Hodgepodge

I\’m not being very good about updating at all – it\’s just a little bit of a pain to do, and I can\’t figure out how to make the slashes go away, other than avoiding contractions and various other punctuation marks. Let\’s face it, I can\’t live without parentheses.

Also, I can\’t link and I can\’t add pictures, and the whole thing is just a little frustrating. The good news, though, is that I do have sweaty dancin\’/drinkin\’ pictures on flickr, if you\’d like to see how we do (the same set I put on facebook). I also included the high five series – not my idea and not taken by me, but on my camera at the end of the (extremely long) night.

So, yeah, the weekend was fun – perhaps, dare I say it, too much fun, since it\’s now Tuesday and I still feel like I\’m in recovery. This week has been exam week, which means that I\’ve had a weird schedule, and I\’ve been invigilating other classes. Have you ever heard that word before? Chris broke that one out a couple of months ago, and I thought he was just flashing some ridiculous arcane vocab, but it\’s the word for watching students take a test, and everyone here uses it like it\’s not a completely weird word. Invigilating is not a whole lot of fun – you\’re basically expected to stand there and stare at a classroom full of stressed out students for 2-3 hours. The first test I invigilated was a three hour ordeal that included listening, reading, and writing sections. During these three hours, I memorized the poster at the back of the classroom that illustrated the causes of conflict, and they were: lack of empathy, lack of compromise, poor communication, needs not met, making assumptions, desire for power, self-interest, intolerance, prejudice, ignorance, challenge to values, and cultural threat. I didn\’t think that was a bad list. Then I tried to memorize the other poster, which had all the effects of conflict, but I didn\’t finish that one since there were more of them (I got as far as unhappiness, fear, poor self-esteem. negative thoughts, anger, physical violence, rudeness, hostility, stress, distrust, frustration), and the game was getting kind of boring. The class I was staring at didn\’t seem to be phased at all by me staring at them, so I started an intensive catalog of their shoes. About seven of the boys had Nikes on, and three of them had the exact same blue and white pair. The girls were more varied, with one pair of yellow and red converses that I spent a few moments actively coveting. The shoe game stopped being interesting pretty fast, too, so I started doing credit card related math in my head, which always induces a huge headache but is a great way to kill an awful lot of time.

While I was sitting there, though, I got to thinking a little bit about the students themselves, and the extent of the wall there is between me and them. I mean, I don\’t even know their real names – all of them use English names, some chosen and some assigned, and I don\’t think I like that practice very much. It\’s like they construct this entirely separate identity that only exists in English class, and it kind of weirds me out when I think about it. So there\’s the name thing, and the language thing, and the fact that I have absolutely no frame of reference for imagining what their lives are like outside of class.

Ok, to illustrate: if I\’m sitting on a bench in Fayetteville, Arkansas, and a man in a business suit rides a bicycle past me, I can make up a story for him. I can visualize the corporate meeting he just got out of, I can make up office banter all around him, I can imagine his white house and family pets and what his bathroom looks like. Obviously, I could be completely wrong about all of this, but there\’s a chance that some of it might be accurate. Here, though, I see the same thing, and I have absolutely no way to mentally supply missing puzzle pieces. I know that my students have families and hometowns that they love, and I know that they have friends and that they must go shopping for shoes. I know that they are very sleepy on Monday morning, and that they study wayyyyyy more than I ever did when I was their age. But I can\’t imagine what their parents\’ living room looks like, or the things they talk about with their friends, or even what they want out of life. I mean, yeah, we talk about monsters and chest hair (have I mentioned their absolutely bizarre fascination with chest hair here?) and they tease me about my love life and I dish it right back at them, but that\’s foreign language class talk – I remember similarly themed conversations in freaking French class, when we knew just enough of the language to try to make jokes but not enough to make them particularly nuanced. I don\’t know; while I was feeling incredibly awkward staring down my exam-takers, it really sunk in how big a distance there was between us and how much work it\’s going to take on my part to ever be able to bridge it.

Let\’s see: today I had a student ask if I was from America. I told her yes, and she said that she would love to go to America, it sounded like a lovely country, but she was afraid because she didn\’t have a gun and that it was very dangerous there. I told her that I never had a gun and she didn\’t need to have a gun if she wanted to go to America, but it was still sort of a WOA, different country! kind of moment.

Another \”oh shit I AM in China\” moment: we were talking about nationalities and I had them draw a map of China on the board, and then the neighboring countries, which sprawled out into a map of the entire world and led to a north/south/east/west exercise involving a penguin stranded in Ireland trying to get home to her parents in Antarctica. However, at first I was just pointing to the different countries, asking students what you would call a person who lived there (Russian, Indian, etc). Without thinking, I pointed at Taiwan and got a unanimous \”CHINESE!\” Woops. Definitely in China.

Anyway, my class took their test today, and they did very well, which made me feel better about things. They got snickers bars and a movie day as a reward. And as MY reward, I\’m getting a four day weekend. I\’m trying not to think about the fact that it\’s almost Thanksgiving too much – I\’m expecting to have a complete homesickness freakout over Christmas, and I\’m trying to consolidate as much of that into one holiday as I can. I am feeling that, though – it\’s starting to feel like it\’s about time to drive to Harrison to have dinner with Mom and Dad, since it\’s been about three weeks and I\’m used to being able to go visit and stock up on familial bonding and delicious cooking (or delicious pizza hut, really, either one is good!). I\’m also kind of jonesing to go pester Daniel and shotgun all the episodes of Heroes I\’ve been missing, and I definitely wouldn\’t say no to Thai Diner with Shaun or a comfy evening at the Dinosaur House with tasty vegetarian treats. However, it\’s too early in the game for me to start getting mopey over such things, and that\’s why I\’m going to be a trooper about Thanksgiving. I\’ve just never not been home for this, you know? I guess missing holidays is a little more grown up than I ever meant to be.

BUT, there\’s a consolation prize, assuming our paychecks come through in time – I think we\’re going to head over to Suzhou for a couple of days and check that out. It\’s an ancient sort of tourist town a couple of hours away on a train that gets called the Venice of China due to a large amount of canals and streams and stuff. So I think that\’ll be a lot of fun, and there will be a full report on that, with pictures.

Erm. What else can I tell you about? I was about to go off on a rant about how I\’m concerned I\’m not doing enough cultural crap, but if I do that, I can\’t exactly tell you that it\’s Tiger Week on Animal Planet and that I\’m really excited about that. I need for this satellite business to get struck by lightning or something. I used to brag about how little tv I watched. Most of my shows came on DVD, and were not the product of idleness but of genuine interest, and I felt so good about that. However, if you just don\’t HAVE cable because you can\’t afford it, I guess you can\’t really brag about how strong and good and active a person you are until you\’ve faced the temptation head on. I just love me some Animal Planet, and for the first time maybe ever, I\’ve got a non-sibling who\’ll watch it just as happily and for just as long as me, and who will also make me pasta and popcorn and feed me olives with chopsticks while he\’s at it.

Holy crap, internet, I am HAPPY! I mean, it\’s kind of weird, and every once in a while (usually while I\’m sitting on the toilet, for some reason – unfortunately, adjustment here does involve some lengthy toilet trips, and I guess I find that to be a prime life contemplation time), that\’ll kind of sink in, and it\’s a little bit like getting a new pair of glasses after wearing the wrong prescription for years and having to get used to being able to see properly again (not going for a cheesy vision metaphor there, just the feeling of betterness being something a little strange). I wasn\’t unhappy before this, but I was pretty bored and I definitely felt like I was stuck in a rut of twenty-something angst and self-absorption. Now, I spend most of my day actively involved in my life, rather than just letting it pass me by, I feel like I have things to talk about again, and I feel like a pretty together, reasonable, not-batshit-insane person, and it\’s fucking great!

End of story, move to China! Seriously, if I can do this, you can. Or don\’t move to China, just do something you want to do. It helps, a LOT. (you\’re totally allowed to punch me the next time you see me for having a life coach moment there, I know that\’s obnoxious).

Anyway, Tiger Week is calling my name, so I\’m done for tonight. I hope everyone\’s well, and I\’ll talk to you all soon.

~ by Anne on November 20, 2007.