Never assume anything. That’s true in science, journalism, and working in China. Because the new guy was not here in September to teach the juniors’ Business English classes, he and the students have to make up the missed classes. So, his schedule is 16 classes of just teaching those students that one subject.

That means I will keep on teaching the freshmen, whom I was rather reluctant to give up, anyway. They were also not happy to lose me as their teacher this term. So, in that respect, it’s a win. (I also get paid extra for the extra classes, another winning point.)

On the negative side, I won’t have a respite from my busy teaching schedule. I have 22 classes a week, Monday through Friday, and on two of those days I need to commute to the old campus where the freshmen live. That’s a 20-minute shuttle-bus ride each way. Still, it’s fewer classes than I had as a high school teacher, so I can’t complain too much. And really, I am not complaining. I’m just a little chagrined — I miss those three-day weekends.

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.

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.

[It is a sad fact that some teachers tapped to be workshop or in-service leaders do a crappy job of teaching teachers. I have no clue why or how such people end up as invited speakers or trainers, unless it's the Peter Principle at work. I was determined not to be one of them, in any event.]

As part of my own self-training, I came across a book by Ann Cook, American Accent Training. Cook’s premise is that American speech patterns are like jazz — Americans have a distinct jazzy rhythmic and tonal quality to our speech. She promotes the idea that a second language (L2) learner has to capture this tonal quality to improve his or her oral English. Pronunciation (making the vowels and consonants sound right) is only one part of the equation.

To be sure, some of my students have really bad pronunciation, and not just of the problem sounds like th, r, l and the oo in foot or /ae/ in cat. Their tongues just don’t move around quick enough to reproduce the sounds (ok, ok, phonemes) of English. But most of them have intonation that is either very Chinese (a tone on each word and a very constant rhythm), completely atonal, or slightly random. I had spent the last term working with my sophomores on their intonation for these reasons. It was their last chance to have oral English classes.

I’m going to put my Powerpoint slides online later, but here’s a few highlights for folks without a burning interest in teaching oral English.

• There are about 20 vowel phonemes in British English (Received Pronunciation — BBC speak), largely because Brits don’t pronounce r’s at the end of syllables or words, as in “nurse” or “mother.” American English has about 14 vowels, depending on whether you use Cook’s West Coast American English or my Mid-Atlantic English (does your “cot” rhyme with “caught” or “thought” — if it doesn’t, you’re probably from the East).
• Brits and Americans pronounce all the consonants identically, except for final /r/ of course.
• However, Americans turn /t/ in the middle of words into a soft /d/ sound, which runs contrary to every English pronunciation guide in China. We Yanks don’t say “Betty bought a bit of bitter butter” with very precise and proper t’s. We say “Beddy boughda bidda bidder butter.” Imagine you’re an L2 learner hearing that sentence for the first time — “What did he say?”
• Some Chinese have trouble distinguishing between /l/ and /n/, even in Mandarin, because the tongue is in almnost the same place. Likewise, some confuse /h/ and /f/, and /v/ and /w/, for similar dialect reasons.
• The American /r/ is really hard to teach. So is the zh sound, as in measure.
• English is stress-timed. Stressed syllables stand out and are spoken at a regular rhythm, while unstressed syllables are said quickly to maintain the rhythm. To use an example from Cook, “How are you?” has the rhythm “dada dum” (like 8th note 8th note quarter note, if you’re musically inclined). Chinese is not stress-timed, so speaking Engish with a strong Chinese rhythm sounds staccato, like a machine gun firing.
• Our students were eager learners. They don’t get many chances to speak English with native speakers, or anyone else, really, in our part of the boondocks.

I had so much to teach in my first sessions that I went too long. No one bothered to tell me we should take an hourly break. Oops. I also lectured more than I wanted to. We had only two days scheduled for lectures, so I packed a lot of information in. Maybe too much, as some teachers admitted they needed to review my presentation to understand all of it.

So, I guess I can forgive some of my previous in-service leaders for their errors. But not the ones who read their Powerpoint slides verbatim. Those people deserve their own circle in Hell for the pain and suffering their delivery inflicts on their audiences. I don’t plan to join them.

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.

For you would-be cheaters, here’s some advice: the papers you can download for free from the Internet are crap. If you manage to get one past your teacher or your prof, I feel sorry for you, because your teacher or prof is crap, too. Either their standards are very low, or they’re just not reading the papers.

The project awaiting me now are the Brit Lit exams, also 90 strong, from yesterday morning. These will be quicker to grade, and they’d better be, since my grades are due Friday the 15th.

The teaching gig is just three hours or oral English lessons in the morning at a downtown location. So, for two weeks I have become a commuter again, riding the bus to and from the city center. The pay is pretty good, 100 yuan an hour, for a total of about 3900 yuan. (My monthly pay from the university is 4280 yuan.)

Then, the following week, I will be in a small neighboring town, Yongshun, teaching middle school teachers oral English. This course was arranged by the local foreign teachers bureau, who hand out our teaching licenses, so I felt rather obligated to agree to work for them. The pay is also 100 yuan an hour, for basically six days’ work: two days of lectures and four days of conversational practice.

Once that’s done, my whirlwind vacation can start. A day or two in Changsha, a few days in Beijing, a couple of days in Los Angeles, then to Indiana (for my son’s graduation from Purdue) and Iowa, Kentucky or what have you, then Chicago, and a week in Shanghai and maybe other places, to finally return to Jishou by August 25 or so.

Yep, that’s right. I’ll be here another year — my fourth. So far, I haven’t found a compelling reason to leave, and many compelling reasons to stay. Why spoil a good thing?

Michele Bachmann, science ignoramus (CNN photo)

It’s not surprising, because Bachmann (and most of the other candidates for the GOP presidential nomination), are stubbornly in the Science (and History) Ignoramus class. Global warming? Liberal nonsense! Evolution? Atheist nonsense! Separation of Church and State? It was never there!

Intelligent Design is religious belief, Creationism with a different label, and the federal courts — most recently in 2005 — have ruled it cannot be taught in public schools, especially in science class. Period.

Yet, Bachmann and others stubbornly insist ID must be taught in public schools. Don’t they read the newspapers?

Here’s what she told CNN.

“I support intelligent design,” Bachmann told reporters in New Orleans following her speech to the Republican Leadership Conference. “What I support is putting all science on the table and then letting students decide. I don’t think it’s a good idea for government to come down on one side of scientific issue or another, when there is reasonable doubt on both sides.”

WRONG!!

There is no “reasonable doubt” about evolution, at least among sensible people and especially not among scientists. There are no two sides about evolution, any more than there are two sides about Einstein’s theory of gravity, or the atomic theory, or continental drift. They are all accepted scientific theories, supported by piles of evidence.

She’s repeating the worn-out “teach the controversy” ploy of the ID community. It goes like this:

1. Assume that evolution is a belief system, not an empirical theory.
2. Pretend that there is lack of consensus about this belief system.
3. Couch objections to teaching evolution in school in “Big Brother” or “atheistic government” terms.
4. Appeal to the reasonable concept that students should hear all sides of an issue.
5. Insist that Intelligent Design is a suitable scientific explanation for the diversity of life on Earth.
6. Propose that ID and evolution be taught as alternative theories, and let the students decide which is “better science.”

To the layman, this all seems perfectly reasonable. After all, we can discuss socialism and capitalism in history classes, why not creationism — sorry, Intelligent Design — and evolution in biology class?

But science is not the same as political theory. Science depends on observations, experiments, logical deduction and induction, self-consistency, explanatory power, predictability and (most importantly for this discussion) rejection of supernatural causes for natural events.

The underlying premise of ID is that some unseen being/force/architect/mechanic/God created life forms more or less as they appear now, perhaps as early as just a few thousand years ago. We cannot prove such a Designer exists, since he/she/it is undetectable by natural means, so this Designer is supernatural.

In addition, since ID assumes a Designer is looking down (or around, or up, or sideways) at Life on Earth, he/she/it might decide at any time to poof! create something new, or eliminate something altogether. Thus, there is no real predictability to this so-called theory, since we cannot anticipate God’s decisions. — Sorry, did I say God? I meant the Intelligent Designer.

You don’t need to my word for it. US District Judge John Jones, a Republican appointee, ruled in Kitzmiler v. Dover Board of Education (2005), after a lengthy court trial, that ID is nothing but Creationism — religious belief — dressed up as a “science,” and very poor science, at that.

The overwhelming evidence at trial established that ID is a religious view, a mere re-labeling of creationism, and not a scientific theory. (Source)

and

ID’s backers have sought to avoid the scientific scrutiny which we have now determined that it cannot withstand by advocating that the controversy, but not ID itself, should be taught in science class. This tactic is at best disingenuous, and at worst a canard. The goal of the IDM is not to encourage critical thought, but to foment a revolution which would supplant evolutionary theory with ID. (Source)

Bachmann, incidentally, implies that “government” should allow public schools to “teach the controversy,” which is a polite way of saying the government should require it. (Several states have legislation pending, or have already passed laws, requiring ID or creationism be taught in public schools. Louisiana, where she was speaking, is one of them that passed such a law.)

So, on the one hand, she says the government should stay out of education, while on the other hand, she says it should not. After all, the religious right, of which Bachmann is a member, really, really wants to put religion (their form of it) in the public schools, if they are not trying to eliminate public schooling altogether.

Pay close attention to what Bachmann, and the other GOP candidates, say about science and education. Then ask yourself if that is the kind of thinking that would enable the USA to continue being a leader in science and technology.

And then vote for someone else.

Students in China choose their majors before entering university. So, each college in a uni (we call them “departments” in the States) would like to maximize the chances of getting sufficient enrollment. It’s not feasible to visit all the high schools in western Hunan on recruiting drives, but relatively easy to visit the preparatory college here in Zhangjiajie to attract some candidates.

That’s what ten of us teachers and students from Jishou U did. We did two hours of marketing to about 200 students midway between high school and university: first our vice dean, then me (with student interpreter), then a sophomore from our college, then a Q&A. There were also two Powerpoint presentations, one by Vice Dean Song Jie and the other by sophomore Helen Xiao.

Our greatest hits: our graduates’ 98% employment rate, the foreign teacher who can speak a little Chinese, the sophomore girl who has broadcast the weather on municipal TV, the dean who has met President Hu Jintao.

To be honest, I was surprised and just a little pleased to be asked to come along on this junket. Apparently, I am considered to be a big draw for the college. Besides, I could visit my friend and former colleague, Connie Hu, who was mostly responsible for me being here in the first place.

Oh, and I got to travel at company expense.

Travel here seems to get easier every year. There is now a faster train (T-class, meaning express) between Jishou and Changsha, which also stops at Zhangjiajie. It shaves 30 minutes off that trip, and the seats are much more comfortable than the usual slow trains. We left mid-afternoon Monday and pulled into Zhangjiajie just before dinner.

We took a city bus to the university’s campus there, where the deans of the preparatory college met us. This college is just what you’d think it is, a program to get under-performing students up to speed for the university. Typically, their gaokao scores are a little low for automatic admission to Jishou U. All seven students visiting the college with us are graduates of this program. They are some of the sharpest students I have, so the gaokao is a poor measure of performance, IMHO.

We went to dinner, where the deans and I shared some baijiu. (He of course ordered the high test stuff, 108 proof. I should have asked for beer.) After dinner, he (now quite loosened up) told us about his life and career. What I could understand sounded like a Dickens novel.

Mister Pu’s mother died when he was 5. His father was a victim of the Cultural Revolution, suspected of being a capitalist. Rather than live with his dad, Pu was sent to live with relatives. The youngest among several cousins, he had to do a lot of housework even as a little boy, and was treated more as a servant than a member of the family.

Despite it all, he was able to do well in school and attended university in Shandong. He was a businessman for a time, then entered teaching. Finally, he became dean of the prep college.

Though I couldn’t understand their local language (yeah, they were not speaking Chinese, hence I was more lost than usual), I could tell he and the students in our party were genuinely fond of each other.

After he finished his tales, we teachers and students went out for after dinner snacks and beers. This is a unique custom here. Eat (and maybe drink) a lot at dinner, then around 8:30, go out for snacks and more drinks. Suffice it to say, by the time 10:00 rolled around we were all feeling quite happy. And full. (And the grilled fish was really damn good!)

Fortunately, we were not expected to be coherent until that afternoon. I spent an enjoyable three hours over lunch with Connie, whom I had not seen for about a year, though we live just two hours apart. We had a lot to talk about, including my college trying to steal prospective students away from hers, the Foreign Language College.

Connie is a native of Zhangjiajie, and came to the USA to be a Chinese teacher in 2006-2007. We were co-workers for that year, and at the end of her visit, I asked her if I could teach at her university. She got the wheels turning in Jishou, and to make a long story short, that’s why I am here recruiting students for my latest employer.

Asking her that question four years ago was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made.

She got married, left the Paducah area and found work under a different name in a school in Missouri.

History repeated itself last week. Another student with too much …uh … time … in his hand .. on his hands … put two and two (or something) together, and found out his teacher, Tera Myers of Parkway North High School used to be Tericka Dye of Reidland High School, who once performed in a few porn movies as Rikki Andersin some 15 years ago.

Apparently, the boy approached Myers with this knowledge, and she then went to her superiors, told them what’s what, and asked to be put on administrative leave. They agreed, and she is not in the classroom now.

She should be back in it. From all the reports from her schools, Myers is an excellent teacher, and in Kentucky, was a great volleyball coach, well liked by parents and students. Considering the lack of decent middle school science teachers in the USA, it’s a crime to lose her — again.

I’ve blogged about Myers before. The last post was an update in December 2007 that got several comments. One anonymous commenter, Terri, in October 2009 not only identified Myers, her husband and an (incorrect) school by name, but gave her physical address as well. I redacted everything but her first name and the state. In retrospect, I should have omitted that information, too.

Just five days before Myers asked for leave, another anonymous (chickenshit) commenter, who gave Myers’ school email address, left these remarks, which I didn’t even publish at the time.

This is her.!!!!! she goes by Tera Myers! Science teacher at PArkway North High school in Missouri! Currently working there. Follow the website.

I posted my own comment instead.

eljefe
March 4, 2011 at 9:25 pm · Edit

Another tipster yesterday gave me information about the purported whereabouts of the former Tericka Dye. As I said before, I am not publishing it. This tipster even used the teacher’s school email address as his own and linked to her school webpage, with the remark, “This is her!!!”

I have no desire to submit Ms. Dye to any more media exposure or public humiliation. Unfortunately, nothing ever goes away on the Internet, and at some point someone somewhere will make the connection between her new identity and the old one. I see no reason why I should make it any easier to blow her cover.

So, if you’re one of those people trying to make her life miserable again, lay off! The porn stuff is years in the past and has no bearing on her life or her career now. She went through enough bullshit already. Leave her alone.

Clearly, the little wanker did not take my advice. I wonder if he was the same kid that did some hands-on research into her porn past.

I’m linking here to a columnist at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, who speaks my mind. The persecution of Myers makes me sick. I’ve said all I can say about her, and I’m not blogging about her anymore. If every other blogger does the same thing (as if!), maybe she can find the anonymity she richly needs and deserves, so she can teach somewhere else.