China has an annual English speaking contest called "Star of Outlook", which culminates in televised finals for children of all ages. Before that, each Province has its own local competition to decide who gets to qualify for the Beijing finals. Yunnan Province, which has a population equivalent to England, had well over 1000 children taking part, with a 100 or so from Robert's School alone. After three preliminary rounds, just 50 students made it to the Yunnan finals, eight from my school and three of those from my own classes. Robert watched the Yunnan finals and was a little disappointed that none of our eight finalists won their age categories. But we did get three second places and two of those were students from my classes. So well done Robert's School, great result for our students and, dare I say it, a small pat on the back for me too!
I spent a couple of hours this evening at a Kunming Radio station being interviewed for an English Show sponsored by Robert's School to be aired later this month. Questions started with the Jubilee and Royal family, moved on to how I came to marry a local Chinese woman and life with her mother, and ended with a comparison of Chinese and Western Education. Thankfully there were translators on hand throughout. Our school has a special event this weekend, where excited students can bring in their unwanted toys and swap them with other students. It reminds me of my youth, when the Saturday morning T.V. show "Multicoloured Swap Shop" was required watching. I recall making a huge number of phonecalls to a youthful Noel Edmonds, desperate to swap my guitar for a Stylophone. Hope our school students have more success! The Lattitude volunteers put their newly learned teaching skills into practice today, with each pair teaching a 50 minute lesson with real students at my school. The two pairs taking part in my lessons did really well - here seen setting up a nice "doctor and patient" role-play.
The Lattitude course continues on. The volunteers I'm training this week are a lively and enthusiastic bunch. They get a wide range of experiences whilst here. Chinese language lessons each day, for example, include trips out of the classroom to practise what they've been taught [see photo - here buying pears and mangoes]. Today we went to a local Middle School to observe a lesson and meet the students. Yesterday we watched a video of a previous volunteer teaching a lesson and being interviewed in her rural school (filmed and edited by me). And tomorrow they meet teachers from Robert's School to be given information on what to prepare for their weekend Teaching Practice. So amongst all the class-based theoretical training, there's quite a lot of practical stuff going on too. It's all quite tiring though! Our new term started yesterday with the usual "whole school" meeting and then the first of the weekend lessons. I've got a particularly busy fortnight ahead, as we have double classes (to make up for our holiday!?) and, from next weekend, I am also training 13 Australian teenage volunteers from Lattitude for a week. Back to work...
Our school term came to an end today and it's been a good one for me, overall. However, I've been struggling with my health for the last week or so - sore throat, cough, skin rash, gout, dizziness - so it's a very welcome break. Jiajia and I fly off to the Philippines tomorrow with a Chinese couple we know well, and their daughter. There may not be any new entries here for a week or so but, in the word of The Terminator, "...I'll be back"
My school is looking a lot more spic and span now that the plastering and painting has been completed. Next come the posters and display boards, after which they'll probably need to replace the carpets which are now caked in blobs of plaster and dripped paint.
My school has been decorated over the Christmas period. It was chaos on the last weekend of lessons before the New Year break [see photos] but I'm told it'll all look beautiful soon. I'll check tomorrow.
"Throw the snowballs through the snowman's holes" - one of the many activities on offer at our school this weekend (and yes, he is full-size, despite looking like he's been photo-shopped into this picture!).
I usually have a good laugh at all the Chinglish around town but it was with more of a "groan" than a "ho-ho-ho" that I spied the huge posters advertising my school which went up along a nearby road recently. Look closely... I wish it were a rare occurrence, but almost every English document our school produces has mistakes in it (our new door sign says "We will answer all your question" and our festive posters wish folk a "Merry Chirstmas"). Those responsible have been told (in no uncertain terms) that all future advertising featuring any English at all now has to first go past my beady eyes! I've been truant more than I've been in attendance at my Chinese lessons over the last few weeks because of the extra work I've been taking on. Despite the patience of my fellow international students [L to R above: Englishman, Palestinian, Australian and Canadian] and Chinese teacher [below] I've been in constant catch-up mode whenever I've been able to make it, and I do feel I'm struggling a bit as a result. If the lessons weren't free (for me, as a teacher at the school) I would have probably given up by now. The other students are more concientious too, and spend much of the rest of each day practising their Chinese in one way or another, while I'm off preparing or delivering English classes. Anyhow, they are a fun bunch to be with and until they start getting frustrated at me holding them back, I'll be struggling on. It does at least provide me phrases such as, "Calm down a bit" and "This isn't totally edible" which can be useful for ma-in-law!
We had one of our occasional school-funded meals out for the foreign teachers yesterday. My boss's wife Rachel [waving in picture] summed up the mood when she said that this is the best team of forigners we have ever had at the school. It's been over a year since any of us have had to provide last-minute cover for any absent teacher, and that used to be almost a weekly occurrence. It's so nice now to know that everyone is reliable and professional, and it helps too, perhaps, that the average age is now 40ish and not 20ish! We are also a very multi-cultural bunch, with teachers from America, Netherlands, Australia, Philippines, Canada, France and England. Our Indian meal was very tasty although, as usual, the appetizers turned up at the every end!
My boss Robert gave me this fearsome-looking device for my birthday. Once your hand is strapped in, it registers your heartbeat and sweat levels and then, as you are asked questions, it works out whether you are lying or not. Anything it thinks is a lie is punished with an electric shock! I used it with one of my classes this weekend and the students loved it. You can only get away with this sort of thing in China, though. Can you imagine the British media backlash if I had been caught "asking young girls embarrassing questions and inflicting electric shocks". I'd be struck off! (Thought about using it on mother-in-law, but didn't want to overload it!)
About a year ago, my boss Robert was telling me how he feared some legitimate emails to the school were getting lost amongst the huge volumes of spam mail that pours in. He didn't have time to scour the inbox and the Chinese staff struggled to sift the nonsense from the job applications, etc. So, rather rashly, I offered to divert all the school email to my private email address and only send on real emails on to him. So every day now I get 15+ spam emails which usually get efficiently swept into my spam box, but which do need a quick check through to make sure a real one hasn't slipped through. They are nearly all for "organ enhancement" or "money making schemes" and it amazes me how anyone can be taken in by them. Mr Usman (from WAST Africa!?) offers me, a total stranger, over a million dollars [see above]. Now what's suspicious about that? I taught my adult class the term "spam email" the other day. In their dictionaries, spam is listed as processed meat, so I had to launch into a rather surreal explanation of Monty Python to try and explain where the term comes from. I'm not sure they were any the wiser by the end! Our school's first TESOL course started today, with Robert doing the first 4 hours (aided by fellow teacher Monique, who taught for 40 minutes in Dutch to give the trainees a flavour of how it felt to be a bewildered student once again). I attended and joined in for the afternoon to get a feel for the trainees and learn their names. It seemed to go very well. But as the day wore on I started to come down with a bad cold and by the time I got home this evening I was sneezing, coughing and running a temperature. Straight to bed - my four hours' training is the day after tomorrow! This last week I, along with my boss Robert, have been putting together a 32-hour course for "ATI", the American TESOL Institute, who recently opened a branch in Kunming. They are accredited to grant the Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) certificate - an internationally recognised teaching qualification. Our course starts this Monday, so we've only had a week to put it together, and I'll be teaching half of it. Hopefully it will go OK, but it's had to be something of a rushed job. Fingers crossed! Amidst the more common "Hapy Brithday" and "Robets School is tenth" comments on the posters lining the entrance to my school (which recently celebrated it's 10th year anniversary) I spotted this rather odd one yesterday. I don't know who "Regina" is, but she may need to see a therapist. Or even an exorcist?
My last class of the weekend proved to be the one in which the students had made the most effort in dressing up and bringing friends. They are the youngest bunch I teach at 9-11 years of age, and are full of enthusiasm and energy. One of them even brought in a plastic bottle full of live praying mantises, "just to scare me". Job done - they are very weird looking insects! Halloween is here again, and our school goes wild for the weekend. The building is decorated, teachers are required to dress up [see Monique, below] and many students do too. After a few years of "sword through my torso", I went for a different look this year - a bizarre, fat Mexican gunslinger growling the phrase, "Where's ma dawg?". It got the usual screams and cowering kids [see photo above]. One of the school's 35 classrooms was decked out as a Haunted Room, with over 500 students trailing through during the 2 hour classes. My students enjoyed various other activities too, such as using loo rolls to dress one of them up as a Mummy, and trying to reconstruct a Dracula face on the board whilst blindfolded [see below]. It's a manic and tiring weekend, with very little getting done educationally, but the kids love it. You get the impression there's not much "fun" in Chinese State Schools"! At my suggestion, all our students are rewarded if they "bring-a-friend" on this weekend. Any newcomers are then given a discount voucher which hopefully attracts some to join the school longer term. Back to normality next weekend, all being well "...now, where's ma dawg?" The bosses of my school, Robert and Rachel, helped us a lot with our wedding. Rachel compered the half-hour ceremony, while Robert agreed to give something of a best man's speech. Even the non-English speakers were laughing along as he projected a number of doctored photos onto the wall, allegedly chronicling my many secret, high-profile, romantic liaisons! (P.S. Did you spot Angelina's tattoo?)
That recently filmed documentary about me aired on Kunming TV last week, to an estimated audience of tens of thousands, but the producer forgot to tell me (or my school) in time, so we missed it. However, it was repeated today and we had advance warning this time, so Ava, her Mum and my school boss, Rachel, settled down to watch it with me this evening. It was very professionally produced - about 20 minutes long - incorporating me doing some teaching, driving and eating pizza along with some (stolen) footage from a previous documentary 5 years ago and excerpts from the interviews conducted with me recently in English and (pretty poor) Chinese. Hopefully they'll supply me with a DVD of it in due course, so my fame can spread even further! Haha! A group of 9 teachers from my school went out yesterday evening on what's intended to be the first of a series of social events. This one was ten-pin bowling, a sport new to many of the chinese. Everyone, including me, did pretty badly (the gutters have never seen such action), but I did manage to win 2 of my 3 games. Strangely, the two girls who scored the least all night were also the only two to get strikes! It was a fun time and a chance to spend time with colleagues outside of the office. Over 80 school staff gathered for a "Ten Year Celebration" meal yesterday evening in a revolving restaurant atop one of Kunming's four star hotels. It took me two hours to get there by public transport however - the first bus did a u-turn after 15 minutes for reasons I never fully worked out. Then we hit tailbacks from two separate accidents. I tried another bus which was suddenly redirected by a traffic policemen due to roadworks and a third bus stopped 2km short of the hotel due to a massive traffic jam which had brought the whole thoroughfare to a grinding halt. But at least (and at last) I got there! The food was a buffet and had plenty of delicious options to choose from. Then there was a party with "hilarious" games. I'm sure it wasn't just the language barrier - it's occasions such as this where western and chinese cultural expectations seem to diverge the most! After 2 hours of "fun" we finally got to head home. I found a taxi this time and was back within 30 minutes. |
AuthorPaul Hider lives and works in Kunming (SW China) and regularly updates this blog about his life there. Past blog entries
February 2024
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