Every Sunday, I teach spoken English (and some reading) to five 9-year-olds for two hours. These kids are the children of police officers — friends of my friend Smile, whose husband is an officer, too. One of my student friends helps me in this project, since I need someone to translate English to Chinese. Though the kids are rambunctious, they are also very bright, so the job is not as awful as it sounds (unless the reader happens to be a primary school teacher, who would know what I mean).

At 11, Nora and I left the police residential compound (警公安局 jing gong an ju) and headed for lunch at the university dining hall. There we were joined by four of my students (roommates), our friend from the PE college and a senior in the chemistry college who wanted just to talk with me. Afterward, three of us went for a walk and a sit in the sunshine, which has been in short supply these last four weeks, and the rest went off to their own things.

Our conversation in the sunlight revolved around that bane of Chinese students’ existence — national exams. Kasurly, one of my sophomore oral English students, had just taken the CET6 (College English Test – band 6) the day before. What, a junior from the PE college (no, he is not on second!), had taken the CET3 that morning. Both figured they passed, but were not entirely sure. Kasurly was considering her next steps — a national secretarial exam and/or a national translator’s exam — while What was debating taking the postgraduate exam next year. I have almost given up trying to keep track of China’s national exam system; it makes ETS look like a bunch of amateurs.

Anyway, at 1 pm, I had to go to a meeting of the JiDa Tae Kwon Do Association. One of my freshmen (also named Smile) had invited me after I told her I had earned a yellow belt 20-some years ago. This club was started by two upperclassmen in the PE college, both black belts. For 30 RMB a term, a student can join and learn this Korean martial art, a real bargain. After some warm ups (stretches and a run around the track — they did two laps and I wimped out after one — 400 m), they gathered around me and asked questions like students do at English corner.

Smile asked her classmates to tell me why they wanted to learn tae kwon do. Some said for fun, others for fitness, but Smile said she wanted to learn it for defense. She was quite frank in explaining her motivation. As she did it in English, most of the students there probably didn’t catch most of it, so she didn’t risk losing too much face. Here is what she said, as best I can recall.

Smile is a country girl and her family is pretty poor. When she was 16, she had come home dejected from a poor showing in the college entrance examination. She went to her room and sulked for a while, then came out to watch TV. Suddenly, a man barged into their home, grabbed her father and tried to take money from him. Her mom failed in defending her husband, and 16-year-old Smile ran to their aid. But her kicks had little effect, and the man ran out of their home with her dad’s money.

The girl was sad that her kicks had no power, and ashamed that she could not defend her parents. So, at university, when she heard she could learn tae kwon do for very little money, Smile jumped at the chance.

How she managed to relate all this without bursting into tears still amazes me, but I could tell she was making a supreme effort to contain herself.

Then, the white belts played an elaborate game of round-robin tag (and yes, I joined in it), while the colored belts practiced punches and kicks. They gave me a huge, red Christmas star as a gift, and we posed for the usual array of commemorative photo shoots. I then left to make my 3 pm appointment.

Nik is the 8-year-old son of Grisha and Anya, two visiting piano teachers from Ukraine. I teach Nik English two hours a week, while his folks handle the rest of his curriculum (Ukrainian, Russian, mathematics, health, natural science and civics) so he can rejoin his hometown school once they return in the spring. We figure Nik will be far ahead of his classmates there, since Grisha tells me the local schools have been closed twice because of the flu.

After our lesson, I got on QQ where I found Tina, one of my former students. She was minding one of her mom’s clothing shops and was starving, so she asked me to join her for dinner downtown. Since I did not feel like cooking, I agreed and took a taxi to meet her for baozai (clay pot rice dish). We then did some window shopping, then returned to her shop, where I tried on a couple of nice looking wool coats. (Price: about 600 RMB, or $88, after Tina’s generous discount.) I decided to wait on buying one, because my friend Frieda texted me to say she was at a concert on campus, nursing a godawful headache but gamely attending to support her roommate’s performance. I decided the gentlemanly thing to do was to join her, to support her supporting. Besides, I like attending these end-of-year concerts. While the performers are generally amateurs, and sometimes not so good, there is at least variety to keep from being bored.

Except when the dramatic skits go on too long, and the public address system is much too loud. Naturally, faculty get to sit right in the front row, next to the loudspeakers. Frieda’s headache was suffering from the noise, but she had promised her buddy she would stay to watch her. As things go, her roommate’s song was the next to last act, so the two of us gamely waited it out, munching on the peanuts, sunflower seeds and oranges left for us faculty types.

Performances over, the troupe (all members of the applied physics college) posed for pix, and of course, they invited me — the only westerner there — to join them. Jeez louise.

Before we both called it a night, Frieda and I had a late night snack — noodles for her and fried rice for me — then we went home to get some sleep. (She was tired, too. She had taught piano lessons all day and not taken time for lunch or dinner.)

So, that was my Sunday — 14 hours of fun. Not a typical day, but illustrative of my life here.

He even says, “God bless you and God bless America.”

I’ve read the text released ahead of time by the White House. I can’t find any socialist, Marxist, or any other kind of pernicious indoctrination. It’s not bombastic. It’s not demagoguery. In fact, he says exactly what he said he would say.

So why were people upset again?

As I have mentioned before, a standard feature of any Chinese university (or high school, too, I reckon) is the English Corner, an extracurricular, student-led activity to practice spoken English. My responsibilities here include participation in the English Corner, for obvious reasons.

I live and work at the new campus. Our English Corner is held (weather permitting) every Sunday at 5 pm on a green across from the athletic facilities. I have already chronicled my first visit to English Corner lo! these many months ago. After that initial mob of visitors, attendance settled down in the following weeks to a more manageable number of regulars and the occasional newcomer.

Jishou University (JiDa in local parlance) has, at my last count, four distinct campuses: new campus, old campus, the medical campus in Shijiachong, and the affiliated teacher’s college across the river, where Princeton-in-Jishou fellows Juliann and Stephanie teach. A few students from the old campus have come to the new campus corner, but only those dedicated enough to travel the 3 km to do it.

Last weekend, my fellow foreign expert, David, and I were invited to an English Corner at the old campus. Many students attended, but the crowd was not a mob as it was during my first experience last fall. Once the initial novelty of seeing Westerners in the flesh faded, we all settled down to relatively calm chatting on the green.

Old campus is home to the Preparatory College, a transition year for students who scored poorly on the college entrance examination, but who want to attend university. Most of the prep students are 18 to 20 years old, come from Jishou or nearby areas, and for the most part have never spoken English with a foreigner. Through the intra-campus student word-of-mouth network, the prep students invited David and me to a special English Corner at the medical campus yesterday.

David instead accompanied a group of frosh to Dehang, so I was the sole foreign expert on this excursion. Julie and Layla, two of the officers, met me at the north gate at 1:30 pm for the taxi ride to Shijiachong. On arrival, about an hour ahead of schedule, there were few students present. We met a small group of class representatives so busy practicing some recitations that they did not spend much time talking to us. I realized later that they were rehearsing the short remarks they would later say during the Corner’s opening ceremonies. [No, I am not kidding.]

New campus has an English Corner of long-standing, and thus has a well-worn casual feel to it. Despite our officers’ attempts to structure it with games and pre-selected topics, it usually devolves into a few clusters of 8 to 12 students who chat in English with each other, or with me and David. It’s a great time to exchange QQ and phone numbers, and meet English speakers from other colleges on campus.

By contrast, the activity yesterday was a well-publicized extravaganza. The prep college has several classes of 30 or so students each; each class has one or two officers, and one or two representatives to the English Corner. Using a portable public-address system, each of these officers said a few remarks before the activity started. [Introductory remarks by officials are part of the standard operating procedure before any Chinese program begins, even before concerts. Fortunately, these students were not as long-winded as their elders.]

After these introductions, the classes were given the topic, “How can we become confident?”, to discuss among themselves. I was asked to visit each class group in turn, to give them a chance to talk to me. Afterwards, there was a show, as each class had picked one or two members to sing an English song. That was the official program, anyway.

The unofficial program was organized mayhem, like my first English Corner experience in the fall. Excited students wanted to know where I was from, what cities had I visited, did I speak Chinese, did I like Chinese food, did I like Chinese girls (a subject that could fill a book!), did I like the NBA, who was my favorite player/team — questions I got to answer not once each, but many times. Then, there were the obligatory photo ops. I shook a lot of hands, like a politician on a campaign stump, and willingly agreed to hug two female students. [Ah! The perks of celebrity status!]

While I was answering questions from one class, a small boy in his school uniform walked over to me, stuck out his hand, and said, “Hello, how are you?” He came later to repeat the process, this time with his more bashful buddy in tow, who also shook my hand.

It turned out that the boys were faculty children, a group of whom just happened to be passing by our noisy activity. At some point in the middle of the singers’ performances, these kids got the idea to ask me for my autograph while I was trying to politely listen to the singers. Then, someone allowed them to have some of the balloons the college students had put up as decorations. The first boy brought a balloon to me to autograph. On the spur of the moment, I drew a cartoon face on the balloon with a mustache and a beard to accompany my name.

You can predict what happened. I got to repeat this exercise easily 20 times more, as one child after another brought another handful of balloons to be signed. And of course we posed for photos.

An hour and a half later, this English Corner ended, and my own students, Angela and Sunny, accompanied me to our English Corner at new campus. As new organizers, they had devised a (fortunately simpler) program for our activity, with a word game and a topic, but we eventually just settled into our usual sit-on-the-grass-and-chat behavior.

Describing a few of the members in my circle will give you an idea of the diversity of students at our English Corner. Three, Corinna, Janet and Mary, were my spoken English students. Ailsa, a sophomore politics major, is my new neighbor. Another girl, a junior marketing student, reported proudly she had just passed her business English certification exam. A newcomer, to whom we gave the English name Janina, is a sophomore in the Resource and Environmental Science College. Another newcomer, a junior in the physics department, also asked me for an English name. She proposed two, “Simple” and “Easy.” I demurred, explaining that “simple” implied she was stupid and “easy” implied something even less complimentary (I whispered the meaning in her ear, to avoid her embarrassment). Instead, we settled on “Jasmine,” one of her favorite flowers. There was also Nick, a medical student from the old campus, and his girlfriend, Nina, both newcomers.

All of these students speak English quite well, though Janina and Jasmine said they had never spoken to a foreigner before. Jasmine, in particular, said she regretted not meeting me sooner, as she wants to be an interpreter and has to pass the TEM8 exam next year to make that goal a possibility. I pointed out that she has a nearly a year to prepare, so the few months of lost time talking to me was not tragic.

These experiences were yet more demonstrations of the hunger some Chinese students have for learning English, which for better or for worse has become the benchmark for success in education and the job market. Some hope to work in international business, others to study abroad. Some just want to be able to understand English-language entertainment media better. All recognize that doing well on their English proficiency exams, no matter what level, will enable them to pursue whatever goal they have.

As a foreign expert, the native English speaker is at once a celebrity (and a novelty, especially in this province), a teacher and a stepping stone to success. If you can patiently withstand the repetitive questions about your origins and the like, you will grow to appreciate the important role you play in the lives of a significant number of students. Sure, it’s cool to pose for photos with pretty girls and handsome boys, to get small gifts of their appreciation, and to wallow in their palpable excitement at your presence, but even cooler to know you are opening a door to a new world for the few students to whom you become a friend and/or mentor.

I was drained by the end of the afternoon, even after a (quiet) dinner with three of the students in my circle, but the effort was worth it. I suppose only a lifelong teacher would have found the afternoon fun, but I’m crazy like that.

It also means that I have been in Jishou for three entire months. While it may be hard to believe, it’s become home for me. I still struggle with being absolutely illiterate in Chinese and being incapable of having even a simple conversation in Chinese, but I learn new bits of Chinese each day. So, I figure I’m making progress.

Chief on everyone’s mind now are finals, and for the seniors, postgraduate exams. Anxiety levels are high, and we all are busier than usual. Of course, the students are more anxious than the faculty.

This weekend, I need to write six exams to turn into the office. Each writing or reading class has to sit for a two-hour exam. Oral class students need to be tested individually, and I have 35 sophomores, so I’ll be occupied with them for the next several days.

Fortunately, I have had some experience writing exams, and I have been giving the students in-class assignments for a few weeks now to gauge how long they will need to complete the tasks. They naturally want the tests to be easy. We’ll see. We’ll see …

The seniors are the ones most stressed. China has national exams in several subjects for students to qualify for a bachelor’s degree, and thus postgraduate (graduate school, in US-talk) studies. They all have to pass the national English test. Those planning postgrad work overseas also have to score acceptably well on the IELTS or TOEFL English tests.

In my opinion, requiring seniors to take finals and the national exams at nearly the same is a little excessive, but at least the students can ask to be excused from classes to prep for the postgraduate exms.

I will not see my 30-odd seniors in class after finals. They will spend the spring semester looking for jobs and/or preparing for postgraduate study, while researching and writing their senior thesis. The English majors have to write an 8,000-word thesis in English; the business English have a shorter paper, and only need write an English abstract for a Chinese thesis.

None of them have had to write anything longer than 800 words, either individually or as a class, so this huge thesis project is a bit scary. With that in mind, I’ve been spending these last few sessions with them working on choosing topics, writing thesis statements, conducting research and so on. At this late date, reviewing punctuation and grammar seems pretty pointless. Either they know it all, or not.

Two of my senior English students have been offered places at universities in the UK, so they are positively aglow with excitement. Other students may receive offers soon, too. (As it turns out, several unis in the UK actively recruit Chinese students, so they won’t feel too isolated from home there.)

On the non-academic side of life, I have been able to visit several nearby towns and scenic spots since the National Holiday in October. I’ve been to Zhangjiajie, Fenghuang, Dehang and Qian Zhou, and taken two hikes up mountains near the campus. Meanwhile, students have collectively shown me places in Jishou to shop and eat.

Four freshmen came to my apartment Thanksgiving weekend, and we made dumplings from scratch and gleefully ate them for lunch. Another freshman helped me shop that afternoon, and taught me how to cook Hunan style before she had to run off to a dance practice. Other students have also offered to cook for me, and invitations to come hiking keep coming, too.

At English Corner, I have befriended several students outside the College of International Exchange, including some from the old campus close to downtown and some postgrads. Now that there’s another foreign teacher here, the Corner is not so overwhelming an experience for me. With the growing chill in the air though, these al fresco sessions on the green will soon need to be moved indoors.

A rather shy 14-year-old came to last Sunday English Corner, on the insistence of her mother, a uni professor. She came with a senior, and delivered an obviously rehearsed monologue about The Lion King to me. Once I tried to converse with her, she got rather tongue-tied. I encouraged her to come again this weekend, if only to listen.

English instruction here starts in middle school, if not before. The stress is on reading and recitation, not conversation. That her soliloquy was nearly flawless grammatically, but her conversational skills non-existent betrays the obsession with book-work here. Even my sophomores feel as if they have to have a script in hand when they deliver their exercises in class.

Nearly every person here is terribly self-effacing when it comes to conversation. “My English is so poor,” “I am so sorry,” “I am embarrassed to speak,” are some of the opening statements I hear. Paradoxically, it’s the folks who speak English passably well who apologize so profusely for their poor skills.

In her diary for class, one of my seniors — an aspiring teacher — told me why so many Chinese are petrified to converse in English. Many middle school teachers follow the old-line method of ridiculing the student who gives incorrect responses in class, calling such a student a fool. (This method is not only a Chinese problem; I have heard of some middle school teachers in the USA who have the same teaching style.) It’s a great way to demoralize students, but that’s about all you can say for it.

Still, it’s not all dismal. Some students transcend their innate reluctance to speak to me. One set of middle school students struck up a rather halting, giggly conversation with me on the way back from the supermarket one afternoon. A few of my freshmen and sophomores can talk my ear off once they are out of the classroom, even if they are reticent in class.

Then there’s the universal communication medium, instant messaging. While a handful of students have MSN and Yahoo accounts, the all-time favorite here is QQ, a Chinese adaptation of ICQ. QQ, like AOL in the States, offers a slew of Internet services. I had read about QQ before I even arrived in Jishou, so I came to campus already equipped with a QQ account number.

I have shared it fairly liberally with students and new acquaintances, so my QQ list now includes 56 buddies (though two are my youngest children, who have graciously offered to chat with my students on QQ, and add them as Facebook friends). Instant messaging is a great way to practice informal English communication, without the barrier of embarrassment and poor enunciation getting in the way. The English from their end might be a tad fractured, but at least they are using English naturally.

(As I write this, in fact, I am chatting with a freshman about the college’s Christmas party.)

Well, I started talking about non-academic matters, then veered right back into shop-talk. Jeez, what a nerd!

This past week has been pretty busy on the teaching front, none the least because of my diary-keeping assignments to my writing classes. Now that I have 60+ freshmen writers, the task of reading their journals has escalated nearly to a full-time job. But I tell them to practice writing English every day, so it’s my own damn fault that I have to read their efforts.

As a physics teacher, the only student writing I saw with any regularity were lab reports, which don’t lend themselves to creative expression and introspection much. (Though, I have had some gifted writers over the years who played with the form.) I was a little unprepared, therefore, for the remarkable honesty and emotional revelations some of my students put down on paper.

My two smaller senior classes have the same assignment as the freshmen. Their thoughts revolve around the crucial events of their young careers: passing English competency tests, passing subject-specific graduation exams, finding jobs after graduation, writing their 9,000-word exit essays. Layered on to these pretty overwhelming obsessions is the realization that in a few short months they will leave the cocoon of university and the camaraderie of their friends and classmates.

Meanwhile, the freshmen are both yearning for their hometowns and old friends, and greeting the challenges of university life with open arms. They write of missing their boy- and girlfriends in other towns, of discovering their stern mothers and fathers can still shed tears when their child’s train pulls away from the station, of failures and successes at university, of boredom, of academic stress, of loneliness, of new friendships.

The students are surprised when I tell them I enjoy reading their journals, for I do. It gives me insights into my students that one or two class meetings a week cannot.

Behind all the tales of woes and worries is something powerful. It may be a strictly Chinese trait, or maybe that of young people in general; I really have no context to base my assumptions.

First, my students are to a man or woman very self-critical. They always want to do better, to excel in everything they do. Failures are distressing, because they know their parents are working themselves to the bone to send their kids to university. (Many of my students come from farming families, who often have side businesses going to pay the college bills.)

As poignant as these confessions are, my students’ overwhelming, even infectious optimism balances the regrets of failing. They will do better next time. They will learn from their mistakes. These challenges in their lives will enable them to succeed in the future.

So, whenever I feel a little down, because a lesson has not apparently gone well, or because the weather has spoiled a weekend’s travel plans, reading my students’ diaries perks me up. By comparison, my petty problems are nothing to the challenges they face.

Dear Mr Wheaton,

I want to tell you something in my heart. I thought you were a person in a film when I first saw you. Although you are my teacher, even sometimes you are beside me, I feel you are so far away, like a person not in real life. I can’t get your age from your appearance, maybe you are old. In my childhood, I read some poems written by some Chinese living abroad. I can understand their feelings. So I can understand you. I hope you have a good life here, being happy and having many friends. If you have some difficulties, like language, shoping and so on, I’m glad to help you at any time.

Your student,
xxxxx

My phone number is xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Need help, call me!

Along the same lines, while returning from the supermarket last night, I bumped into a young couple from Germany on campus. Both medical students, they had gone sightseeing and gotten lost downtown. One of our students ran into them, brought them to campus by taxi, and was proceeding to arrange for their train tickets when I walked up. She was then going to accompany them to the train station to ensure they got their tickets and boarded the right train.

Two Mississippi school districts have banned teachers from texting their students — to avoid any hanky-panky with the kids. Meanwhile, a small school district in Texas has decided to allow its teachers to pack heat while on the job — for protection from wacko students.

Sad, sad commentaries on the American educational system …

According to Associated Press and ABC News reports, the two Mississippi districts (Lamar County, southeast of Jackson, and Lauderdale County, east of Jackson) imposed the new restrictions on teachers following the convictions on sexual misconduct charges of two teachers from elsewhere in that fair state. School district attorneys made the recommendations, apparently.

While maybe well intentioned, it’s a stupid restriction. Texting, like dancing, does not necessarily lead to sex. Cracking down on teachers and students texting each other will not eliminate teacher-student liaisons. After all, that kind of “extra-curricular” activity happened long before Web 2.0 — or for that matter, the Bell telephone system — became a reality. Some teachers — myself included — use instant messaging for far more boring reasons, like communicating with students about homework — hardly ideal foreplay.

A related controversy involves teachers and social-networking sites. A CNN story suggests some legislators (gods forbid!) are also looking at preventing teachers and students from associating with each other on Facebook, MySpace and similar sites, for the same bass-ackwards reasons as the Mississippi texting bans.

Rather than trust teachers’ professional judgments, officials would rather make the wall between teachers and students even taller and more impenetrable. CNN quotes a teacher who said he uses his social-networking page to facilitate communication with his students about assignments, in essence an on-line extension of the classroom.

The ABC News story quotes a somewhat alarming statistic, that between 2001 and 2005 there were 2,570 educators charged with sexual misconduct, but it fails to put that number in context. According to the US Bureau of the Census, there are 6.8 million teachers in the United States. Of those, 2.6 million teach at the elementary and middle school level, and the rest teach pre-school, kindergarten, high school and postsecondary classes. So, let’s assume the 2,570 known sexual misconduct cases were evenly spread across each of the five years. On average then, during that period there were about 500 teachers caught fooling around with students nationwide. That’s 1 in every 13,600 teachers each year, or in others, little Susie and Billy are probably perfectly safe.

I would bet you that most of those cases did not involve texting or social-networking sites. Maybe electronic communication could have facilitated student-teacher liaisons, but pulling the plug would not have prevented them.

One of the hardest aspects of teaching is maintaining a proper social distance from your students. There is a wide range of acceptable teacher-student relationships, from the strict disciplinarian to the more easy-going, collegial kind. Some teachers fall off either end of the scale. Either they act like feudal lords, with complete control of their students’ minds, or they act like pals — overaged teenagers. Then there are the distinct few who either prey on students for sex or who allow themselves to get sucked into inappropriate relationships with their kids.

Those few are going to cross over the line with or without text messaging or the Web.

As for the Harrold, Texas, school board decision to allow teachers to carry concealed weapons … well, it’s Texas. They do things differently there. With the kind of bass-ackwards reasoning fostered by the National Rifle Association, the folks there want to prevent school shootings by arming their teachers.

The small community of Harrold in north Texas is a 30-minute drive from the Wilbarger County Sheriff’s Office, leaving students and teachers without protection, said David Thweatt, superintendent of the Harrold Independent School District. The lone campus of the 110-student district sits near a heavily traveled highway, which could make it a target, he argued.

“When the federal government started making schools gun-free zones, that’s when all of these shootings started. Why would you put it out there that a group of people can’t defend themselves? That’s like saying ‘sic ‘em’ to a dog,” Thweatt said in a story published Friday on the Fort Worth Star-Telegram’s Web site.

“These shootings” refers to those cases where students entered schools with enough artillery to quell a small-scale border incursion in Afghanistan. Unless Harrold teachers are packing AK-47s or Uzis, I somehow doubt a pistol in a shoulder holster is going to slow down any determined student shooters, in the highly unlikely event one of them visits Harrold, Texas.

[Statistics, folks. How many school shootings in how many years? A few. How many schools with no shootings? Hundreds of thousands. Jeez, can't people count?]

So, here’s the moral of these two little developments in US education. It’s not appropriate to talk to your students on-line, but it’s perfectly OK to shoot them. Remember those bywords, teachers, as you start the new year.