The End of Qufu

Sorry I didn't send anything out yesterday, things got pretty hectic very quickly, and I just didn't have the time to write out anything that would do things justice. We started Thursday with rehearsals for the closing ceremony, and it was here that I discovered that my kids were going to sing a Taylor Swift song, a Justin Bieber song that stole the chorus from Lovefool, and Beat It. To say I was dissapointed in their music choice would be a pretty accurate statement, but what can I do? I used their rehearsal time to meet with other teachers and plan fun games and stuff to do instead of teaching. Miles and I were going to do Baseball again, but it poured all morning, so we had to just use games we knew to keep them busy. We took our jobs very seriously, and if you've never seen Miles chew out a kid for not moving during musical chairs, you've never lived.

I'd like to start talking about what happened Thursday afternoon by saying that the Chinese insistence on grand ceremony has begun to grate on me. Photos had to be taken of everyone in the rain, which cut significantly into lunch time. Then, it was time for class goodbyes, which had significantly less crying than they did in Inner Mongolia, which was very nice. My kids taught me how to write my Chinese name (赵云), so I signed everything using characters. The closing ceremony was pretty bland, and mercifully ended on time, unlike in Jangxi, where they had to sit for five hours. We all ended the day too tired to do much other than lay around our rooms and watch movies and turn in early, which was good, because I've walked a hell of a long way today.

Why have a walked a long way? Well, today was the Tour de Confucius, wherein we visited his temple, his home, and the Kong family graveyard. All of these were quite neat to walk through, even with heat and humidity that completely outclasses the humidity that we complain about in Minnesota. I could talk about what I saw, but I really didn't understand much, as very little is in Chinese, and the stuff in English is poorly translated at best. Don gave us five pages of the greatest Engrish ever. I'm going to photograph them and put them on Facebook as they deserve to be in a museum. However, I do have a couple of notes to make. For one, the whole thing would have been much nicer if there were fewer tour groups. Why? Well, in China, every tour group comes with a guide, and that guide comes with a tiny loud speaker that doesn't make anything louder, but does make it significantly more grating to your ears. Now put one of these everywhere, and you have something capable of completely breaking the serenity of a temple. The other thing is that every time I see white people I'm shocked. Today it was a group of German students about my age. I greeted them in German as I passed, and they all seemed really confused. I think I'm going to speak German to every white person I see here from now on.

Other than that, I would really advise looking at my photos on Facebook, as they are worth seeing, and do the whole experience far more justice than my words ever could. We have another lazy susan dinner tonight, and then we're going back to the hostel for a couple of drinks. I hope nobody disappears this time around. Oh, speaking of that, Abbie's back in Beijing, and is doing just fine. Our train leaves around Noon tomorrow, and I'm looking forward to a night out in Beijing before going to Guyuan for our final camp. If I knew anything at all about Guyuan, I'd say something, but I don't. At least it's the last camp. We'll see when I can send out another transmission.

-Cooper

Plagiarism Part Two: Electric Boogaloo

And here it is, folks, the thrilling conclusion of the plagiarism saga, which turns out to have 66% less anger, and 50% less disappointment than I had anticipated it to. However, before I get to that, I have to give a general update on the goings on of the camp here in Qufu. For one, we have suffered our first medical casualty since the butt incident in Quzhou. Abbie was feeling a bit under the weather yesterday, and spent the day sleeping in the warmest room possible; a sure sign of a fever. They took her to the hospital, and I'm not sure what they found. Today after lunch, she left with Niona for Beijing, and we're not really sure what's wrong with her. This being China, I'm guessing she's had at least two X-rays. I'll know more about her condition tomorrow, and I'll keep everyone posted.

The Soccer players down the hall continue to get worse, and we continue to do our best to keep them in line, although due to the language barrier I think they see our outbursts as cute instead of intimidating. We're yelling at them every time it gets loud, but it isn't making much of a difference. We returned from the corner store last night to find that they had managed to completely flood their end of the hall through what could only be an overzealous use of the faucets in the bathrooms. Because of this incident, they have begun to use our bathroom holes with even greater frequency, which has resulted in a drastic increase in the negative externalities associated with non-flush toilets. It goes without saying that we are all less than pleased at this development.

Other than that, I'm done teaching for this camp because we are having a party day tomorrow before the closing ceremony. This means that I'm running baseball, something I'm going to do with gusto. I can't say that I'm going to miss this place, or my students, which certainly makes leaving easier. Don't get me wrong, they're good kids. I'm just looking forward to the next crop more than I want to stay here and hang out with them, and that's a sentiment shared by the rest of the group. We're hitting up all of the major tourist sites on Friday, and then it's off to Beijing for one glorious night in the city.

But I'm going away from what I really want to talk about: the speeches. As I said before, they went way better than I thought they would, although the weather would have indicated otherwise. Throughout the speeches there was thunder, lightning and torrential rain, giving the proceedings a certain air of ominousness. However, the students prevailed. The speeches I thought were going to go well did, and the kids that had taken their speeches from the Internet showed up with new speeches, one of which (a heartfelt piece about the environment that was, disappointingly, not titled "Fuck Coal") was the best speech in the class. However, there was one girl that did not change her speech. Her name is Kitty. 

Kitty went up and gave the same speech she had pulled from the Internet the day before, and stumbled through it in a quiet monotone while I frowned from the back. After the class, I took her into the hall and in the tone of a father that has caught his child stealing pies from a windowsill I explained to her what she had done. I went on about how this would not fly in any American classroom and how dissapointed I was with her. I told her that there was nothing I could do to punish her, but that if I could, I would. She went back into the classroom and emerged fifteen minutes later with my TA and an apology speech that was longer than most of the speeches in the class, and much better written. I'd like to think this represents a victory for me, and at this camp, I'll take any victory I can get.

I have a couple other stories, but the Soccer kids are running up and down the hall, and I'm going to go yell at them. Hopefully I'll get to them at another time, I've got issues that need resolving.

-Cooper

Plagiarism OR How I Made a Student Cry for the First Time

This whole speech thing has been much harder than I thought it was going to be. Yesterday, when we introduced the speeches, we gave everyone time in the afternoon to work on them, and it seemed like everyone had a pretty good grasp on the concept of giving a three minute speech. They all worked diligently, scribbling down things onto whatever paper they brought that day, and asked the proper questions about translations and expectations and such. Today was a completely different story. The first warning we got came from Class 3, where one of the kids came in at 8AM, and handed a Zowahh a speech, saying "I couldn't print my speech at home, but here's one I wrote a couple of days ago". It was way beyond his English level, and as soon as she brought it out in the teacher's lounge, I googled the opening line, and sure enough, it was wholesale stolen from the Internet. We all thought it was an isolated case. It was not. The same speech popped up in Paja's class, and then in another.

When we got to tutorial time, I asked if any of my kids had finished their speech. When nobody said yes, I thought I had dodged a bullet, but they just didn't understand my question. The first girl to come up had a printed speech that, like the speech from class three, was way outside of her skill level. I made corrections (It had errors!) and noted a line to google in my head. As I fiddled with the school's WiFi to get the internet working, I was approached by another girl, who had THE SAME SPEECH. They sit next to each other, and they thought this would work! I chastised them for plagiarizing, which they didn't understand, and told them to write their own speech. Not five minutes after I made a big deal about all of this, two more girls came up with the SAME SPEECH. I made an even bigger deal about this, and then one of them tried to defend their obvious theft by telling me that it was a speech that they had written last year and won an award for, which is why it was on the Internet. The question of the day is: How dumb do they think I am? I'm not mad, just kinda interested and dissapointed. In the end, over a third of the speeches in the class were plagiarized from the same source. When I told one of the girls that I knew she had stolen her speech, and that she would have to write an entirely new one before tomorrow, she started crying. I didn't care. This isn't as bad as Jenny's class, which had a 90% plagiarism rate.

Dan pointed out that in a country with no regard for copy write law, we shouldn't expect them to care about plagiarism, and I think he's kinda right. They were completely blatant about it, much like how blatant they are about the 5 yuan pirated DVDs in the marketplaces. Or maybe I'm completely wrong, and it's like this anywhere in any middle school. Jeff Johnson should comment on this issue if he can. We'll see how the speeches go tomorrow.

Other than that, a bunch of 10-16 year old soccer players moved in down the hall, and let me tell you, they are truly awful. They're up running down the hall screaming before we wake up in the morning, and they're screaming long after we go to bed. They were told that they can't come to our side of the hallway, but there they are, knocking on our doors at random times and running away, using our shower, and filling our squatters with their poop. They have their own toilets, and it's not like ours are clean, why are they using them? We talked to Don, and he's going to talk to them, but I don't have much hope. Either way, I'm only here until Saturday, then it's off to the middle of a different nowhere.

-Cooper

P.S.: If you want to read the plagiarizer speech, it's here: http://pabg.net/blogs/entry/as-everyone-knows-english-is-very-important-today

The Incident and Confuciusland

Well, plenty has happened since yesterday afternoon, which has been a very nice surprise. We managed to turn 30 minutes of video into an hour and forty five minutes of large group activity, through what can only be called the greatest effort to stall for time ever conceived in this Provence. It had it all: long pauses, unnecessary student involvement, and made up technical difficulties, and in the end, we pulled it off masterfully. Then at the end, Don dropped a bomb on all of the students AND teachers when he told the whole auditorium that every student has to give a 5 minute long speech. He later told us that he wants us to have them in the auditorium in front of everyone, but we did the math, and 170 kids at 5 minutes a speech is over 14 hours long, so we're going to have to put the brakes on that part of the plan. Either way, it's going to be a great timesink.

 The headmaster took us all out for dinner which was the standard giant lazy susan meal, full of all sorts of different and strange foods. The first odd one was century eggs, which tasted like regular eggs, but weirder. there were also whole prawns, one of Miles's favorite foods here, some totally awesome squid, mussels, whole fish, and the standard soups with vegetables and so many unidentifiable and bony parts of some animal that you should just kind of try to stay away from the meat all together (I picked out a sheep vertebrae from one bowl last night). Oh, and I also go to continue my goal of having at least one strange food per lazy susan meal by eating cicada, whch was just kinda crunchy and bland. Oh well, now I know what that tastes like.

Following dinner, we decided to go to the only youth hostel in Qufu, which turned out to be a great idea, well, at least until The Incident. The place is about a mile from here, and we had no idea exactly where it is, so we decided to get cabs and go. The thing is, it's apparently impossible to get a cab on a Saturday, even though they're everywhere. After a mile of walking and about 30 full cabs had passed us by, we decided to say screw it, and all piled into Tuk Tuks, which turned out to be a great idea, as it makes you feel like kind of a king touring the streets. We arrived at the hostel to an empty bar, and got drinks. (Quick note: drinks are even cheaper here than Beijing, something I didn't think was possible. I could get Johnnie Walker Black on the rocks for 15 yuan, which is completely insane.) Soon, a few Brits that were touring China for a month showed up, and we made a few new friends, bonding over a game they called shithead, but I knew by another name: cheating bastard. Then, The Incident happened.

You see, there's one member of our group, Abbie, who can go from zero to drunk faster than anyone I've ever met, Nick Alonzi included. Within an hour of us being there, she was already screaming drunk, and somewhere over the course of the night, she decided to make an Irish exit. When we discovered she was missing, everyone freaked out. Well, not everyone. Miles and I were in a conversation with Reyse and Ben, two of the Brits, and didn't get the memo until we realized everyone was somewhere else. Several search parties were sent out, and all of them came back with no sign of her. When Niona called and said she was back at the night, it was decided that we were done for the night, and everyone went home. Well, not everyone. Just before the signal to go was given, Alejandra, Paja and I had bought another round, so we quickly finished them while I talked in surprisingly passable German to a couple of Dutch guys at the bar. And here I was thinking my German minor would do me no good in China. We finally got back around 12:30, and went to bed.

This morning we got to sleep in, which was an opportunity welcomed by all, ate a late breakfast, and were taken to a place that I've taken to calling Cofuciusland, a place where education about Confucius and fun meet. It was really kind of an odd place, there was an It's a Small World style ride through the story of Confucius, a bunch of mannequins related to the old scholar, arranged to show things that we couldn't understand, and a big, multilevel maze in a geodesic dome, which was supposed to represent math in some way, although I'm not really sure how. I got some great photos of it, and learned very little. Other than that, we got a visit from the DDT man this morning, or at least we think it was DDT. Some guy in a reverse, diesel powered leafblower came through when I was in the shower and covered everything with some sort of chemical, including all of the bathrooms, the room where we dry our laundry, and the entirety of the hallway. He tried to spray it all over our room, too, but Miles managed to stop him. Thank god. We know what he was spraying is bad for us, because he was dressed in pseudo-hazmat gear, so I'm not exactly sure why he was allowed to do it. Oh well, it's China.

-Cooper

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

Chinese kids have horrible swing mechanics

Sorry I didn't get an e-mail off yesterday, I didn't really have a whole lot to say, so I figured I'd just send out a longer one today. Teaching is going better than I thought it would, although I'm unable to teach in the way that I would like to. The kids all love me, which is pretty neat, although I'm not sure if they're understanding anything I'm teaching them, or if they just have lines they use in situations. For example, I asked one of my students if he felt comfortable writing short stories, and he responded with "The American dream", which threw me for a complete loop. One of the kids in my class looks like a young, Chinese Pee-Wee Herman, and I have problems not laughing when he talks in a distinctly feminine voice. Pretty good student though. We had a fashion show as a camp, and my class asked me to be a model, and I agreed. They asked me if I would wear a dress, and I thought "why not?". Next thing I know, I'm wearing a flowing wedding dress made of newspaper. I think it scored me points in everyone's book, but I'm not really sure.

The guy from this school who is our primary contact, Don, is an interesting fellow. We played The Price is Right on the first day, and everyone had a great time, and he followed it up with a long, angry lecture about only speaking English in camp and just generally chewing out the students. It was a huge buzzkill. He's also a great example of the subtle graft that permeates life here. He placed his kid in the best class in the camp the day after we opened, despite the fact that his kid is about four years younger than the rest of the class, and significantly less proficient than everyone else. He routinely tries to cheat at the activities to get his kid to win, among other little things. He can bat pretty well for a pudgy middle-aged man, though.

That brings me to the title. As you know, I bought a bat and some tennis balls when we got here, and we've been having a blast with it. We've been out every night hitting tennis balls around the soccer field, and let me tell you, it feels really good to go out and get some regular exercise and run around. If I had shoes other than my Chucks, I'd probably start running again. I taught all of my classes baseball today, and they all love it. Everyone oohs when someone hits a pop fly, and some of them are actually pretty good hitters. The rest are awful. Most of them have these weird downward hack swings that I can't really figure out how to fix. I'd just let them be, but Miles's class and mine are playing a game against each other tomorrow, and I'm gonna be subtly competitive about it.

We're killing time here pretty well, too. We went to KFC two days ago. It's much spicier than home, which is actually really nice. Last night was Ben and Danny's 6 moth anniversary of being in China, so we went out and got beer and a $4 bottle of Brandy and watched Dr. Strangelove, which made us all feel like we were getting away with something. We have two more days of teaching before a day off, and I have enough lessons ready for the rest of the camp, so I'm in great shape. The other camp in Jangxi is not. Apparently it's deathly hot, and they're with a bunch of kids from Oxford. This wouldn't be a bad thing if the people from Oxford weren't A)Huge pricks, and B) on a secret mission trip. They're butting heads, and the kids aren't cooperating with the activities, so they're all in their own special kind of hell. I'm so very happy I'm not there. I'm going to do laundry tonight. My kingdom for a washer/dryer combo!

-Cooper

Puberty: Even Worse in China

I said to Scott today that nothing has made me want to get a desk job more than teaching here, and it's something I stand by, at least right now. I'm teaching a group of 14 Chinese middle school students, and it seems to be nearly impossible to get through to them. At some points I just feel like I'm talking to a bunch of small, fleshy walls, with no real goals or direction, and I can't imagine doing this for a whole year. It might just be the camps that we're doing, where I get to spend no more than nine days with any given group of kids, and am given no real instruction other than to teach, and no way to gauge progress or how much attention the kids are paying. Stability and grades might be a big help. But even then, I think that I really need to have a concrete way to measure progress in the work that I do. If things continue the way that they do, I might switch from trying to teach to simply trying to amuse the kids and count down the days until the camp is over. I hope it doesn't come to that, but we're already planning for it.

We're with some different people from CSETC on this trip, folks that have been in China for 6 months, and it's been really interesting to get their view on things. Turns out the program is kind of a front for all kinds of government graft, and there's a restaurant on campus that is more or less a money laundering front. We get paid what we do in cash because it's the maximum amount they can pay us without reporting it for taxes, which I'd be completely fine with if foreigners didn't need a pay stub to change RMB into dollars. This may be a problem later. There's all kinds of other stuff that makes me trust the program even less, but it's all minor. If anything big comes out, you'll know about it.

Other than that, it's been raining here all day, so we get to do the Price is Right for the afternoon activity, and I get to be Bob Barker again. The internet's up in my room, so if anyone wants to Skype, I can do it in the morning.

Remember to spay or neuter your pets,

-Cooper