It makes me ill
Posted in Homesickness, Living in China, Teaching in China, TravelOctober 26th, 2009 · 10:48pm | 3 Comments »
I’ve been a bit under the weather lately. I think it’s a flu/bronchitis deal, but nothing too serious. If I get fevery or achy, I take two acetaminophen and feel much better. I wish I didn’t have the congestion, but that’s just because it’s a nuisance. Frankly, there have been so many sick kids at school, it was only a matter of time. But the H1N1 signs aren’t back up at the school gate, so I’d imagine it’s not swine flu. Either way I’m not concerned.
The other foreign teacher, John, is also sick, and has it much worse than me. He went to the hospital today for some “injections,” which is something all of our helper teachers keep encouraging me to do (at least three times a day they’ve been calling me – “Are you alright? Maybe you should go to the medical center for injections.”). This is not something that sounds enticing to me. My friend Aimee says “injections” are usually just a saline wash to “clean” your blood – but I also know that the best cure for a flu is sleep and fluids, and since it’s been more than 2 days since the onset of symptoms, it’s not like medicine will do much anyway.
I’m not interested in going to the hospital unless I have no other choice. This is pretty much the case in the US, too – I just hate going to the hospital. I could do without the incessant phone calls checking in on my health, though. I figure, as long as I still feel okay to teach (which I do – I taught 5 classes today without taking anything and I felt alright), then I’m fulfilling my contractual obligation, and nobody can force me to go to the hospital. I wish I could get rid of the stuffy nose so I could pretend like I feel perfect, though, and get the The Foreign Teachers Are Sick Brigade off my back. Nobody’s on the The Foreign Teachers Have No Social Lives Brigade, I notice. Still no KTV for us. Lame.
Anyway, it’s almost Halloween and I am sorely missing it. I just realized that I would have been planning my costume for months by now already. And it’s my first year with no Erika-and-Katie Halloween Party. I’m not sure what I’ll do with myself; probably sit in my apartment, watch The Nightmare Before Christmas (and any other Halloween movies I can find on youku.com, the Chinese equivalent to YouTube without the copyright laws), and eat popcorn and the rest of the candy corn I have. My parents sent me two big bags of candy corn; last week, I ate one of them. The other one I’ve been using as a treat for four students who come up to the board at the beginning of class to do an activity. All 4 get one piece (I’ve got 15 classes for goodness’ sake) of real American Halloween candy. Then we watch the intro song to “Nightmare Before Christmas” and talk about what Halloween is about. And then the students work in groups to write scary stories. So far, they’ve been pretty creative (when I can get them to talk).
Other things that make me ill include students who refuse to speak. I should correct that – entire classes that refuse to speak. I don’t even mind having one or two kids do all the talking – at least the other kids are *hearing* English that way. But I’m really getting tired of 3-minute-silent-staredowns, where I sit and wait for someone to answer the questions I’m asking, especially when they have the answers written down in front of them.
I’ve been using one particular format lately. I pose some questions or a writing prompt. The students have 10 minutes to write their thoughts, and I walk around the room to make sure they’re doing it – about 50% of students usually get a good written answer down, 25% get a little started, and 25% don’t do anything; I’m not giving them a grade, so I can’t really give them grief. Then I give them 5 minutes to discuss their answers with 1 or 2 other students. Then I ask the questions out loud and ask for volunteers to answer them – and suddenly, the brilliant writers and chatty conversationalists clam up and I’m stuck in a neverending cycle of dead silence.
I stare around the room at the tops of heads; everyone has put their nose to their desk and it’s suddenly like I don’t exist. I have to tell you, I’d take my swearing, impolite American teachers to this silence any day. I know that they are not used to speaking up in front of class, but we’ve been working on this for eight weeks now. And the reason I have them write the answers first is so they don’t have to come up with the answers on the spot. But apparently, having the words in front of them doesn’t help. It seems like it’s only gotten worse.
Don’t get me wrong, I love to teach. But it’s hard to feel like you’re teaching when the students stare at you (or away from you like if they can’t see you, you’ll go away) and refuse to respond. This Halloween lesson uses music, a movie clip, and the kids getting out of their seats. This is rare, because there are so many desks and piles of books in the classroom, there’s barely room for me to move around by myself and most of the aisles are too blocked for me to look at individual student work. Even with all these changes to the usual M.O., however, I had a dead silent class again this morning. I showed the “Nightmare Before Christmas” clip (with Chinese subtitles to help my low comprehension kids), and then asked, “So, after watching this, what do you think Halloween is about?” Most of my other classes at least mumbled something like, “Scary things.” This class just stared at me.
I’m sure I’ll figure something out, but I’m feeling like we’ve backslid a lot. The novelty of having an American woman as their teacher has obviously worn off, and they’re losing interest. We’ll see what happens in the coming weeks.
Yet another thing that makes me ill is the crazy lack of power/internet we have around here. Up until two weeks ago, I really never had a problem with the internet. The incident mentioned in Renewed bike bruises; holiday travel plans is about the only time since I got to Shimen that I really had a major internet problem. Well, two weeks ago, when the school got around to installing my new computer and DVD player, the internet problems started. In the last two weeks, the power and internet have cut out about two dozen times. I can go without the internet (in fact, when I went to Changsha to visit Aimee and Craig, I went without my laptop, and came home to two days of broken internet). But when the power is off without warning and my lesson is on a PowerPoint, I’ve got a bit of a larger problem.
I’m well aware that the school has no control over this; China is notoriously power-deprived (despite the Three Gorges Dam). But that doesn’t make it any less taxing to stare at the overhead projector that refuses to work and hand-write your PowerPoint on the board with chalk (thank goodness for laptop batteries with a decent life). I used to print out the PowerPoint slides in a little outline just in case of this problem, but I’m running out of ink and I’m trying to squeeze the life out of the ink cartridge in this printer. I also intended to write “backup” lesson plans that don’t require any technology, but I haven’t gotten around to it. Nothing I can do about the power problem, but it’s certainly irritating.
Something that doesn’t make me ill is the fact that I get yet another holiday at the end of next week. The students are taking mid-term exams and will then get 4 days off as a post-exam break. That puts me at seven (count ‘em, seven!) days off in a row! I’m off from November 6th to the 12th and I think I’ll be going to Xi’an and Hanzhong (one of the places I might switch to next semester if I change schools). I’m like a traveling nut over here. My salary is piddly in terms of what I’d make in America (well below the poverty line for a single-person household), but here, it’s plenty to let me travel and see as much of China as I can. Not to mention my accommodations and 19 meals a week are already provided for, so I don’t really need much around here.
Except tissues and acetaminophen, apparently.
Photos have been uploaded from Changsha, and the Liuyang has been added to my location map. I’ve messed up my photo plugin somehow (or the upgrade to WP 2.8 has), and I’m unable to get it to work with the fancy photo “lightbox” that used to be there. For the time being, I suggest you just click on “View slideshow” to use flickr’s fancy slideshow to look at the pictures. You can look at larger sizes of the photos and share them, and get captions and all that fun stuff. Hopefully I’ll fix the lightbox thing, but so far, I’ve only heard of one person on the entire internet who’s gotten it to work, and he’s not answering my emails. We’ll see.
3 Responses to “It makes me ill”
By larissa on Oct 27, 2009
Judging from your twitter post, the Foreign Teachers are Sick Brigade is not off your back and you may even have the flu. Oh no! You are right: fluids and rest and candy corn will help.
By larissa on Oct 27, 2009
Oh – would the students freak out if you called on them? Or would a sense of duty overcome them and they would then try to answer your questions?
By Katie on Oct 27, 2009
Yes, we’ve got the flu…whee! The school has been shut down for swine flu. More in an upcoming post.
Also, when I do call on them, or finally get one to stand up, they struggle so hard for the English that it hurts to watch. I let it go on as long as I can stand it, then I let them sit down and give them praise for the effort. It’s a lose-lose situation here. The Halloween lesson has done a better job than usual of getting participation (today’s classes were better). But it’s still a bit of a battle.