Time to Say 再见 !

I can't believe I'm leaving tomorrow.  These three weeks have gone by too quickly.  I checked in for my flight, and Sharron is picking me up at 9 AM to take me to the airport.  I sort of wanted to try the Maglev train that goes like 400 km per hour, but she thought it would be too much of a hassle to get my giant suitcase onto the train.  I sure hope it's not overweight, with all the presents people gave me and the bargains I got!  I am having to leave some stuff here, including my yoga mat, which I gave to Ms. Guo!  (don't worry, I have another one, this fancy pink one I got from Suzanne for my birthday)

Goobye to Ms. Guo!

Of course, everyone had to take me out for lunch.  Even the headmistress came!  We ate and ate, and I entertained them by telling them about all the rides they would soon be able to go on at Disneyland in Shanghai.  Mr. Luo is going to Washington, DC this summer to visit his daughter, who is studying at Georgetown University, so he probably won't be able to come to the global symposium.  When we said farewell, he told me to say hi to Ben and to "McGill."  I hope I will see him again - I am sure he and Ben will be hanging out together next year.  At least, I hope they will.  

For my own personal farewell to Shanghai, I decided to go up to the top of the Shanghai World Financial Center, to the observatory on the 100th floor, and look around.  I took the train up to Pudong, that brand new modern icon of capitalism, and just strolled around.  It felt really different than it had on my first tourist day - so much more familiar, like Shanghai had become "my" city, somehow.  I strolled around watching people, looking at the tourists, craning my neck to see the high skyscrapers.  There was a group of Tibetan monks visiting, too, snapping photos and just hanging out.

Monks can be tourists, too!

I took the ear-popping elevator with the monks to the 94th floor, then an escalator to the 97th, and another one to the 100th floor.  There was a glass floor in the walkway and you could see all the way down to the street.  From up there, you really see how big Shanghai is, how many people, how many high rises.  It was fun to look around and try to recognize all the places I had visited: the Bund, the Science and Technology Museum, People's Square, the old town and the Yu gardens.  I even tried to pick out DaJing High School!

On my first day as a tourist doing sightseeing, I told myself I wouldn't go up the Oriental Pearl Tower because it was too expensive and touristy, but at this point I wanted a touristy experience to celebrate the end of my time here, so I paid the extra money for the cheesy tourist photo, the one they take in front of the green screen (I already have photos like this from the Creation Museum, from Graceland, from Dolly Parton's Dixie Stampede, so why not the World Financial Center?)

 Woo!  there I am floating over the city in my Insane Clown Posse shirt!  I love it!  The World Financial Center is the tallest building in the photo, the one that looks like a giant beer bottle opener.  In fact, that's what they call it over here.  It was supposed to be a round hole at the top, but people said it would look too much like a giant Japanese flag floating over the city, so they changed it to a more square design.  

For my farewell dinner, Sharron took me out to a restaurant in the Mercedes Benz Arena, which was built for the expo and has amazing views over the river.  Taylor Swift just played here for three nights in a row.  All the images of "Red China" that I had from growing up in the 60s and 70s have pretty much been washed away at this point, so Taylor Swift being here was not surprising.  We ate and ate, and talked and talked, about our lives, about teaching, about politics (!) and about when we might be able to hang out together again.  "You will come back," is what everyone said to me.

If I had to sum up Shanghai, I would say it is a city of contrasts: the old Yu Garden and the sparkling skyscrapers; people pushing on the subway and yet acting shy and deferential; old people ballroom dancing in public squares and Buddhist monks chanting; haggling for cheap souvenirs and dining at the finest restaurants;  fiercely Chinese in its identity and yet global and cosmopolitan; traditional and high tech.  My advice to you:  come visit!  It's a blast!  If you are a student or teacher at Northwest and you have the opportunity to do an exchange at DaJing, come on over!  The students are shy, but if you reach out to them, they'll respond with enthusiasm.  The teachers are somewhat more subdued than our teachers at Northwest, but their hearts are no less caring for the kids they work with.  They have to contend with a huge bureaucracy and a draconian exam system, but they make the best of it.

 

What have I learned?  I think the main thing I learned is what I knew already:  I love being a teacher. I have never wanted to be anything else for as long as I can remember.  I don't care if it's from the driest textbook in the world - I will try to figure out how to make it interesting for the students by reaching out to them with affection and humor, trying to make them think creatively, asking them to speak up for themselves, and fostering loving relationships with them and with my colleagues.  I also love traveling to new places, learning about different types of people and trying to understand them. Ellen Taussig always spoke so passionately about her dream of world peace through international education, where students from schools thousands of miles apart would somehow all be reading the same text at the same time.  We got a little bit of a start on that over the past couple of months with the "Oedipus at Shanghai" project, and Sharron and I talked about how we could continue some joint projects (I'm afraid we may have to do some grammar lessons from their textbook if we want to work together, but a little grammar never hurt anyone, and NWS kids could probably use a little dose of grammar once in a while) to strengthen the connection between our two schools.  I hope we can talk more about it at the Global Symposium at Northwest in June.  Can you imagine?  Teachers from Northwest and from our five partner schools from Ethiopia, Spain, France, Taiwan and China all having a sleepover at the International House dormitory in June, after the students go home and before summer school starts?  Sitting up in our pajamas talking about crazy curriculum ideas?  I can't wait!  

I also can't wait to have a piece of whole wheat toast with peanut butter.  I love Chinese food, but it's time for a change.

The Chinese Student - American College Cash Cow?

At the beginning of the week, I went to visit another school in Shanghai, a very famous school that caters almost solely to Chinese students but administers the IB curriculum, the SAT and the TOEFL in preparation for North American (and a very small number of Australian and British) Colleges and Universities:  Shanghai World Foreign Language Academy.  The academy is the brainchild of businessman Wang Junjin, chairman of the JuneYao Group, whose personal philosophy you can read about here. JuneYao is a huge Chinese corporation that owns a big domestic airline, food services (they were a concessions supplier to both the Beijing Olympics and the Shanghai World Expo) and is currently in partnership with Disney to bring Disneyland to Shanghai next year.  They are investing in what they call "Chinese-American" education, which they feel will pay off in the long run.  Their school is brand new, a sparkling building only a few years old, that makes DaJing look like a Soviet-era dump (which it isn't, by the way!)

Shanghai World Foreign Language Academy

I think the tuition for this school is around 10,000 USD a year, which isn't really that much compared to, say, Northwest School.  Sharron tells me it's about average for international schools in China - it might even be on the low side.  But it's a "long term investment" for the JuneYao company, and eventually they expect to see a profit.  I asked Mr. Luo and the other DaJing teachers why a big Chinese corporation would want to invest in a school.  They all thought maybe it was for publicity, for gaining more investments from the parents of the kids who were sent here.  Lots of Chinese parents want an "American education" for their kids, but they either can't afford to send them all the way across the ocean to schools like mine, or they think their kids are too young to go that far away from them for so long.  I tend to agree, honestly.  It boggles my mind how the parents of my ESL kids can send their kids that far away from home for four years. 

IB Banner outside the school

The Chinese education system is very different from the American (at least private) or International school system.  There is a focus on "getting the right answer," however you do that.  There are a lot of blanks to fill in, a lot of things to memorize and regurgitate, a lot of multiple choice type questions.  At many American independent schools, the focus is more on the process of learning, teaching kids to "think and act with integrity" and gain "global perspective."  Yes, I stole those from Northwest's mission statement, but you can look at any independent school in our association and see similar ideas. Independent schools are always talking about "experiencing education" and "creating lifelong learners."  Here's the sign proclaiming the International Baccalaureate program, with the word "Inquirers" first.  To me, an inquirer is someone who wants to know an answer for himself or herself, who asks questions, assesses sources of information and, most of all, someone who develops a unique perspective on the information based on a combination of experience, creativity and some sort of value system. At Northwest, we even add the aspiration that students will believe they can have a positive impact on the world.  This can be a challenge for Chinese students, because there is so much pressure on them to "know the right answer" and not to fail.  And it can be dangerous, in China, to speak up with real integrity or to try to make an impact if your opinions go against the government.  The Chinese concept of wu wei, or going with the flow, is very much practiced here.  The JuneYao group may praise the spirit of entrepreneurship, but their government (that is, Party) connections have gotten them a long way.

Last year, the SAT scores from SWFLA were thrown out because of widespread cheating.  Apparently, agents sell the exam answers from across the ocean, since the time zones are so different.  Students in Mainland China can purchase the entire set of answers to gain a perfect score on the SAT or even the TOEFL.  Since the test is not administered in China, students must travel to Hong Kong, Taiwan or father afield to take the SAT, and many students will go to a country like Vietnam or Cambodia, where it is apparently easy to purchase the answers, and/or have someone take the test for you.  Bribes are rife, and it's pretty easy to obtain a perfect score if you have the cash and the wherewithal.  This year, one of the teachers told me, the answers were leaked again.  She lectured her students again and again about integrity and honesty, but still this kind of cheating happened.  It's just more important to have the right answers than it is to be honest.  At lunch, I heard other anecdotes: students paying agents to write superbly crafted college entrance essays for them, thousands of dollars in bribes to college admissions officials, students purchasing answers and projects and essays from the internet - of course, these are just anecdotes, but the teachers were full of them. Because the emphasis in the Chinese education system has been on memorization and regurgitation, there is always a "right answer" to be found - and in many cases, purchased.  In the words of Deng Xiaoping, "It doesn't matter if the cat is black or white, as long as it catches mice."

Over the past three years, more than 8000 Chinese students were expelled from American universities and colleges, for plagiarism, cheating and poor academic performance.  Did they get a refund on their tuition?  I think not.  Read the Newsweek article here Chinese students want to go to college in the US, but oftentimes their high schools can't prepare them adequately for the language barrier they face, or the cultural differences between the two education systems. Tuition for international students at independent schools in the US (mine included) is much more than the 10,000 dollars per year they spend at  SWFLA, and more than the tuition that "domestic" students pay at the same school.  There is rarely financial aid for these wealthy Chinese students.  Many American independent high schools could fill the entire school with Chinese foreign students.  I know that at my school, we try as hard as we can to have some diversity in the international student body, but it's a challenge - a vast majority come from greater China.  Interestingly, the students who speak the best English are the ones involved in extracurricular activities like sports and community service, where they have the opportunity to really talk and listen to native English speakers.

I enjoyed the time I spent observing classes at the SWFLA.  It reminded me a lot of the ESL Humanities classes I teach at Northwest, nothing like the classes at DaJing.  Class sizes were small, with 10-12 students in each.  Although there were some remnants of the Chinese education system, such as uniforms and the flag-raising ceremony, there were no calisthenics, no rote memorization and repetition, no kids sitting bent over in rows with their heads down.  Teachers were making appointments with students to have writing conferences.  Students were giving oral presentations, making posters, learning about power structures and reading American short stories like Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery."  They were following the IB curriculum.

The students I talked to wanted to go to art schools like Parsons in New York or small liberal arts colleges like Clark University in Oregon.  I saw application materials and posters for places like Penn State and Western Michigan University on the bulletin boards.

And yet, according to some of the teachers I talked to, it was all somewhat of a facade.  Yes, the kids were going through the motions of an American-style education, but they were not learning for the sake of learning, not growing personally or intellectually, but just waiting to get through as best they could (some kids' English was great; others' was almost nonexistent) until they made it into the American university system.  But then what?  Will they have been prepared well enough, or will they just be dumped into an apartheid-type system where all the Chinese students hang together (like they do at the University of Washington), speak Chinese to each other, and try to get their American college degree so they can enter the world of business?  Or worse, be expelled from the college they select because they are not prepared academically?

I asked Ben Lee about this, and he said no Northwest School graduate from our international program has ever been expelled from college for cheating or poor performance.  I do think we do a pretty darned good job of teaching kids about academic integrity, about the whole person, about what education means to us, even though not all of their parents may understand.  I remember when a former student of mine was made captain of the Basketball Team and a student RA at the dorm.  He was very proud, as were his teachers and classmates.  But when he called his parents, they just wanted to know how his grades were.  There is still a huge cultural divide in terms of education between the US and China, despite the inroads we are making.  On the other hand, parents like the Mas (with whom I spent the weekend) are enthusiastic about the type of education we offer at Northwest and other independent schools.  They say that their son was prepared very well for his small liberal arts college and is loving it.  He is taking a variety of classes, including a debate class where he had to do a lot of  research and construct his own arguments.  It is his favorite class and he is getting an A so far.  They are very pleased, not only at the grades, but at the independent, creative thought he is displaying and the enjoyment he is getting from the learning.  They get it.

I just wonder sometimes about conflict of interest.  Chinese students aren't eligible for financial aid, either at independent high schools or in colleges, so they are an important source of income for the school.  It might be tempting to be complacent about letting kids just "pass through" when they are such a source of income, not to care about them as individuals.  I'm not saying anyone does this, (although some may remember a comment that was made a looong time ago about "warm bodies") but it seems a shame that these kids end up unprepared for the American system sometimes.  China is such a gold mine right now (even with a slight downturn in the economy), and no matter how much you talk about values and integrity and character education, in a capitalist system, making money is usually going to be number one, for both the Chinese and the schools who seek to educate them.  Of course, when I was discussing this with the SWFLA teachers, they said this sort of money-driven private education is nothing new; just look at the way many independent schools and colleges have handled terrible students whose parents donated a lot of money.

This past week, Presidents Ma and Xi met and shook hands.  It was a momentous occasion for both countries after years of frosty relations.  And guess what people in Taiwan look forward to most?  Investing in Chinese businesses! 1.3 billion people to buy their products!  Wait till Disney comes here.  There is such an huge (and still largely untapped) source of revenue in China - while Americans were celebrating Veterans Day, in China we were celebrating "singles day," the biggest online shopping day in the history of the world.  Singles Day makes Black Friday look like pretty small potatoes.

After visiting Shanghai, I think it's more important than ever to have Chinese students in my classes.  I think for the most part we do a good job of opening their eyes to a lot of realities they haven't known before. Even if we don't teach them anything else, we are at least trying to teach environmental stewardship. Every day, more than 5 million tons of raw sewage and industrial waste are dumped into the mouth of the Yangtze River.  Every. Day. When I think of education that will "pay off in the long run," I think of education about this kind of issue.

Moreover (to use a word that Chinese students use all the time in essays), our mission works because we are trying to educate all the students, domestic and international, in the same way.  Which is worse, living under the sway of a government that curtails your free speech and free thought?  Or living under a government that supposedly allows free speech and free thought, and not exercising that freedom?  What's the good of being able to question the government, being able to participate in the political process, to peaceably assemble, if nobody does it because they are too busy buying a bunch of crap online after watching commercial television?  

After leaving the SWFLS, I took the subway over to the old French Concession, one of the most trendy shopping areas in the city, but also the site of the original founding of the Chinese Communist Party.  I visited the former home of Zhou EnLai, with its Spartan furniture and walls bare of any decadent capitalist decorations.

 Comrade Zhou carried the same small suitcase with him for 20 years.  It's in this picture, if you look carefully, on the little table next to his bed.  He carried all his stuff in that one suitcase, and never bought a new one.  Walking out of his house, just a few blocks away, I came to the most high end shops, the most expensive restaurants, slim young men in Gucci loafers lounging with their cellphones, smart coiffed women having cocktails, hotel spas promising "princess pampering" treatments.   What would Premier Zhou think of  "Singles Day?"  I can't even imagine.  The school Zhou went to, however, Nankai Middle School, was a very unusual school in China, modeled after Phillips Exeter Academy in the US.  He traveled in Europe and at one point supposedly attempted to enroll in Edinburgh University.  Did his exposure to non-traditional education help him to become one of the most influential (and most beloved) figures in the Chinese revolution?  I don't know, but one of his famous slogans is inscribed on a wall here in Shanghai: "Study for the Rise of China."

I assume this is what Wang Junjin has in mind when he talks about "long term investment."  And I hope (and believe) that even as our students do this, we can help them to graduate with global perspective, enable them to think and act with integrity, and to have a positive impact on both their home countries and the world we all live in.  

My Weekend Getaway with Mr. and Mrs. Ma

On the high speed train

Bright and early Saturday morning, the Mas picked me up and whisked me away to the high speed train to Hangzhou, the ancient capital city of the Song Dynasty, visited by both Marco Polo, who called it "The City of Heaven, the most beautiful and magnificent in the world," and Ibn Battuta, who also said it was the largest city he had ever seen.  It was a huge trade city, at the end of the Grand Canal that ran all the way to Beijing, and hugely cosmopolitan, with everyone from Jews to Muslims living here as well as Chinese. The city itself isn't so amazing nowadays, but the West Lake, or  Xi Hu, has been the subject of poetry, literature, painting and philosophy for centuries.  There are a lot of legends surrounding the islands, the pagodas, the temples, the trees and the water, and one of the largest Buddhist temple compounds was built right on the edge of the lake.  It's also very famous for its green tea, Longjing, the finest tea in China, the tea of the emperors.

We were picked up by another couple, the parents of a 9th grader at Northwest, and our first stop was the Tea Museum, where I learned all about the history of tea.  The first ancient text about tea was written during the Tang Dynasty, and it was called the Tea Classic, written by Lu Yu, the first tea scholar, in around 760.  If I were as obsessed with tea as I am with coffee, I might read it, but I'm really more of a coffee gal.  Still, I was drawn into the world of tea as I learned all about the history, the different varieties, the way tea has been (and should be) prepared, the various properties of tea, and so forth.  Did you know that there was a "tea and horse" road even before there was a Silk Road?  Neither did I!  It went from Yunan and Sichuan to Tibet and people brought tea and horses across.  Did you know that up until 1391 tea was made in these cakes, like Japanese Green tea, but then the emperor decreed it would only be loose leaf tea?  However, the Japanese still do it in those cakes, with the brushes and all, but they got that from China.  I became even more interested when Tony's parents took us to the Longjing Tea Village, up on the misty tea mountain, to have lunch at the home of a tea farmer, where we would "look at tea, drink tea, buy tea," as they told me.

tea in its bulk, dry state

pouring the tea

Showing how tea grows

We climbed up the rainy path to the tea field and the farmer explained to us how the tea grows, when it is harvested, dried, and prepared.  They gave us some samples, which were delicious, and we bought a whole bunch of tea before going back down to where lunch was prepared.  

This was one of three or four HUGE meals I had over the weekend.  Every time I thought the meal was over, they would bring out more dishes.  Everyone sat around the table for hours, talking and eating more and more.  It was like having several Thanksgiving dinners in a row!

 After the tea lunch, we went to the Lingyin Temple complex, which has a whole bunch of different temple buildings with various statues that were carved anywhere from the 300s to the 20th century. Each building was unique and amazing in its own way.  One of my favorites was the temple of the 500 Arhats, which ad 500 bronze statues, each completely different from the others.  Each Arhat had his own particular personality that was so captivating I could have looked at them all day.  But there were many more.

 

The Wisdom Body

Here I am in front of West Lake, enjoying the mist.  We walked and walked, through the temple complex, down to the lake, up the side of another mountain village, admiring the hundreds of pagodas and mystical buildings, statues, and other carvings.

Of course, then we had to have another meal, at the most famous restaurant in Xi Hu, where you have a dish called "beggar's chicken," baked in mud and lotus leaves (that's the dish in the middle there -many more dishes came).  Again, we ate and ate, and talked and talked, and ate more,  I don't even know what all I ate (I think there was some eel in there), but it was all delicious.

And that was only day one!  Tony's parents dropped us off at the hotel for a 10 hour sleep after all that walking and eating.  The next morning I got the thrill of my life when Jimmy Zhang's mother picked us up!  One of my favorite things about the entire experience was getting to spend time with the parents of students that I love so much.  I especially enjoyed the way they called each other "Jimmy Mama" and "Tony Baba" the entire time.  It was awesome.  I tried to convey to them how much we at Northwest love their kids, how special they are, and most of all how grateful and honored we are that they have sent them thousands of miles across the ocean to be with us.  

"Jimmy Mama" took us to the little town of Tangqi, also known as the Venice of the East.  Why does that always happen?  Why can't Venice be known as the Tangqi of the West, huh?  Everything has to reference back to Greece and Rome.  When I was in Edinburgh, it was known as the "Athens of the North."  Was Athens ever the Edinburgh of the South?  At any rate, here I am in Tangqi, 

And you can see why it is compared to Venice, because that bridge does look an awful lot like the Rialto Bridge, doesn't it?  While there, we went to the brand new Rice and Granary Museum, which was a bit much, even for me.  It had the exhaustive history of ancient grains and staple crops throughout the world, which is of course exactly what the 9th grade humanities class has been studying in my absence, doing reports on the earliest civilizations to spring up in the agricultural revolution.  This was the most painstakingly detailed list of grains, granaries, growing techniques, grain trade and grain history that I had ever seen.  It had long, detailed captions with awkward English translations like the following:

Now you know if I, a humanities teacher who is obsessed with ancient civilizations and grains and things, says it was too much for me, that it must have been really over the top.  Luckily after that, we went to the street market to look at the really cool stands with interesting foods, then we were whisked off to Jimmy's parents country house for - yes, you guessed it - another giant meal.

We ate and talked for three hours!  Of course, most of the time they were speaking Chinese so I didn't really know what they were saying, but I did put in my two cents when I could. Finally, we had to get on the train back to Shanghai, and Jimmy's dad drove us to the station.  It was an amazing experience with these wonderful, thoughtful and generous Northwest School families.  When the driver picked us up at the station, the Mas asked if I wanted to go out to dinner.  I was like, no, please, please, no more food!  And you know how much I love to eat.  

When I first arrived for my visit, Katie Ma told Tony's dad that it was my dream to go to Hangzhou.  He said, "Well, then your dream is coming true!"  At the end of the weekend, she asked me if Hangzhou had lived up to my expectations, whether the dream of Hangzhou was better than the reality.  No, I replied - the visit was beyond my dreams of Hangzhou, better than I could have possibly planned for myself.

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!

The Life of a DaJing Teacher

As I spend the days here teaching, observing and hanging out with my DaJing colleagues, I think a lot about their lives both in and out of school and how their lives compare with mine in Seattle. Today, I thought I would give you a little overview of a teacher's life at DaJing High School.  First of all, I have to say that many of the teachers here are super cute and stylish.  Look at the fashionable Chinese teachers, taking a stroll after lunch!  And these English teachers, especially the one with the sparkly lapels on her jacket!  Not all teachers dress like this, but the ones who do are most impressive.  Now, you may ask, Adina, where are the man teachers?  Aren't there any?  The answer is yes, there are male teachers, but there is a really noticeable gender divide here between the male and female teachers.  I'm not saying they don't EVER hang out, but in the dining room at breakfast and lunch it's almost like an unspoken apartheid situation.  The male teachers all sit on one side of the dining room, and the female teachers don't seem to go over there.  So of course, I haven't gone over there myself.  Ben Lee spent all this time telling me how great VP Luo is, how amazing, how articulate and scholarly and I was really excited to spend time talking to him but I'm scared to even approach him because he's over there with the male teachers.  I do have to say, however, that the head of the school is a woman, and she sits with the administrators at lunch - and the two vice principals are men.  I wanted to take some photos of the male teachers, especially this one guy who wears the same grey and black tweed jacket every single day, and also the "coach" dude who has a crew cut and wears a track suit, but frankly, I'm too intimidated to go up to them. So I just hang with the female teachers.

A day in the life of a DaJing teacher starts with arrival through the main gates of the school around 7:15 in the morning.  Some teachers have a before school class to teach that starts at 7:15; other teachers go eat breakfast in the cafeteria.  As you can see in the picture, there is a big gate in front of the school, where security guards have to let you in. It's an impressive structure.

Jiang Yan arrives through the gate

 Here are some teachers eating breakfast. That lady on the right is Gao Jianren, who came to visit Northwest.  I went to her class on Confucius and Lao Tze and she is one dynamic lecturer!

Teachers eating breakfast.

Teachers, have their own offices, but they are more like cubicles.   They can be very noisy and hectic, even noisier and more hectic than the Humanities offices, if you can believe that!  Teachers are often seen wearing headphones (like Scott and Cal do) to cancel out noise so they can get work done.  The students are always rushing in and out, especially during the breaks (they have a 15 minute break between classes) and at lunchtime, to get extra help, ask questions, and so forth.

teachers working in their cubicles

students getting help  in the office

They also have these extra little rooms that teachers can go to hang out, drink tea and grade papers.

My friend Eva in her office

A student comes in with a question

teachers grading papers

As you can see, there isn't much room. Relationships between students and teachers are friendly, although teachers have up to 40 students in a class, so there isn't a lot of time for hanging out.  They have constant stacks of really boring grading, which involves just seeing if a student answered correctly on a multiple choice question or filled in the blanks correctly.  There's not a lot of controversy or spice in the lessons.  Teachers teach from the textbooks, and don't have a lot of choice about the material.  One of the aspects of my job that I enjoy most is hashing out the details of assignments or other parts of the curriculum with my colleagues, trying to determine what is most important, what is the main idea, what do we want the students to come away with at the end of the unit.  That part of the job doesn't really exist for a teacher here, unless you get to a higher administrative level and then you go to a meeting with the district to discuss the textbook.  And I do have to say that the textbooks, as far as I have seen are totally random and bizarre.  Here is one of my favorite pictures, from a lesson about tea, depicting American (or I guess probably British) teachers:

Swanky western teachers during a break

Another thing I really enjoy about my job is the relaxed atmosphere of the classroom, the way the students feel free to speak up, to ask questions, to state their opinion, to challenge their classmates and even challenge me.  If you are a teacher at DaJing, here is the view you have of your class:

As you can see, their heads are down and they are all in rows.  It's a real challenge to get students to even answer the simplest yes or no question.  I have to run down the aisle and tap them on the arm just to get them to look up!  I can't tell if they understand, if they like it or not, if they are learning anything, if they got anything out of a lesson.  Later they will tell their teachers they enjoyed it very much, or it was a "happy" class, but by the blank looks on their faces you would never know.

Down on the main floor, they seem to have this "teacher hall of fame."  I'm not sure what it actually is, and I sort of don't want to know because I'm afraid it's NOT a teacher hall of fame, but I love it.

It's a row of pictures and text with various teachers in teaching type poses, looking up from books or down at papers, smiling on vacation, etc. and I wish we could have something like this at Northwest. But you'd probably way we suffer from too much hubris already, whereas Chinese teachers seem to work harder at the tedious tasks and less at the "grappling with ideas" tasks that we love.  In that way, their lives mirror those of the students, who work hard, keep their heads down and do a lot of tedious preparation for the exams.  The teachers spend a lot of time teaching to the tests, getting through the point in the textbook they are assigned to cover and grading the exams.  This is not to say there isn't some room for fun a creativity in this.  For instance, when my friend Eva was teaching a lesson on reading comprehension, the subject was Pele, and she put together a really fun lesson where we got to see pictures of Pele and watch him score some winning goals.  But WHY was there a lesson about Pele?  It was so random!  And of course, the students are fun.  Even with the pressure they are under with all the homework, the memorization, the tests, the tedium, their lovely spirits shine through. They love to catch me in the hall and ask me questions, or just say hi and practice their English.  They love to play basketball and badminton and table tennis, tease each other, eat noodles and play on their phones.  It a real treat to be one of the DaJing teachers, even for such a short time.  If I were Chinese, I'd probably still want to teach, despite the differences between our two cultures.