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: