Shame

In a country where “keeping face,” aka, maintaining your status, and not looking bad in front of your peers is crucial, I guess it makes sense that ’shaming’ a student would work as a behavior control technique. However, the process of shaming a student that you cannot really rough up (as tempting as it is sometimes), much less communicate with effectively using words, becomes much more complicated. The Chinese teachers have the edge here. There is no hesitation in berating a first grader for a few minutes in the middle of class to stop the unwanted behavior. Top offenses include:

1) Incessant touching of desk mate. Some kids just cannot keep their hands off of each other. Sure, it’s cute, it’s puppy love, but it’s clear they are not paying attention to my melodic rendition of 3 Little Monkeys, and its pissing me off.

2) Stealing the “Hello Kitty” pencil pouch of the girl behind you, or the “Toy Story 2″ rocket ship pencil box of the boy in front. It never gets old, trust me.

3) When repeating as a class, there is always the one kid who has to say it first, throwing off the whole synch of things. I realize that when the most stressful part of your day is having to glare really menacingly at the kid who says ‘B’ right when you say it, instead of immediately after like everyone else, really your job/life isn’t all that tough. But I can’t even begin to explain how I want to rip their vocal cords out.

Today, I figured it out though. The kids here go absolutely insane for a sticker (preferably a red, for communism, star) as a reward. I’m pretty sure I could get them fluent in French too, if I had enough stickers. So when I first started giving them out I was a little bit confused, because instead of holding out their hands for them, they look straight up at you like a lost puppy might. I learned eventually that this was the cue to put them right on the middle of their forehead. The more stickers they get in a day, the cooler they are. Status clearly isn’t lost on them.

So today after my little star student got his sticker, I suppose he realized that odds were he wouldn’t get another one, and he could just goof off the rest of the day. I went over to his desk, tapped him on the shoulder, and made sure everyone saw me rip the sticker right off his head.

Making children cry isn’t always my goal. I just consider it a perk of the job.

Opposites

I finally broke down the other day and asked how to say “opposite” in Chinese. I promptly forgot it, but that’s not that point. Something like fan mian I think. It just seems like every day there is something that strikes me as perfectly counterbalancing the way I am used to thinking about things. Some are simple- instead of calling “911,” you dial “119″ in China, or instead of saying “Emergency Exit Only,”saying “No Entry on Peacetime,” to more profound things like accepting herbs as a treatment as opposed to powdery white stuff. I find a simple question of “why” usually elicits an entertaining response when faced with an odd explanation. For example: I asked my host family why they don’t have an oven. They explained that they are not “healthy for the body.” I obviously couldn’t leave it at that, so I pushed further and found that they supposedly think that they should only have foods like that once per week, because too much hot food is not good for the health. I laughed, and explained that Americans tend to think that eating at least half of your food in fried form isn’t the picture of health, but then again, they are not a nation of morbidly obese people, so who am I to judge?

More differences if not opposites:

1) People will wait in line to eat at Pizza Hut (ok, I think that does actually qualify as an opposite

2) It’s acceptable for women well into their 30’s to have Hello Kitty or other cartoon-ish apparel.

3) Stumps vs. Holes. This is actually a term my mother coined when visiting Beijing, and wanting to know if she would be forced to squat over a porcelain hole in the bathroom, or if she could rest easy on a stump of a Western toilet.

4) Happy Hours are actually during times when people are out drinking anyways (like 6 pm-6 am). Nothing wrong with that.

5) Monkeys boxing on TV

Obviously I can’t think of anything since I’m trying to write them down now, but I will keep them coming.

And, in more entertaining Chinglish news, here is the new chant that I taught my 5th graders today. Normally, I would make an executive decision, and just skip certain things, but the authorities told me that the students will be tested on the material that we were given. And when you have to compete with a billion other students to get into college, I don’t really want to harm anyone’s future. It’s called the “Weekend song,” and I decided just not to explain it to them at all. Not that I could if I wanted to.

Monday morning is not Monday morning

‘Till Taylor has his coffee

Friday night is not Friday night

‘Till Jessie leaves the room sweaty

Tuesday morning is not Tuesday morning

“till Nick has his talk with his son

Thursday night is not Thursday night

‘Till Chris has played with his Bass

Come on to the weekend

’cause the weekend I’ll get high [seriously]

Hold off ’till the weekend

’cause there’s too much time to think

And there will be nice skies

I thought that was bad until I turned the page to find we’d be learning Scarborough Fair. Yes, let me look up the herbs that they don’t use in China for a really valuable lesson. And also figure out what a “cambric shirt” is. And also that they can’t actually say “Remember me to one who lives there,” because its a lyric in the song, and actual grammar doesn’t work like that.

Those in Wine Often Make Gaffe

Chinglish is funny. Most of the time the translations are funny, but they don’t really affect your life other then to provide you with a little laugh as you’re walking down the street. It becomes less funny however, when you are given 20 minutes to answer 100 “psychological” questions in an online test and your work visa depends on it.

In their infinite wisdom, the Chinese government created an agency to screen anyone coming over to teach English, and I presume other jobs, who don’t have some sort of certificate with an official looking red stamp that proclaims you an expert in the subject. Because I was never formally trained in teaching, I had to go through the system to make sure I’m not a wacko or something. The first part consisted of an online test of two parts- psychological questions and informational. I can’t really do the test justice, other than to highlight some of my favorite questions I copied down.
These were in the “agree,” “no opinion,” “disagree” style.

#6) Facing with the every days work is the root of my pain and baldness
#47) Those in wine, often make gaffe
#33) As a game putting forwards person, it is difficult for me to motivate others’ enthusiasm
#34) If I considering with the self absorbtion, I cant give the heart to the thing which is totally not related to mine.

They were literally all that ridiculous. I mean, they’re making all of the English teachers who enter the country take this test, and they didn’t think to have just one of them look over the test and correct it?

Moving on to the informational questions, which were just about as bad, but not nearly as much fun… At one point I had to decide how to classify Asian people’s skin a)white b)black c)brown, or d)yellow. I really had no idea what they were looking for on that one. Most of it was simple enough though, like “where are the 2008 Olympics going to be held,” and “If it is now 2006, how many years ago did 9/11 happen,” and also “What is the smallest continent;” only all the answers were oceans.

The second part of the test involved a 3-on-1 interview which basically consisted of informal chatting, peppered with inquiries over how I felt about physically punishing the children, and my teaching styles. They were clearly trying to get information about the company that hired me as well, and there were questions asked about how they decided which age I would teach. As far as I could tell this process was absolutely random, so I made something up about how I told them I had experience volunteering with young children.

I’m really not sure how I fared, but hopefully I won’t be deported. Or executed for having this blog.