Monday, April 19, 2010

Swing and a Miss

Darn, darn, and double darn. [Expletive]. Darn.

I took all these great pictures at a talent show the school put on today, but when I uploaded them to my computer they were sent to some twisted nega-folder and disappeared without a trace. I searched high and low for them, but they are gone. I will give the talent show its own paragraph (no I wont), but here are two highlights. A nine year-old kid did a flying karate kick over like six people and broke a board, and three kindergarten teachers performed some kind of traditional dance in outfits that would be lawsuit worthy in the good ol’ USA. Captain says they always do that dance at talent shows, so I guess it’s kind of passé to everyone but me.

The daily routine at my school is bizarre, bordering on the surreal. It is also pretty draconian. The Kaiyin primary school is a private boarding school, so children spend the week at school and the weekend at home. The students are woken up at 6:40 in the morning, breakfast is around 7:30 and they are in class a little after 8. At 10 the whole school meets out front for calisthenics. The lunch break is at noon and lasts till 2:30, which seems long, but trust me, they need it. 5:30 is dinner-time, and then at 6:30 they go back to class till, I believe, 9 pm. After that the students go back to the dorms to do homework(!) and the teachers go to their dorms to do paperwork and plan lessons.

Ugh, I feel exhausted just writing that. It really is as bad as it sounds. I want to say that no one is happy with this situation, but the kids and the teachers are way more upbeat than they have any right to be. Do I feel obscenely guilty about the fact that I work maybe 1/6th as much as the Chinese teachers do, and yet I make five or six times more money than them? Yes, but saying that Chinese workers are grossly underpaid is like saying the sky is blue. I am not shafting them, the system is. As long as the teachers agree to work for shitty wages and the parents encourage the schools to drive their children to the point of exhaustion, this is what they will get. Obviously, the whole situation is much more complicated than that, but progress comes from making hard choices.

Moving on, this marathon schedule is not just a straight shot. The day is broken up by a series of pointless rituals, each one attempting to outdo the others in pointlessness and unintentional comedy. The morning workout is funny mainly because the teachers have to do it, too. Seeing your co-workers subjected to something that no American teacher would ever stand for epitomizes everything that is strange about Chinese schools. There’s definitely a hierarchy in American schools, but a really experienced teacher with a lot of seniority is more like a partner to the administration. In Chinese schools, everyone is subjugated to the administration.

I’ve also seen the workout turn into an impromptu English lecture. The kids have all been taught to salute and say “good morning, sir” or “good morning, miss.” Also “good morning, grandpa” and “good morning, grandma” which I thought was weird because no one from any English-speaking country calls a random old person grandpa unless they’re trying to be offensive. Anyway, I can’t count the number of times a student has saluted me and said “good morning, miss!” Swing and a miss.

Eye exercises are performed twice daily. Apparently on one occasion Chairman Mao was making a tour of Chinese schools and observed a lot of students rubbing their eyes constantly. So bam, eye exercises for everyone forever. Maybe Mao should have made a tour of the optometrists’ offices, where you basically just try out a bunch of different pre-made pairs until you find one that works ok. Eye exercises are serious business. If you don’t do them right, you will get beat, and the teacher will do them for you (or to you, I guess), with gusto.

It didn’t take me very long to stop being shocked by the violent nature of student-teacher interactions. Smacks to the back of the head, throwing a kid’s stuff on the floor, all in a day’s work I guess. Sometimes when I see a teacher’s face flash with rage, I get a little scared, too. On the other hand, it is kind of liberating to be able to just pick up a kid who’s acting bad and move him around like a chess piece. My kids are good, so I don’t have to discipline them very much, and I would never hit one of them anyway. But, I think it’s a good thing that physical contact between students and teachers is not perceived as creepy in China. I’m having a really hard time articulating this thought correctly, but I think the pervasive fear of sexual misconduct in schools reflects poorly on us as a society, for a number of reasons. First, it reflects poorly on us because it does happen and that is horrifying. But also, the fact that we allow these acts to color our perception of every interaction between an adult and a child is misguided and, ultimately, very damaging to the trust that we must have in each other for society to function.

That was a weird tangent.

It’s hard to make singing and dancing around not fun, but it is possible, and I have seen it. Every day after lunch my students sing a Michael Franti (I think I spelled that right) song called Say Hey. They have this whole choreographed dance number they do, and they do it 1 ½ times. That’s how long it takes to fill up the 5 minutes before class starts. Like the eye exercises, if a kid doesn’t perform with sufficient vigor he or she will be instructed, rather sternly, in the correct method. Sometimes they get kind of into it, and they thought it was pretty hilarious when I started copying their moves, bust mostly they just look really bored. I’ll have to see if I can bring in some new tunes for them to groove on.

Damn, this post is getting kind of long and I’m getting kind of bored. But there’s still a lot to say about school! Oh well, if people find it interesting then I’ll write another post about my classes. I’ll just say one last thing before I go. My kids are loaded, and I am not talking about drugs. There is some serious cash in that school.

This is a terrible place to die in.
Where’s a good one?