Happy 61st, China!

Yesterday was National Day, and thus we get time off. A whole week, as it turns out. Of course, our week off started yesterday, and we didn’t find out for sure we were getting a week until Wednesday, which made planning difficult. As it stands, Mark and Ma LiJun and I are leaving this afternoon for a village about 3 hours away and then deciding after a day or two there whether to venture elsewhere. I’m really excited. I’ve never done this sort of “follow the wind” travel before, but it should be fun. And Yunnan is so beautiful that I don’t doubt we’ll find cool things to see.

Yesterday, my first day off, I kept it local—doing a major room cleanup in the morning and then strolling out into the villages behind the school in the afternoon. My original plan was to find a back path to Heqing that I could walk along without fear of being hit by a tour bus or a tractor, but before long I stopped paying too much attention to where I was, rather just wandering indiscriminately. It’s worth noting that, when wandering rural China, you never really know where you’re going to end up or what you’re going to end up trekking upon. Yesterday’s walk encompassed nice, concrete, sidewalk-like roads; packed down dirt (and sometimes mud) paths; skinny, almost-dumping-me-into-the-rice-paddies trails; and straight up bush wacking. My tiva’d feet got a taste of the local stream, my bag picked up many friends in the form of burrs and needles, and I terrified/herded about 100 ducks before warranting the attention (and mercy) of a local farmer, who allowed me to cut through his courtyard to get back to the main road. It was, all in all, a quite lovely afternoon, despite the embarrassment and need for extreme foot washing. There are new pictures of my wanderings, as well as Lijiang and Dali, at http://anamericaninheqing.blogspot.com.

Today marks 11 weeks since my arrival in Yunnan. I wonder how long it’ll take the weeks to add up enough that I stop counting and default to months. I have been teaching for a month now, officially. In some ways it feels longer, but I still have quite a lot I need to improve upon. The kids will have their first “Monthly Test” shortly after the break. These tests are modeled off of the prefecture and regional tests students are subjected to on a quarterly basis, and they are really, really dumb. So far, my students have learned the alphabet, a few simple greetings, ways to introduce themselves and others, and a few scattered colors and nouns. Everything I’ve taught them (with a few exceptions for classroom commands like “stand up”) is in their textbook. There are other things in the book like acronyms (because BBC and UFO are really terms that first year English students need to know), and I’ve been putting those things aside in the interest of teaching them, y’know, practical English. Unfortunately, China and I do not see eye to eye on what constitutes practical English. Thus, if I want my kids to pass their test, after the break I will need to spend significant time teaching them things that absolutely are not important to first year English study. It’s quite frustrating, but everything from here builds to the end-of-ninth-grade Zhong Kao. If they don’t pass that, they don’t go to high school, so I have no choice but to bite the bullet as far as content and test prep are concerned.

I’ve been in a slump since getting back from Dali—more homesick and less motivated than usual. I’m really hoping this is just a short thing that I’ll snap out of soon, but I don’t know.

Last night, I watched “Beauty and the Beast” in Chinese. It was glorious—classic Disney fun with the added benefit of me being able to write down some vocab words. I intend to do quite a bit of Chinese Disney watching in the future.

Anyway, that’s all for now, folks. I’ll post about my 2-5 day adventures upon my return.