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JISHOU, HUNAN — I had to upgrade my cell phone today in order to eat tomorrow. In a real life analogy to upgrading to Windows N+1 or OS X+I, in order to buy a meal, I had to upgrade my hardware.
Naturally, there were compatibility problems.
There were some major changes to the main university dining hall this summer. The second floor got new tables and chairs, new serving lines and (bless us all) air conditioners. The other big change was, beginning this week, we can no longer pay cash for our meals.
Previously, there were two payment options: good old fashioned cash money and the SIM cards in our cellphones. Most students paid with their phones. Each serving line had a “wave-and-pay” near-field reader: hold your phone against the reader and the meal cost is deducted from your account. It’s a pay-as-you-go arrangement, so students periodically have to refill their accounts at the dining hall or cellphone office.
I, however, just used cash, because I eat less often at the dining hall (also known as the canteen here) than the students do. But that option ended this week. After a two-week transition period of requiring us Luddites to buy meal tickets at the door, the university switched completely to the wave-and-pay system.
For four days, I relied on my forgiving students to pay for my meals with their phones, but today decided it was time to get on the bandwagon. So, my colleague Gordon Ye and I went to the dining hall office to set my phone up.
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JISHOU, HUNAN — More personal horn tooting here — I wrote a longish diary for Daily Kos about my experiences here after three years, and it made the Community Spotlight.
 I made the Community Spotlight at dKos! As of right now (1:30 am EST), it’s had 58 comments since I posted it yesterday. And its plea for foreign teachers has netted three responses so far. Not bad for a couple hours of work.
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YONGSHUN, HUNAN — This part is less about the teaching, and more about the whole experience of the training gig.
First of all, getting there was a job in itself. This part of China is mountainous, a lot like the Appalachian region in the USA, so straight line distances on maps mean nothing. For example, I had passed through Yongshun 永顺 back in February, when I visited Jackie Li in Longshan, which is even further back in the hill country. On a map, Longshan 龙山 is only about 150-200 km away from Jishou; the trip took seven hours.
Yongshun, fortunately, is not at the end of a major road construction project. Even so, it took two hours to get there on twisty roads that rival New York City streets for potholes per linear meter.
Aside from topography, and the attendant isolation, there is not much else in common between Appalachia and this part of China. For one thing, Yongshun County has a population of almost 500,000; the city has about 70,000. That’s a pretty big “small town.” The city, like Jishou, is a big grubby, but also showing signs of steady improvement. In other words, it’s not Podunk, but you can see it from there.
After we arrived, we settled into our hotel (about a 2-star in my book, but the closest to the school where we’d be teaching) and then had dinner with, not the teachers, but the local and prefectural mucky-mucks who were all men ranging age from 30 to 50. Baijiu (Chinese “wine”) is a necessary part of such gatherings. Michael and I did our part to represent America in the Baijiu Drinking Cup, earning some respect from the local pros.
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YONGSHUN, HUNAN — I have participated in who-knows how many teacher workshops, training sessions and in-service days during 25 years of teaching. Last week, I approached the task from a new angle — as an in-service teacher — and it went better than I expected.
Several weeks ago, my foreign affairs officer, Cyril, asked me if I was going to be around during the summer. The Xiangxi Prefecture foreign experts bureau (the people who hand out our teaching licenses) was organizing a one-week oral English workshop for local middle school teachers. The job actually sounded like fun, although the pay was also decent, so I agreed to do it.
I was joined by Michael, an American teaching in the Foreign Language College in Zhangjiajie. Our duties were to teach pronunciation and intonation, useful expressions, and the differences between American and British English. Michael took the expressions assignment, and I did the nitty-gritty pronunciation/intonation tasks.
Our students were 37 teachers from Yongshun, Huayuan, Luxi, Baojing, Fenghuang and Jishou — all counties or cities in the Xiangxi Tujia and Miao Autonomous Prefecture. Most were between the ages of 24 and 40 and, I am happy to report, had really good English speaking skills already.
Having sat through endless training sessions where the trainers read Powerpoint slides to us and talked in pointless generalities, and having enjoyed fruitful and well planned workshops where we actually learned shit, my aim as a leader was to focus on the practical side. After all, I am now an English teacher, too, and I know what I wish my students had learned before they come to university.
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JISHOU, HUNAN — I’ve been up to my eyeballs in work these last two weeks, so I haven’t had time to post anything. Even this one will be short.
This term I had only three subjects to teach, Oral English, British Literature and Academic Writing, but the last two upped my workload significantly. The juniors in Business English take those courses, and altogether there are 90 students. Their term project for the writing class was to read a novel by a British author, and write an analytical paper of 1,000 to 2,000 words about it.
Given the average length was about 1,400 words, my ambitious assignment required me to read 126,000 words between the due date, June 16, and my self-imposed deadline of Friday (yesterday here). Most of that I did once classes ended a week ago. Meanwhile, I had already agreed to help out one of my Chinese teacher friends with her English school, so in the mornings I was teaching middle schoolers and the afternoons and evenings I was reading essays.
Phew.
As for the quality of the essays, they fit the standard distribution pretty closely: a few superb ones, a few truly awful ones, and the rest in the middle. Considering none of these students had ever done such a paper before, the results were better than I expected. As for the low end, some were bad because the students’ English skills are poor, or because they hadn’t actually read the book. A few were cribbed from the Internet, and I gave them zeroes as a result. The re-writes are due July 12, for a non-zero but substantially diminished passing grade.
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JISHOU, HUNAN — One of my students showed me this video, from a website called Hujiang English Network. The guy in the vid shows us how to speak English with a Mandarin accent (not a Canto accent — so, you won’t sound like a Hong Kong action movie).
Although he’s joking around, the way some Chinese pronounce English comes out sounding just like he says it does. Chinese is a tonal language: every syllable has one of four tones** (nine tones for Cantonese) and each syllable is pronounced distinctly. A Chinese may try to speak English words the same way, so it comes out sounding like machine-gun fire. (Native English speakers tend to connect words together, dontcha know?)
And, as he notes, Chinese will substitute Mandarin words for English words that sound similar, like du 琽 = “stopped up” for “do,” ti 踢 = “kick” for “tea/tee/tip.”
If you visit the Hujiang link, they have the “translations” of the not-so-obvious phonetic substitutions he makes. Here they are, with the real meanings next to them.
downtown = 当烫！(dang1 tang4 = when hot!)
gun = 刚！(gang1 = hard!)
big gun = 大刚！(da4 gang1 = really hard!)
job = 脚脖子！(jiao3 bo2 zi – ankle!)
beautiful = 彪特否！(biao1 te4 fou3 = tiger very evil!)
congratulations = 坑刮出来的屎！(keng1 gua1 chu1 lai de shi3 = blow out of shit pit!)
I’m not sure who the fellow is, but he’s good. His name is Magician Joe, out of Vancouver, British Columbia. He’s got a YouTube page. And you can find him on Facebook and Twitter as @popking161.
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