I'm still here

I apologize for my long absence from my blog. A lot of interesting and stressful things have been happening here, including but not limited to being busted by the cops for riding my friend's motor scooter without a license plate (the plate costs about $700 and the fine when you get caught is about $30), negotiating with my landlord who, apparently like everyone in China, has ties both to the government and to the company I work for, and trying to appease the parents of my less motivated students.

But mostly everything has been continuing as usual. I was afraid that my second graders didn't know how to read, but when I said, "Just go slowly and look at one word at a time," most of them managed to complete the exercise I assigned. They've also managed to get a good grasp on "There is a pencil case under the desk" and the concept of pairs of things. Here is a picture of two of my better students, Amelia, possibly my favorite, on the left, and Rain on the right:


Last week I was teaching my especially noisy class of fifth graders about American geography, and when we got to Washington they all started laughing. Luckily my fellow teachers had warned me that Chinese kids think "Washington" sounds like "Wo xin teng" meaning "my heart hurts." The Chinese name for Washington is Hua sheng dun which comes without any such connotations. After class, when their Chinese homeroom teacher was berating them for being so noisy, I couldn't resist saying, in Chinese, "When you talk in class, my heart hurts." I'm afraid my joking may have rendered the discipline ineffective, but I guess we'll see next week.

My middle schoolers continue to take the cake when it comes to amusing statements, though. Last week I gave them the following riddle, which was apparently used in some Stanford study:

The poor have it
The rich need it
A hole is full of it
If you eat it you will die
[It's greater than God and more evil than the devil]

I didn't use those last two lines, partially for political reasons and partially because I thought it made the riddle too easy. None of them could come up with the answer I was looking for (think about it) in class, although I heard one kid say to his friend on the way out of the classroom "sex." I told them to tell me next week and if any of them got it, I'd give them a prize. Well they certainly thought about it, going to their dictionaries for ideas. When I got to class this week, one kid suggested "ore." He gave a valiant defense of his answer, "Some poor countries have ore, and rich countries need it to make things. You find it in holes, and you can't eat it."

The next period, the goofy kid in the back of the class raised his hand and said, "Medicine to kill mice." The combination of this ingenious and absurd answer with the grin on the student's face while he said it caused me to start laughing uncontrollably, which only made the class laugh more.

There's certainly more I'd like to relate here, but it'll have to wait for another time. In the meantime, a few photos. The first one is my bedroom:


This one gives some indication of Chinese building standards. Note that the Chinese writing above the door says "Emergency exit," not just "exit" as in the English:


And finally, one more bizarre sign from the many that populate Nanjing:

Einstein and Advertising

There are a number of hilariously mistranslated signs around Nanjing, and often when I see them I don't have my camera handy to record it. For example, there's a cafe not too far from my apartment called "Space Time Coffee Trajectory." I just can't get over the name, especially since it's an average Chinese coffee place. One amusing sign I did manage to capture is below. Two androgynous (mostly because the one on the right, whom I have been assured is a famous male actor, is wearing earrings) hikers are out for a walk on the mountain one sunny day when what should appear but a pile of disproportionately sized electronics! Our ambiguously-gendered protagonists are clearly thrilled.
Another week of teaching is almost done, and yet again my middle schoolers provide the most amusing stories. During class I had the students talk in groups, and I noticed one boy just sitting by himself.

Me: Why don't you work with them? (pointing to girls behind him)
Him: They're girls!
Me: What, you can't talk to girls?
Him: Maybe when I'm older.
Me: Okay, how about them (pointing to some nearby boys)
Him: They're girls, too!
Me: Okay, who do you want to work with?
Him: Him! (pointing to a boy at the back of the class)

After this exchange, he ran off and sat on the other boy's lap for the rest of the group work. Certainly not what would happen in an American middle school. The school, view from across the main courtyard:


I did an activity with the middle schoolers where I wrote some questions on the board and had them decide whether it was appropriate to ask each one to someone they had just met in China and in the U.S. I was surprised when I got to the last question "How much money do you make?" and the students unanimously responded that it was not okay to ask this question to a stranger in China. I asked them, "Then why do so many Chinese people ask me how much money I make right when I meet them?" They seemed shocked to hear that this happened to me and offered several explanations: "Maybe they are thieves." "Maybe you are a foreigner" (yes, I am...) "Some people are very impolite" "Maybe they want to show that you are friends" (interesting...).

I continue to enjoy my middle school teaching the most, but I've started to get to know the second graders in my private Cambridge textbook class, and they're incredibly cute. I'll get some pictures soon. And for the record, the kid I named Matt decided he wanted to change his name to Sky. "I even know how to write it," he told me in Chinese. I couldn't argue with that...