There is no Chinese Word for Rehearsal Take

Today has been a frustrating day. You know how I said that the school wanted us to teach an extra day, and that we got out of it? We didn't. It was either that or do evening activities, and one more day of teaching is preferable to seven 12 hour days. The good part was, instead of teaching a normal day, we've designed a movie day, wherein each class films a short film in the morning, and then we show them in the afternoon. Filming this morning was a complete disaster. Realizing that I am the king of my class, and that my word is law, and will be universally lauded by my students, I decided to stay out of the creative process entirely. This was my first mistake. What followed was a half hour long debate entirely in Chinese that I could do nothing to control. They came up with a number of ideas, and in the end, a romantic movie won the impromptu vote I had to institute to keep things moving forward. The class spent an hour writing a script, once again entirely in Chinese, and came to me with a page and a half of dialog, which is not enough to make a 3-10 minute film. "Whatever" I thought, "we just need to get filming".

Filming was even worse, as I had no idea what we were filming, and through that, no idea how to shoot it. My TA was less than helpful in this situation. She was unable to facilitate communication between my class and me, and it took me ten minutes to get her to understand the concept of a rehearsal take. After about half an hour, we had 47 seconds of film shot, and I was growing increasingly frustrated. In the second scene, the wheels completely came off. They practiced the scene a couple of times, declared it to be completely terrible, and then decided to completely rewrite it. Frantic Chinese followed this for longer than it ever should had, and two of the students who had been quiet up until this point made a gun out of two umbrellas, and completely took over the production, turning a romantic film into a hostage movie, something that nobody was expecting or had any control of. They should one truly odd scene, and declared the film to be done, leaving me with a one and a half minute long film that made no sense. My TA tried to salvage some kind of plot by making everyone dance at the end, but this only made a nonsensical narrative into some kind of perverted surrealist critique of Hollywood. I have to edit it after I finish this.

Other than that small hell, I can report that Chinese kids write really weird short stories, and that my class's baseball defense is about as bad as the Minnesota Twins' right now, and that I have the highest ERA in all of Shandong Provence with 27.00 (9ER/3IP). The headmaster is taking us out to dinner tonight, and we have the day off tomorrow. We'll see if I make it that long without bashing my head against a wall out of frustration with the lack of communication between me and my class. I'll write more general stuff tomorrow when I have the time. I've had a few good observations recently.

-Cooper