"Who Needs a Master Key When You Have a Good Snap Kick?" and Other Stories

Here is what I’m wearing right now:

Sweatpants, a T-shirt, a knock-off North Face fleece, heavy socks, excellently absurd slippers with blue cows on them, a relatively thick hat, and freshly-knit wrist warmers (made with my first ever bought-in-China yarn).

Did I mention that living in a concrete box can get kinda cold?

We’ve come to the point in the year where, outside, sunny weather quite often means pleasant conditions and cloudy weather quite often means misery. Unfortunately, even with the curtains open, not much warmth trickles indoors. Hence my evening attire being what it is. Don’t worry; there are still layers to be added, but having been Minnesota-trained for the last five winters, I know better than to throw them all on at once the moment it gets chilly. I haven’t turned on my space heater yet (I’m aiming for post-Thanksgiving), and I have fleece PJs awaiting me.

So it’s been a good long while since my last post, mostly because my weekends have been busier than usual, and weekends are usually when I get my blogging in. But this weekend is apparently five days long and will be followed by a marathon nine days of class. Excited I am not, because we found out about our vacation a grand hour before it started, and hence there wasn’t exactly time to plan for travel. We’re probably heading to Dali for a couple days. Most of the other places of note within three hours of us are too chilly ‘til the spring, and we don’t fancy a long trip to somewhere like Kunming, because we had two ten hour bus trips last weekend (more on that in a moment). I shudder to think of how I will feel on Friday December 3^rd, after going from the night before Thanksgiving (weeks always begin with the evening class) without a day off. But what can you do?

Anyway, here are some stories of good, bad, and just plain random times in rural Yunnan.

Gate Crashers

One Saturday morning, Hallie and Arianne thought it’d be nice to ride their bikes up to the spring near our school and hang out. Mark and I, being only twenty or so minutes away, walked over to meet them. Upon arrival, Mark and I looked around for our American friends and were instead greeted by a chorus of “Good Morning, Ms. Emily!” from a gaggle of girls.

“Are those mine or yours?” I asked Mark, puzzled. He didn’t know whose students they were either, and as we drew closer it turned out the answer was neither. These were eighth graders from the area’s top middle school, and they knew who we were because they had already thrust birth

day cake and lollipops onto Hallie and Arianne. Before we had time to utter more than a “Oh, you don’t have to give us cake!” the two of us received the same treats.

The next hour or so was mostly consumed by slightly successful attempted conversation with the girls, followed by a hugely successful silly string fight (during which Arianne was pretty well walloped), followed by the washing of hair, in the spring, to remove said silly string.

Reunion

Last weekend, the reason we had two 10-hour bus trips in three days was because of this year’s first Professional Development Conference. All fifty-whatever CEI fellows congregated for about a day and a half of discussions and trainings aimed to help us work better in and out of the classroom. Since all but three of the CEI schools are in Lincang, rather than Heqing, we Heqingers got to/had to make the trek back down. That part wasn’t so bad. We got two mini van-sized cars to take us all and spent most of the time chatting and sleeping and occasionally playing word games. The conference itself was more useful than I thought it would be. There was some annoying bureaucracy involved, as always, but some of the discussions about class planning and classroom management and integration into school life were genuinely helpful.

More importantly, it was awesome to connect with everyone again after almost three months apart. Our situations are alike in that we’re all dealing with challenged populations, and the American fellows all have some sort of language barrier, but of course every school and every team of fellows is different, and the casual chats/rants about individual schools were great. I was also able to start probing into people’s plans for our month off in January and might—fingers crossed—be putting some things into motion. Details to come when I’ve got ‘em.

On the somber side, being with everyone really hammered in for me how much I wish I was closer to other folks. I like this place, but the 6-10 hour distance from other places stinks. Case in point: if I weren’t 6-10 hours away from everyone, guess where I’d go visit this weekend?

Who Needs a Master Key When You Have a Good Snap Kick?

This story is actually super old news, but I forgot to write about it and it’s way too good to not share.

Sometime in October, I left my room with a key-shaped lump in my pocket, pulled my door closed, went to the bathroom, and traipsed back up to my room only to find that the lump was, in fact, a wadded up post-it. Oops.

Not really sure what to do, I was lucky to immediately run across the teacher who lives next door to me coming up the stairs. She got the maintenance guy. Prepping my very best “不好意思” (I’m sorry/Oh, I’m so embarrassed) face, I got ready to thank him profusely for walking up here to unlock my door. Thus, I was puzzled when, rather than taking out a master key, or a set of keys, he started examining my (very much closed and locked) window. At this point, I was beginning to suspect that there was, in fact, no master key, and that the only two keys to my room were both inside. How this could possibly be the case made no sense to me, as in the city you can find key copying people on many a street corner, and copies cost 2-3 kuai a piece.

Anyway, at that point another teacher arrived, and Ma LiJun came out to help me translate. Her services were swiftly rendered unnecessary as the other teacher’s foot engaged in the cross-cultural language of kicking—kick

ing out my lock, that is. The maintenance guy then spent an hour replacing and installing a new one. Of course, they had all the parts necessary to replace a whole lock. The next time I went into the city, I got copies made, so I now have my own “master key” in the form of four keys—one to carry around, one spare in my room, and two in Mark and Ma LiJun’s rooms. And I still have an awesome footprint on my door.

My Kids are Crazy!

This is less an anecdote than an ongoing saga, but these last few weeks have been particularly notable behavior-wise. Heqing students are, generally speaking, closer to sane than some of their Lincang-ian counterparts. I have never had a student set a desk or his/her own hair on fire in the classroom, and I’ve never caught a student coming to class drunk. At other CEI schools, this has in fact happened. But the Pengtun kids are, on the whole, the least cooperative of the three Heqing schools, and hence we’ve got our own issues. Mostly, these issues arise in the form of talking—lots and lots of talking. Then there’s cheating—lots and lots of cheating. On their Unit 5 test a week ago, I caught no fewer than ten students talking or cheating. Not fun.

The problem is that these kids are very much used to being hit, and I will neither hit them myself nor send them to be disciplined by teachers who will hit them. Thus, my own discipline system needs to replace the fear of being hit with a wooden stick with the fear (or hope of) something else. I’ve tried to make this work through carrots like free time and candy and games, and metaphorical sticks like holding the class back for ten minutes just before lunch so they’re last in line, giving out extra homework, and making particularly naughty kids stand just outside the classroom in 40°F weather for an hour and attend class through the window. Unfortunately, nothing’s come to work properly just yet, and now some of my least cooperative students have a new trick: crawling out of the window as soon as class ends. Mark’s having a similar issue, so we’re planning on switching off being “window guard” for the other.

Anyway, I’ve talked discipline tips with other CEI fellows and my parents, but if anybody else has tips on how to handle the velociraptors (as one of last year’s fellows so aptly titled them) I would love to know.