Especially a salad.  The view was even more awesome than I had anticipated, but the real (creepy) thrill was knowing that I was sitting atop the famous  opium warehouse of the Sassoon family, where bales of opium were unloaded to be distributed throughout China.  This was after the British East India Company lost its monopoly on the opium trade and other merchants (aka "drug dealers") took advantage of the free trade and started pushing the drug harder and harder.  By the late 1830s, tons of opium was coming into China, despite the fact that it was outlawed by the government.  The Chinese equivalent of a Drug Czar, Lin Zexu (you will learn about him in 10th grade humanities), spent a lot of time and energy trying to stop the British from selling opium in China, and the struggle ended up sparking the Opium Wars, which ultimately ended in China's defeat and indirectly actually created the city of Shanghai as a "concession" to the Europeans.  The Sassoons were this incredibly wealthy Jewish family that spent a lot of time investing money in Shanghai, trading, building buildings (including "Sasson House"), and generally amassing huge amounts of money.

Eating lunch, I could see the hundreds of boats traveling up and down the Huangpu River.  About 1/3 of China's exports come out of the port of Shanghai.  It was a great view, but I could also see how dirty the water is - and it's the source of most people's drinking water around here.  Eeew.  At least they don't throw the dead bodies in there like I guess they used to.

After lunch, I strolled down the Bund and looked inside the Fairmont Peace Hotel with its magnificent Art Deco interior.  Famous celebrities from Charlie Chaplin to Chairman Mao all stayed here at various times.  But by this time, I was tired of the old and wanted a taste of the new, so I took the subway out to the biggest "fake market" in the city to look for some bargains.  The "AP Xinyang Fashion and Gifts Market" is conveniently located inside a subway station.  There's a huge fabric market where you can get hand-tailored clothes, plus every other kind of cheap souvenir, fake Buddha statue, shoes, imitation Dr. Dre headphones, and of course, the fake Rolexes.  The most fun part is the bargaining. 

 I found this pair of fake Doc Martens, pink,of course.  The guy asked for 480 RMB, which is like 80 bucks.  I was like no way, you are joking.  He said, how much will you pay?  I said 50, which is like 8 bucks.  He was like, you are kidding me, right?  Then he came down to 350 and I went up to 60, and so on.  I ended up getting them for 100, but only after I said it was my final offer and started walking away.  I was two shops down when he yelled after me, okay, okay, your price, your price.  So I got this awesome pair of pink fake Doc Martens that say "Dc AizWsin" for like 16 bucks.  I also got a fake Rolex and some other cool stuff.  It was a blast; the bargaining was the best!  Luckily Daren taught me how to do it.

Now, I don't want you to think that Thursday was all play and no work, because after I got home with my snazzy shoes and fake jade Guan Yin necklace and all, I finished polishing up my most challenging lesson of all, the "picture writing" prep for the 12th graders who were preparing for their exams.  These exams, remember, determine their entire future.  Universities in China don't care about grades in classes, extracurricular activities, or sports achievements.  It all rides on the exam. As part of the English exam, students have to write a 150 word essay describing a picture, and the teachers have a lot of trouble teaching them how to organize and execute such a piece of writing.  I made a guide for them and taught the lesson first thing Friday morning.  It was definitely my showpiece, because even VP Luo came to see it, and of course I wore my pink boots.  Afterwards, the teachers said that I brought qualities out in the students they had never seen before, and that even the quietest and most reluctant students had been able to write some coherent sentences in preparation for the essay.  They invited me to give a seminar on teaching writing with ALL the English teachers that afternoon, to explain to them how I had come up with all those tips and tricks, how I had elicited responses from even the most reticent, diffident and recalcitrant students.  Ok, so I'm bragging just a little bit, I admit it, but any one of the humanities teachers could have done the same.

"Seminar on Teaching Writing"

Frankly, the biggest problem these teachers have is the textbook.  It is the driest, most unhelpful, most mind-numbing, brain-freeze-inducing book you have ever seen.  It can make even the most interesting topic boring.  If you are having trouble falling asleep, just rest your eyes on one page of New Century English or Reading Advantage and it will be lights out.   These textbooks are full of bizarre grammar points and weird exercises that do nothing for creativity.  My biggest suggestions were to throw out some of the exercises in the textbook and insert other activities, like maybe having the students write their own sentences using the vocabulary words they were supposed to use.  (Yes, writing sentences! I know that's controversial...)  Some of the teachers nodded and took notes, but others sat in stony silence or graded the stacks of student workbooks they had (I don't blame them).  They said they had limited time to get through a certain amount of material, and if they stopped to have students do creative activities, they wouldn't be able to cover everything they had to cover for the exam.  Personally, I think that's baloney, because you could cover the same material differently, with more creative and active options, but I can also sympathize with the teachers who have been there for a long time and are just pounded into the ground by the textbook and the curriculum.  

In the end, we had a nice talk, and I even told them about how the humanities teachers at Northwest like to hang out together and play games like "celebrity."  I tried to explain how to play it, but most of them just stared at me in astonishment.  "You should try hanging out and playing games together," I said enthusiastically at the end.  After the seminar was over, I wrote up a document with some concrete suggestions for modifying the textbook exercises.  It's a small step, but maybe some of the younger teachers will take it.  In the meantime, I went to bed early, because I was headed to Hongzhou the next morning with the Mas!