August 16, 2006
I love my students. I am teaching two classes but I am an especially close to my main class, class 2. I became very close to them even just in the first week of classes. They are smart, kind and wonderful. Our relationship has progressed past that of a teacher and student to friends. I bring them la jiao (hot chili) at lunch and they tell me stories and ask millions of questions. They hold my hand, want to play basketball and sit on my bed. They also sing Chinese songs for me and get me to sing American ones. This relationship would not be possible with students 12-16 years old in the United States. We are taught to be individualistic and mature so quickly that we no longer act as children. My students happily play musical chairs and Simon says, both games that would be inappropriate for students their age in the United States. This innocence though and warmth has allowed for my experience teaching in China to be so much more than it could have been in another place. I have taught students for months longer than I will be with these students and did not feel as strong a connection with them. I have made 100 friends and I am always welcomed with smiles. Students offer me their chair, their last baozi or a peach. They have a generosity and curiosity I have never seen in children their age. Every time the other volunteers and I start walking out the school gate to buy water or a street snack made from leek (the best food in the world!) students clamor around with more questions halting our exit for at least 15 minutes.
The teachers at the school are also not just teachers but do everything. This summer since most of teachers were not teaching classes they became construction workers, designers and movers. They created a new library. (It looks exactly like the one in my middle school except with less books. There are chairs, desks, computers, newspapers, magazines and books. It is also going to have a language lab. Truly amazing and unlike the libraries (if they exist) in other local schools) The teachers also fixed the roof, laid tile, repaved part of the basketball court and created new classroom and dorm space. They are also endlessly helping students with everything. The students also do their part helping clear water from the courtyard/playground after heavy rains (almost weekly) and cleaning the classroom and their dorms.
This experience teaching has really been one of the greatest experiences I have ever had. Teaching was at times rough and so were the conditions but at the same time it has been wonderful. The Dandelion School is an amazing community of committed teachers, administrators and students. It is a truly unique place that has been created for these students that often have no other stable home in Beijing. I encourage anyone who is in Beijing or wants to come to Beijing to come teach here, even if only for a week or one day. One step into the courtyard and you will be amazed by the energy and warmth coming from these former factory buildings. If anyone would like anymore information, please e-mail me or go to their website www.dandelionschool.org. The Dandelion School is also looking for more funding to fix up the school and keep costs low, if anyone is interested in donating money or providing a scholarship for a student to go to school, please also let me know or look at the website.
Posted by Jessica Gordon at 06:52 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
August 07, 2006
The students have no idea what the United States or the rest of the world is really like. They have never heard any languages other than their local dialect, Mandarin and English. Their ideas of the world are based solely on television. One student, told me that before she met me she thought foreigners were so different. It was a shock to her to realize that people around the world have much in common. Therefore, in an effort to promote international understanding, I decided to teach my students to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. I told them how middle school students in the United States often eat it for lunch and they were floored. They eat the same thing everyday? But its cold? They don’t eat anything hot? Everyone got the recipe down pat but getting them to say “peanut butter and jelly sandwich” with a mouthful of peanut butter- well, that was a another challenge altogether. Some of them liked it though and ate the whole thing with a smile. Others looked pained much like they were being tortured. I can only equate it to being forced to eat pig intestines.
The next day, Hannah, Angela and I decided to teach PE. We had been watching PE class for almost a week and had decided enough was enough. The newly hired PE teacher had decided that all the students needed to learn to march properly. Therefore, PE had become the army rather than time for basketball, ping pong and running around. After watching all our students (once again) pained faces, we had to do something. So, we took over. We played all the American PE games we could think of that didn’t require a ball. (The school only has basketballs and there is no where in the district to buy a different kind of ball.) We played red light, green light, sharks and tuna (who knows what the translation is for minnows), duck, duck, goose, the human knot and so many more. They all worked well until the boys had to touch the girls in the human knot and the knot dissipated. After games, we decided to teach the students, “The Electric Slide.” We marched the classes into the auditorium and turned on the music and started counting. Most of them caught on quickly and we sped up the music. We didn’t have the electric slide song though so we had to be creative once again and use Busta Rhymes. Luckily, they can’t understand all the words. Everyone had fun.
Posted by Jessica Gordon at 06:58 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
August 02, 2006
So much has happened since I last wrote. My other class has finished and English camp has begun. English camp is organized for the incoming students to get them started on their English before the school year begins and introduce them to the school and some of their classmates. Many of the students have never studied English before and this program is created to give them an introduction to English and make it fun.
The camp was not well planned though and two days before it begun the foreign volunteers, 15 volunteers from Beijing Teaching University, the school English teachers and a school administrator met to decide what we were going to teach, how to divide the classes and other logistics. It was a disaster as most of us did not know what to expect in terms of the level of the students. The meeting ended up with the foreign teachers (basically Angela and I) fighting for smaller classes and more teaching time with each class. Although, there were altogether about 20 teachers they wanted to divide all the students (over 100 of them) into 4 classes. This we later found out was to make sure every class had a foreign teacher but definitely did not make use of all the teachers that were available. We wanted to divide the students in at least 10 groups because from our experience smaller language classes worked better, allowed the students more speaking time and more individual attention. They said there was no space and we offered to teach in the cafeteria, the meeting room and even our own rooms. Finally, consensus was reached and the students were divided in 8 groups.
It was also decided that the structure of the camp would be 4 hours of class in the morning, lunch, rest and four hours of other activities in the afternoon including computer, music, art and P.E. (all supposedly in English) and a movie in the evening. The principal and founder encourages using alternative education methods and wants the camp to use music, art and games to aid in the study of English rather than just the traditional Chinese teaching methods which include rote memorization and many tests. This created a challenge for the Chinese teachers to think about new ways to teach other than how they had been taught and people have been taught in China for generations. Many did not understand the concept that learning could be made fun and felt there was a separation between wanting the camp to be fun and wanting the students to learn English.
The first day of camp was filled with nervous excitement as the students arrived. Many came with their parents often on tricycles with trailers on the back for their blankets and few belongings and some walking from the nearby street. We met the students and their parents and ushered them into a room to take an English test to help divide the students into groups. The test had three parts, oral, listening and speaking. The other American volunteers and I gave the listening and oral part of the test. The students were so nervous and the majority of them could not say the alphabet or count to ten. I later found out that this was the first time most of them had ever interacted with a foreigner. With the test finally finished the classes were divided up. Angela, a American volunteer from Stanford and I were given the smartest students but those with the lowest English level. We therefore had a large challenge ahead of us. We were also each paired to teach with the two English teachers with the lowest level of English to hopefully reach the duel goal of improving the English of both the students and the teachers at the same time.
That afternoon, the students were all quiet, shy and still nervous. I started with 12 students but the number gradually grew to 15. Most of my students are from Shangdong, Anhui and Hubei provinces although some were from as far as Sichuan. They are from 12-15 years old and most are about to begin 7th grade. Many who had been in schools in Beijing before had studied English (some for 3 years) but still could not make a simple sentence.
The Chinese love ceremonies and every event deserves one. The opening ceremony of camp began with every class marching with their class flag (that we had created that afternoon) and shouting the school slogan at the top of their lungs in Chinese. The school slogan is:
We are:
Confident Dandelions
Brave Dandelions
Happy Dandelion
Healthy Dandelions
It was so reminiscent of communist marches I couldn’t believe it. Each class marched around the auditorium and then took their seats. Then the principal handed a huge red flag over to the vice principal who is in charge of the camp. Then there were speeches by the (Communist) Party Secretary who works at the school urging everyone in a booming voice to study, learn and be happy. It was a sight.
The next day the whole school took a field trip to Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City. Most of the students had never been before and were so excited they could not sleep. We all lined up at 6 am by class, every student was wearing the camp lime green t-shirt and armed with their lunch bag which included: 2 hard boiled eggs, bread filled with red bean paste and a hot dog like meat wrapped in black plastic and some water. Although the teachers looked tired, the students most of which had been up since 3, were full of energy. It is too expensive to get a bus so we all (130 of us) took public transportation. There is no direct bus though so we had to take one and then transfer to a second bus and somehow managed to stay together. We arrived at Tiananmen and of course took the necessary million photos. None of the students have cameras but happily sat through all the pictures and posed with smiles and peace signs.
We finally arrived at the Forbidden City. The principal had arranged for the trip in March so we all could all get in for free. It was drizzily and cold, a welcome change from the oppressive heat, and did not damper the mood one bit. All the classes then split up and the walk began. We walked through all the main buildings, the museums and through back ways I had never seen. We walked for hours with breaks for bread, meat and boiled eggs. We marched with our flag to keep everyone together and counted everyone about every 3 minutes. There are so many tourists at the Forbidden City in the summer that it was almost impossible to keep everyone together. It’s like trying to keep track of 15 students at Disney World on the most crowded day of the year. No one was lost though which was a miracle.
Posted by Jessica Gordon at 05:56 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
July 23, 2006
Complaints
I need to do some complaining. Not just to make myself feel better (I admit it does) but also to complain for all the people around me who live like this all the time.
1. I am living at the school with students and the teachers. I share a small room with two other volunteers. There is no floor space and we trip over each other and our stuff all the time. Our room also has bed bugs and tons of mosquitoes. We sleep under the mosquito nets but somehow still get bitten. This week one of the other volunteers got bitten on the eyelid and her eye swelled up to the size of a golf ball. (It's doing much better now though.)
2. Beijing is incredibly hot in the summer. We have no air conditioning and in the middle of the day there is nothing you can do to escape the heat.
3. We are in the middle of nowhere. The most exciting thing to do is to buy a watermelon and have a watermelon party. In fact, this district is known for its watermelon which are really good. We are getting good at cutting it in new ways and having seed spitting contests. It has been hard to not be able to go anywhere though and be mostly stuck inside a 100 foot radius. Luckily, the students are wonderful and entertaining and we have nightly frisbee or basketball games.
4. The students do not understand English. They have all been taught English in Chinese so although they can read and write pretty well, they do not even understand simple instructions like “Read this. " Also, their pronunciation is so bad that often I can't understand what they are saying either. The other volunteers and I are working on that though with both the students and the teachers. It also means that we are teaching students to unlearn habits as much as teaching new material. An uphill challenge to say the least.
5. The bathroom. The toilet consists of a long trench. If we are lucky, it gets cleaned once a week. I won't go into detail but we are all getting good at holding our breath for long periods of time. The showers are down the street so the other volunteers and I walk to the neighborhood showers together. It is a communal shower and we shower with the rest of the neighborhood.
All of my complaints remind me of the immense inequality that exists in the world and in China. These students, teachers and neighborhood live in conditions that people in the United States cannot even imagine. I have spoken with the teachers here and they often forget that their standard of living is so much lower than that of other Beijingers. But this week they went into the city to pick up some furniture that a college was giving away and they saw the new furniture and the college rooms and it hit them once again.
Posted by Jessica Gordon at 04:53 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
