Month: July 2017

In addition to our tour of the campus, all the students and teachers convened in the late afternoon.  Teachers got a front-row seat.

Leo acted as Master of Ceremonies (in both English and Mandarin), while Fr. B and a Chinese professor welcomed everyone, thanking the students for their dedication in giving up part of their summer in order to attend, and thanking the foreign teachers who came all the way from America — at their own expense!  (Insert a chorus of “Ohhhhh!” here.)

Teachers were assigned to their classes — I have group 5 for the first three days, while Ms. K (my hotel roommate) has group 1. Since we will teach only four groups apiece this year, this means she and I can share lesson plans and materials with no fear that students will have both of us.

Also discussed were the order of China Daily articles and the teachers who will present them.  Fr. B wants us to concentrate a bit more diligently on the articles, since the topics are important social and moral questions.

We greeted a few repeat students and some program alumni who are here for the summer for other reasons, then we headed off to a wonderful dinner with Maryknoll teachers from Hong Kong. These folks are not Americans or English teachers, but Hong Kong folks who teach at Maryknoll’s five primary and/or secondary schools there.  Maryknoll runs the schools under contract from the government of Hong Kong, which means they are not private schools and so must follow government regulations — which means there is no possibility of my working at any of them because the “NET program” (Native English Teachers required in each school) has a mandatory retirement age — and I am past it.  If I want to work in Hong Kong it will have to be at a private, for-profit language school or an International School or religious school, probably of another faith.

I chatted with several ladies from Maryknoll Sisters Schools (a combination elementary and high school that teaches in English) and they were kind enough to agree to let me visit the schools when I return to Hong Kong. I’m longing to see how an “English MOI” (Medium of Instruction) school works in real life in a country where one’s mother tongue is relegated to “foreign language” status.

Wonderful Chinese Dinner

 

Today the group got its first look at the facilities we’ll be using.

Of course, we had to pose for pictures in front of the library/administration building.

Our guide for the tour was Leo, s a very tall (6’5”?) and very nice young man we met last year who is now the Head Student for this year’s program. This means that he’s in charge of supervising about 15 subordinate Class Leaders and ultimately responsible for the behavior of all 180 students.  He is staying at the hotel with us and is additionally tasked with ensuring that none of us gets lost.  I’m very glad he’s been given this position. He’s an avid student and quite a lot of fun.

He walked us to the university, where we met Ms. W, who took us to Fr. B’s office for worship services.  The office doubles as a meeting place for students who want to practice English and so is stocked with drinks and snacks. It makes a great teachers lounge and is the only place on campus with air-conditioning and one of the few places with Internet access.

The campus originally served the Chinese air force as a medical school, so there are a couple of 1960s-era airplanes on display.  Though a relatively prestigious place for the Chinese to study (very hard to get into), the facilities are rather run down by western standards, though to be fair we are visiting during vacation period and so upkeep probably is taking a hiatus. We ended our tour at the Teaching Building, where all our classrooms are located.

The first session of each day will take place in a large, tiered room with a projector and a loudspeaker system. After that we’ll disperse to individual classrooms. Some of them are also tiered, with fixed furniture; some have flat floors with fixed furniture, which usually seats students in banks of four.  If you’re lucky enough to have a room with “loose” furniture the students generally sit in pairs at small table-like desks.  Every room has a digital projector and screen, though it’s not likely that most of us will use them. More important, to me, anyway, are the large chalk boards.  And the podium – that is, the teacher’s platform at the front of the room.  Ms. R, who has taught two semesters in southern China, explained that generally the Chinese professor sits at a desk on the podium and lectures from there. Students listen, absorb, and occasionally parrot back what they’ve heard.  I like to get close to the students, so I can hear them and so they can watch me when we do pronunciation drills. I also like to write on the board, so I’m constantly hopping up and down onto and off of the podium.

I wonder if this year I’ll actually fall on my face…

 

 

We crossed the border from the Hong Kong New Territories into “Mainland” China and thence to the airport at Shenzhen, a huge and bustling place that, like Brasilia and Washington, DC, (and Londonderry, Northern Ireland?) was deliberately designed to be built on nearly vacant land. A generation ago there was nothing there but a fishing village.

On the way to Jilin we had one brief stop, where we found two things you don’t (to my knowledge!) see in American airports:
–  Karaoke booths (in case you just HAVE to sing while waiting for your plane?)
–  Drinking water dispensers (reflecting the fact that practically nowhere in China is the water safe to use directly from the tap)

 

 

 

 

 

 

We also encountered the standard “sanitary facilities”, to wit, the squat toilet. These are the norm in public lavatories, including the university in Jilin.  Places that expect a certain number of foreign visitors usually have one or two “western style” toilets, though these are apparently becoming more common in response to the aging of the population.

The sign in the stall doesn’t make things quite clear:  you must never flush the paper (as the waste water pipes cannot handle it).

Flying north we saw some very beautiful, and some very sad, scenery.  As in continental Europe, the Chinese custom has been to build a small central village, usually of several rows of attached dwellings, surrounded by the cultivated fields or orchards or nurseries.

So much of the land we flew over was as lush and green as Ireland, crisscrossed by the occasional high-speed rail line and/or (largely under-used) superhighway, more often by wide roads that appear to be unpaved, and by rivers practically snake-like in their twists and turns around hills and terraced agricultural land.  The sad part was, how often these waterways spread out into what I thought at first were large lakes and later realized were simply huge flood zones.  Once looking at it with this understanding, I could detect submerged fields and roads, beached barges (where the water had receded), and it one case, what I believe was a half-destroyed bridge.  As the area around Jilin had been affected we were greatly relieved to find that the bulk of the local troubles were on the outskirts of the town, although electricity had been temporarily cut off in the neighborhood around the university.

Ms. W got us all checked into our hotel, and we’re looking forward to orientation.

You know you’re really in China when all the planes carry names of airlines you’ve never encountered before!

Mr. J #2, Mr. J #3, Ace, and the second Mr. P are all young Chinese men, post-graduates. They are with us to get some practice in their English, and join the group in Jilin as students.  A few evenings ago I stopped to chat with Ace, whose spoken English is rather limited and who, like the others, appeared rather discouraged because he couldn’t easily follow the training classes.  He showed me his notebook, wherein he was (vainly) trying to translate Dr. D’s class outline.

One of the problems I saw last year with Jilin students is heavy reliance on translation devices or App’s, rather than using any kind of English to English dictionary. This is due, of course, in part to the fact that the average English-English dictionary is too difficult for young English speakers or for English Language Learners (ELLs) to use profitably. Based on a paper I wrote last fall for one of my classes, I gave Ace (and, later, my fellow teachers) the URLs for three online dictionaries that are designed especially for use by ELLs.  These dictionaries provide simple definitions, lots of synonyms, the ability to hear the correct pronunciation; sometimes they even provide examples of proper and improper usage of the new word or phrase.

A couple of days later, Ace pulled me aside to tell me that he had tried all three dictionaries and that the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English (www.ldoceonline.com) was the one he liked the best. I was pleased he had tried them all, and was particularly happy because I, too, think that Longman is superior to Merriam Webster and Macmillan (the other two I had suggested).  Ace seemed reassured that continuing his studies in English wasn’t going to be as hard as he’d feared.  He was, however, accessing the dictionary via wireless on a tablet. Since Jilin Medical University does not have wifi, I don’t know whether students there will be able to use it.  Ace said that one of the dictionaries (I don’t recall which) has an App for use with phones, so perhaps that will be the way to go.

ELL-oriented dictionaries to look at:

• Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
  ldoceonline.com
• Macmillan Dictionary
  macmillandictionary.com
• Merriam-Webster Learner’s Dictionary
  learnersdictionary.com
• Cambridge Learner’s Dictionary
  http://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/learner-english
• Cambridge Advanced Learner’s Dictionary
  http://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/british
• Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary
  oxfordadvancedlearnersdictionary.com

 

Today was our last day in Hong Kong.  Dr. D delivered his last lecture, somewhat to our disappointment, because he’s a great resource and because he didn’t quite finish the syllabus. All the same, we sure learned a lot about the forces that shaped Chinese thinking through the centuries and even today.

Ms. W gave the most entertaining part of our training:  a presentation she calls “East and West”.  Based on drawings by a Chinese-born German, it contrasts Eastern and Western attitudes towards time, family, work, etc.  Here’s an example.

Ms. W also explained the concepts of “face” and “reciprocity”, both of which drive nearly all dealings in China and which are important in our teaching even in so short a program as this.

So it’s “goodbye” to the House of Prayer, and off we go to Northern China.  I’m going to miss this little Home Away from Home…

and my new Best Friend.

 

 

 

 

And now…off to pack up.   The bus departs at 6:15 in the morning.

 

Due to heavy rains, the city of Jilin has been experiencing flooding this past week.  Jilin is just down river from a large dam that holds a huge lake; the opinion here is that they must have had to let some water out of the dam.  In any case, the town is in a serious situation.

We’ve seen some horrific pictures and videos of this. Please keep the folks there in your prayers.

Dr. G continued his lecture today, discussing the Three Teachings (Buddhism, Daoism, and Confucianism) and how they have historically been interrelated in the lives of common peoples, rulers, and “the bureaucracy”. The importance of ancestors in daily life and belief was touched on, and should be fleshed out in some detail tomorrow.

Ms. W gave us another installment in her very intensive “crash course” in Survival Mandarin. Today she presented courtesy phrases, how to make requests, numbers, and names of things to eat and drink. And everyone’s favorite phrase, “Make it cheaper!”  (i.e., come down a little on the price).

While I believe that I have a knack for languages I have to admit that I am getting nowhere with Mandarin.  I really have to ascribe it to the circumstances under which it’s being introduced:  hurried and focused on spoken mastery without addressing the underlying logic. And I really can’t hear many of the sounds.  I learn better via other methods…which I will certainly need if I go on any further with it.

After lunch, the Divine Ms. M (my roommate last year) and Mr. G (another 2016 alumnus) and I did a little panel presentation to give the new folks an idea of what to expect and how to deal with it.  Dr. G, who has also taught the summer session, and Ms. R, who has taught two semesters elsewhere in China, added very valuable comments.

People seemed a bit reassured, and afterwards we chatted about plans for our classes and the kinds of things they wanted to try.  Ms. K wants to do a shared session with me, which I think will be great, but we agreed to wait a few days until everyone was “settled in”.

As I feared, rather than adding an “after school” session each day for optional activities that would include more teachers and fewer students, we are simply adding an extra session of regular class.  The activities I planned to be optional can be done, but not as I wanted:  smaller, faster, and louder than the rest of the day.  I am disappointed, to say the least.   But since this year’s program has fewer teaching days than in 2016, adding a mandatory session ensures the students don’t receive less than those who attended last year.

Another dissappointment, and an example of the way the Chinese think:
I sent Ms W and Fr. B the final questionnaires for my research project a couple of weeks ago, to which Fr. B had replied, “We do not have permission from the university to do this.”  Today I asked Ms. W, “Does that mean that they refused?  Or does it mean that we are waiting for a reply?”  She said that in China, no response means “No”.  I had anticipated this, so I asked whether we could ask the other teachers to simply read the first questionnaire to their students and have them write their responses, as if in an exam. This would, even without the second questionnaire, still provide helpful information. Ms. W looked very uncomfortable and said we really couldn’t, in case the university found out.

So, cultural lesson learned:  when we in America hear nothing, we assume all is well; when they in China hear nothing, they know nothing is what will happen.

I’m glad I didn’t have a master’s thesis or doctoral dissertation riding on this.

Dr. D’s lecture today focused on the languages of China and how Chinese writing developed into a lingua franca across East Asia.  One of the problems/advantages, of course, is that the writing carries with it no indication of how the words are pronounced, unlike alphabet-based writing systems in which the sounds are represented but meaning is less readily identified.  I think we can draw a parallel with the pictograph systems used by certain American Indian groups in the western states, or with American Indian sign languages, which were interpretable despite differences in language.

At this point, I can recognize about a dozen Chinese characters:  person, day, month, king, forest, and a few others.

Training today was also graced by the presence of Kenzie Lau Kwong, PhD, a friend of Fr. B’s who is a graduate of one of the Maryknoll girls’ schools in Hong Kong. Dr. Kwong is a founder of Leaders’ Quest, an international organization devoted to bringing leaders from different countries together to identify, understand, and start work on solving important problems around the world.

She gave us a very frank picture of China’s current problems and challenges, and our first real insight into the situation of the average Chinese citizen…especially vis à vis the Hong Kong citizen.  Under the slogan “One Country, Two Systems” there are significant differences between the Hong Kong Semi-autonomous Region and what is still called The Mainland or China (rather than “the rest of the country”), especially in such areas as economic and personal freedom.  Dr. Lau addressed topics such as economic initiatives, government-powered urbanization programs, environmental concerns, and education. As with most of our training, a very large amount of important information delivered in a very short time!

To learn more about Dr. Kwong’s work, please visit leadersquest.org.

What a pleasant surprise!  Apparently, Sweet and Sour Pork is not an American invention, but a real Cantonese dish – or at least one that has been adopted back.

Most meals at the House of Prayer consist of steamed rice, whole fish (last night was Snapper with Rainbow Shreds, “shreds” apparently being slivers of bell pepper), some kind of other meat dish, soup, and fruit.  Breakfast includes fried eggs and hot dogs, and a huge bowl of what looked like muesli.  I hoped it was congee (a sort of porridge like grits but made from rice).  It turned out to be very thin oatmeal.  Drinks are generally hot, which is a bit hard to take when the temperature is in the humid 80s.

Since we are a large party, each day five of us are tasked with cleanup duty. After scraping the dishes, we give them a quick soapy wash and put them in the “dishwasher”, which is more like a rinser/sterilizer. A single tray of dishes goes in at a time, but it comes out in about two and a half minutes!

Then we dry and put away.  I was (firmly) corrected in this last task. It seems that not only do all the mugs go into the cupboard upside down, but they must be stored according to color and type. Mugs with Mickey Mouse on them do not go on the same shelf as those with Donald Duck.

After dinner I met with Ms. E and Mr. P (the last arrival), both barely out of college and very eager, to discuss how they should plan their classes.  Ms. K joined us, which was helpful since she has conducted training sessions in a large number of foreign countries on a large number of business topics. I explained my personal class routine (based on what I did last year and about which, more later) and they mentioned several of their own ideas, which sound both appropriate and useful. I think they went to bed very encouraged, because, to be honest, the guidelines Fr. B gives are so broad that it’s easy to feel completely lost.  At a minimum, I think I was able to reassure them that they didn’t miss anything – we really do have a great degree of latitude in what and how we teach.

And then, the end of a perfect day…
. . . discovering in the newly-uncovered closet a large electric fan!

We arrive in Jilin on Saturday and will meet some of the students on Sunday, with classes beginning on Monday.  This is slightly different from last year, as our flights north from Hong Kong were badly delayed then, not arriving at Jilin until 2:00 am!

There will be five periods a day, at 9:00, 10:00, 11:00, 2:00, and 3:00.  For the first period each day, all 180 students and all teachers will assemble in a large chemistry lecture hall. Each person will have a booklet full of news articles from the China Daily.  Using a Power Point presentation, one of the teachers will present some new vocabulary found in the article, providing definitions in English (with both English and Chinese on the presentation screen).  Then the teacher will read the article aloud, to demonstrate pronunciation and inflexion.  If time permits we may call on a student to read, or drill the group in pronouncing the new vocabulary.

For the second period, each teacher willl take his students to a smaller classroom, where we’ll review the vocab, see whether there are additional words the students don’t know, and then possibly have them read the article aloud.  After making certain that everyone understands it, we move on to discussing it.  I loved this part last year:  breaking my class into groups of three or four, giving each group a discussion question, and having them present their consensus to the full class.  As Fr. B said today, we are not just teaching English, we are teaching young people.  Watching them do this makes we wonder to what degree they ever have discussions in their regular classes (English or other subjects).

After these first two periods the teacher has the freedom to do what he thinks best for his class. For some, pronunciation drills will be in order. Other times, discussions of less serious topics (foods, music, home towns) are good, or games.  In a departure from last year, Fr. B suggested…almost recommended…giving a short writing assignment during the 2:00 session; he did insist, though, that we correct any writing so the students don’t persist in mistakes.  (Apparently their usual teachers tend to simply acknowledge that the work was done, the student receiving no feedback on the quality of the work.)

It’s not clear yet what the 3:00 session is for. This is the period that I suggested be used optionally for special activities, which I expect to present to the others in a day or so.

There will be thirteen news articles used, two of which were voted, by last year’s students, interesting enough to be repeated this year.  Topics include:  racism, gender imbalance in China, suicide, sports and drugs, funerals, the cost of care for the elderly, giving “English” names to Chinese students, gambling, consumer rights, the Chinese Brain Drain.  There are two additional ones that were described to us as “Too Close to Call” and “What’s Up, Doc?” but Ms. W couldn’t recall exactly what those discussed.  We take turns presenting, in age order starting with our youngest teacher, who is all of 21.  Of course, this grew embarrassing as the scheduling reached those of us who are a little “up there” in age.

Other news:
It has been raining like a firehose for two days.
Mr. E, the Englishman, has had to leave due to a sudden illness.