Learning about what learning is like in China

Although you certainly already know, I must mention…Obama won! The reasons why I am thoroughly ecstatic about this can be categorized into two groups. The first consists of all of the reasons why I decided to vote for him in the first place. The second is based entirely on the fact that all of sudden people of all nationalities look at Americans, such as Jason and me, in a much more positive light. All I have to say about the latter is that if there ever was a way to begin repairing the reputation of the United States it was electing Barack Obama as president.

In other news, I have been in class for a bit over a week now and I can evaluate each of the classes fairly well. Also I must make a correction I have three classed not two. They are: Grammar, Speaking, and Listening. I have listed them in descending order according to quality, which decreases drastically.

Grammar- This class is taught by a teacher that is pays attention to all of the students in the class, includes me in the speaking, answering, and repeating drills, and on the whole is a pretty good teacher. She repeats herself to ensure understanding, writes new vocabulary on the board, and even gives us time to write it down.

The only drawback to this teacher is that she speaks in an octave that is several higher than my own. This is only a problem because occasionally I get lost in trying to correctly pronounce words and their tones and when I repeat the word after her I imitate, or attempt to imitate, her octave. The rest of the students think it is hilarious. I have decided to not take it too seriously and look at it as such: at least I can make people laugh without speaking the language, or rather BECAUSE I do not speak the language.

Speaking- This class is taught by a teacher that also pays attention to all of the students to in the class, with the exception of me. She has taken it upon herself to decide that I am a problem because I am not at a level even close to the other students and therefore should be ignored. If I do say so myself, and I do, she has done very well in carrying out her decision. She did slip up on Friday when she took 30 seconds to tell me to start at the beginning of the book over the weekend. This is of course something that I may have thought of on my own. I should say that, contradictory to her overall treatment of my situation, she is quite nice and the other students think that her teaching is alright. Alright is defined in comparison to the other teachers, grammar being very good and I will get to listening next.

Listening: This class is horrible and not just because of the teacher but also because of the format of the class, which may or may not be designed by the teacher. First, I will describe the teacher. She is very loud and gets louder every time she has to repeat herself, which is often because does not ever repeat herself exactly. Instead she rephrases herself and this tactic could be helpful if the problem was that we, as the students, did not know the words that used the first time. In my case this is true, but it is not the reason why the other students did not understand. The reason why the other students cannot understand what she says is because: (I paraphrase this) the teacher speaks extremely quickly and has a very thick accent as she is from southern china and does not speak putonghua (standard Chinese) as her native language. So it is easy to understand why her method of speaking louder, in different words, and just as fast, does not help.

I mentioned before the teacher is not the only reason for the failure of the class, because the format of the class is also terrible. This class is centered only on the student listing to and understanding mandarin language. To facilitate this, the teacher has a small boom box with a cassette player in it. At this point, I will mention that the word “boom” in boom box is misleading in this case as the max volume is slightly quieter than normal speech and significantly quieter the booming voice of the teacher. The extent of this problem is emphasized by the fact that the teacher sits in the front of the room with the “boom” box pointed towards her, and therefore away from the students, to allow easy access to the play and stop buttons. This is coupled with an already poor quality cassette to add all new layers to what is meant by when the student is asked to listen and understand.

I have decided that I will not stop going to my listening class for at least a week. I have good quality recordings at home, which I will listen to on my headphones, as a substitute. When I told the other students what I was going to do and why they said they also did not understand much of anything that was on the recordings but went to class anyway. I am not sure why they still go. It could have something to do with attendance. They tried to convince me to stay, but they did not present any consequences that I did not already account for. The main one being that I would no longer have the teacher as a resource, but I do not really see this as a consequence.

Other exciting things include the possibility of a Saturday hockey league with this, extremely proud to be, Canadian fellow and maybe a few other Canadian but mostly a lot of Chinese. When we found out about hockey and told Dereck, the Canadian, we would like to play his response was something along the lines of, “That’s great eh! You know how to play, eh?” We told him that we could skate and had played street hockey, field hockey, and broomball. His response was, “That’s great eh! Most of these Chinese don’t know one end of the stick from the other eh!”

This Saturday hockey was cancelled, but hopefully next Saturday it will happen. You may have guessed that I paraphrased the above dialogue, but I did so for good reason. What his actual speech lacked in “eh’s” his actual persona (complete with Canadian, rubber, wristband) made up for.

The last bit of news has to do with the weather. Jason and I have been watching the local weather here intently and we decided two things. First, the fact that the local weathermen are awful and constantly project that eight days from any day the temperature will drop ten degrees from what it is currently. Is and continues to be the trend of the ten day forecast. Second, regardless of the incompetence of the weathermen we know:

1. It is very cold.
2. It is very, very cold at night.

And finally

3. It is only going to get colder.

The outcome of this was the decision to go coat shopping for me. I now have a coat and I will post a picture of it in a few days but for know I would like you to guess what it looks like. I will give you a few hints:

1) It cost around $50. (yes that is in dollars)

2) It has fur on it, though it is not real fur. What do you expect for $50?

3) It has two words on a rubber tag on the left sleeve. The first word starts with an ‘F’ and is seven letters long and the second word starts with an ‘L’ and is six letters long.

I will accept both written and illustrated submissions.