Details, details, me being pissed, and when words become tasty

[In this installment: today, yesterday, food habits, appliances, teaching, going apesh*t, and a colorful restaurant review]

Today I awoke at 6:something from what amounted to a teaching nightmare to find that my abdomen was still inflated like a balloon. I'd been tossing and turning for goodness knows how long, from confrontation after confrontation with confused and irritated students and some righteous gastro-intestinal injury. Basically, I'd eaten an unusually large portion at dinner previously and it appeared that none of it had yet begun the journey to digestion and was just hanging out in my stomach. So actually this morning sucked, because I knew I still had 2ish lessons to plan for today. I sat up straight for a while, consumed an oreo, took some pepto, and tried the sleeping thing again, really uninterested in puking in any way.

After my alarm officially roused me around 9, I managed to pass out again (you know how that goes). This time, I had a really interesting dream about "King's Island" (only not really), getting pizza and candy there with Selina, some holiday, a small child, a bunch of Chinese people who are related to me, and... stuff. Whatever, it was weird, and I woke up during this really emotional part that involved lots of cheesy pizza.

You see, the restfulness of my sleep has not improved.

Anyways, classes today went all right. The training center students now have THREE textbooks! I was like... what?? When I realized a few days ago that they'd all paid for the first two and were already in possession of them, I started building some lessons around those. The first day was boooring, cuz I didn't get the corresponding tapes (yes, cassette tapes!) until 30 min into the lesson, and not everyone brought their books, and also I wasn't 100% sure of the most efficient way to use them. I've since determined that some of the activities are just plain dumb, but have also accepted the usefulness of some of the others to spur discussion. So that ended up warming things up today after the initial blaaaah of the recorded dialogues.

My ideal class would be smaller, with a more consistent level of advancement. But oh well. At least when they're doing activities, I get to move around and check on their degree of understanding. It's actually, like, my favorite part and I'm hopeful that it helps, but really they're the ones who'd know about that-- not me. Sadly. Today we did introductions (almost as done as it sounds, but with a bit of logic behind it, coming from a book) and superstitions, which was fun and COINCIDENTALLY (whoa) appropriate since yesterday was you-know-when.

When I got back, Alice and her mom were home getting dinner started. In case you wonder, I've been subsisting largely on a diet of potatoes and rice, and, uh, losing weight in spite of it. All my clothes started fitting better again almost as soon as the plane landed. It's been pretty sweet. Anyways, tonight there was rice, potatoes and... leeks? with extra soy, and some leftovers from when the Lees cooked lunch here the other day-- the green remains of some di san xian (Alice's mom insists that it's just stir-fried eggplant... i guess since the green peppers and potatoes are more common) and some stir-fried potato slices with green pepper. The leftovers were brought to us by our brand new microwave, which we picked up Thursday morning from the 5th floor of Wangfujing department store. The microwave... was Y400, but interestingly enough has a function that admits the use of metal... I believe it's the "Lightwave." I don't know anything about it, so I'm reluctant to use anything other than nuke hi until I can get details on the instructions from Alice. Also it was big and we had to drag it down all the floors by escalator and then wheel it home on the back of the bike.

I started still another class with high schoolers today, this time only 7 students. There were two English teachers present, moms of two of the boys. They came to the apartment at 8 tonight, and we talked for about an hour before they all left. They were pretty enthusiastic, but most of them have some big exams this weekend (class will be 2 hrs long, starting next week). I felt bad though, cuz one of the girls kept insisting that they had absolutely no free time to watch movies or listen to music since they spend so much time at school and on homework. I was like... damn, 1) I'm glad to be out of high school, 2) I'm glad I went to a US public school.

Viewed 10 Things I Hate About You, courtesy of iTunes, for the 3rd time in perhaps just as many days, but the idea was to show it to Alice since we watched Brokeback Mountain the other day (agreed: it should have won, and crash is a sillier movie than ever) and I wanted her to know that Heath Ledger can enunciate when the script calls for it. As you see, it's been a good week for movies.

Friday marked the end of my first week of real classes at the high school. This second lesson was mostly about getting them in the right mindset for learning English-- first present the potential, then discuss it. Also, I wanted to get an idea of the subjects they usually talk about with their friends (in case I'm more out of touch than I thought). And we listened to/analysed "It's Beginning To Get To Me" by Snow Patrol. I want to equate the first class of the week to a firstborn child. That is, they get the raw unadulterated lesson, which has had no feedback, no correction, and they have to deal with any unrealistic expectations that may exist. The kids are all really charming though. I thought that my first lesson, which involved throwing a ball and sitting around chittering while other kids had the spotlight, would make them think that it was ok to be unruly. But boy, do they listen to you when you speak! By Friday though, I was way bored with my own lesson (and I have to do the same thing for the other classes next week, ick), and changed it a little-- for the better evidently. Instead of my blind quest for a group analysis of the song (which left me explaining most of it), I was like "ok, you figure it out for yourselves." Yay for getting to walk around and talk to everyone!

Meanwhile, and this is something I HAVE to complain about, Russ spent all week screening Fellowship of the Ring. I know he's declared vehemently that he doesn't want to teach high schoolers, but I don't see what the big deal is. In a lot of ways, they're a lot easier to teach than the adults-- they're no less cooperative, and due to the miracle of a 5-7 year (still not sure which) curriculum, they understand more of what you say, sooner. Also, hey, you have slightly more power over them, weird as that sounds. Anyway, the story began on Monday, when Alice asked me and Russ if we had our lesson outlines prepared. He said yes, and I said no. By lesson outline, she meant like a handout that they could photocopy for the students. I was expecting to have until Tuesday morning. At all this extra information, Russ was like "what?" Turns out he had a lesson plan, but had no idea that anyone had ever asked for a handout (which I'm sure has been brought up before). The next morning, I got up bright and early to type everything out and finalize like my song choice and all that, and had the original sheet printed by the time Alice woke up. She left to photocopy and didn't come back for hours.

When she finally got back, I was like... did you really have to wait that long? I was curious because she only needed to make 300 copies of each outline, and having walked various print jobs to the Olin copy center, I figured that no matter what equipment it was, it couldn't have taken that long. She said, with some exasperation, "I was waiting for Russ!" I had heard her call him before she left to make sure that he had something, but he still didn't even by the time she got there. What he wound up giving her was a handwritten sheet with a few random terms from freaking LOTR written on it with colons after them. I looked at this paper and not all of my laughter could be suppressed. Seriously, anyone who had this handed to them would have a big WTF branded hard across their forehead. I was like, you are shitting me, plain and simple. But no. Alice's aunt had bought a computer for Russ to use, so Alice was like, can't you at least type it? Well no. He refused to revise the "outline" (like hell) in any way, saying that he never wanted to teach the high schoolers and that they could fire him if they wanted. What makes this situation more exasperating is that he's leaving in January anyways, when a new teacher is scheduled to arrive, and we really don't want him to leave sooner than that.

So Alice didn't copy that.

We went to the school early to sort out all the technical matters associated with him playing that damn movie, and they almost couldn't get it to play. But since my equipment was controlled by a console I'd never encountered before, I asked Alice and Teacher Ding (who's in charge of the language lab Russ was using) to figure out my stuff while I messed around with the DVD. Proud to say that my experiments bore fruit, and quickly, and I was off.

I had the training center that night, so Alice and I were dropped off within walking distance (well... in campus/city terms, I suppose). She'd sat in on Russ's class and was nice enough to describe it to me. I would probably have been really pissed if I'd been sitting in there. He'd insisted that he would only show about 15 minutes of the film, but actually spent 40 min or something on it. Only... the way he did it... he apparently played it, unsubtitled in any language, then stopped it and repeated all the lines, and wrote them on the board. Alice had told me earlier what Russ had told her that his plan was: 15 minutes of the movie and then October holidays. Fucking holidays! So the first day at the hospital and training center, we'd been surprised by the fact that we had to actually teach a lesson (this was the day after we arrived), so he turned randomly to a page in a book, saw the word "holidays" and insisted that we do holidays. So holidays, to me, says "I don't want to think of anything else to teach." But also he wanted to do just October holidays. Alice said that since we teach the same lesson to two sets of kids for 2 weeks, she was afraid he'd just teach nothing but month-specific holidays all year. Which I think was a valid fear.

So I asked if he managed to teach Halloween ok, since it was the only Oct. holiday I could think of. She said no, he didn't make it to Halloween. I was like, uh? What eclipses Halloween? Well, apparently Columbus Day does. Along with Columbus day, evidently, came a Spanish lesson. Yes. In his ENGLISH class, Russ taught SPANISH. And also a smattering of racial terms, which I saw evidence of the next day.

The next day, we walked into the classroom and I looked at the board and just had to roll my eyes. Remember now, that I'm a huge Fellowship fan, but I'm sure you agree when I assert that the usefulness of the language in those first 15 minutes is... well, these are 9th graders. They have English exams that will determine their candidacy for college. "They were all of them deceived" will probably not help them. "Nine rings were gifted to the race of men" probably won't either. Neither will the word "Mongoloid" which was scribbled in an area of the board with a lot of other "-oid" type words that no one ever uses. So additionally, the language in this movie, apart from being a little ornate and dusty, is very standard British. Russ hasn't got a British accent. As far as I know, he has no intention to teach British English. In my opinion, this makes his lesson hyper-inconsistent.

What else adds to that? Well, the second day, when I asked if there was any more Spanish, Alice reported that Russ showed the movie until there were only 5 min. left in class. That is the time that he decided to say "let's have a 5 minute break!" In my experience all week, the kids are already a little confused when we end at 5:40 as we're told to, because the bell doesn't ring until 5:50 (the time class would be over if we observed the 10 minute break that occurs 40 min into class). So that's like... what?

The next day, Alice spent the period in the hall talking with Mr. Yuan (the man we had dinner with that one night and who's sort of in charge of the fact that we're there) and Mr. Ding. So I end up finding out from Russ himself that the audio didn't work that day. So I was like "maaan, what did you do?" Because Tuesday he'd insisted that he had a back up plan "in his head" when I sorta criticised him for having such a tech-dependent lesson (I was considering the fact that he's technologically inept, to be totally totally frank in my words). I was interested in knowing how he'd pulled it together. Still optimistic, I promise you. Until he said that he'd just showed the movie anyway and did the voices himself. Eh!

Whew. That was long-winded, but you know how I like to get things off my chest. So I know that I have my own short-comings, but here's what I have to say. I don't care if there's something you don't want to do if it needs to be done. It's of absolutely no inconvenience to him to teach these classes and take the effort to do it well. Of the two of us, he's the one who's TEFL certified, so what the fuck is going on? These students are not released from that school until 7:20 or some such, and I think they actually have to go back until like 10, and their only chance to eat before 7:20 is the time they get after our class before their next one starts. So really, can't he just reflect for a moment and then give them something worth learning? They're in our classes voluntarily and are really excited to have us there. I just wish he'd show them some real respect.

And I know that he thinks he's doing well, but I'd have freaking murdered my language teachers by now if that's all we did in class. And who knows-- maybe the students enjoy it? But anyways, as of now, my opinion on this matter is that this sucks and I just wanted to say so.

End rant. Ah. Maybe I've been nastier than usual. Whatever, we took the bus back that night and Alice and I booked to Xiang La Xia ("fragrant spicy shrimp" it means, and they ain't lying) to meet her mom for dinner. It's the 3rd time I've been there-- we had our first Baotou dinner there, and ate with Mr. Yuan there to discuss the high school-- and it really doesn't get old. Tell me if there's any way this can get old: The first plane of eating manifests in a large stainless steel pot/wok. It's brought to your table containing a jumble of shrimp, wings, potatoes, cauliflower, carrots, and bundles of starch noodles dripping in bright spicy oils. You eat and eat and eat, while sipping a really lovely tea that's sometimes lightly sweetened, with dried dates and a guiyuan (described as a cheap lychee/longan type fruit) floating in it. But no matter how much you eat, the meal does not end. There is a second plane of eating. There is another level, another step. There is eating 2.0. Once you've deemed that you're done with phase one, they bring out a second menu. Then they dump a bowl of chilis and spices into the pot, add some broth, and light a gas burner underneath. Then come plates of other delectables: raw lamb, beef, or pork, leafy greens, vermicelli, mushrooms of all varieties, tofus of different makes-- all these can be yours! On this occasion, we ordered some frozen tofu, golden needle mushrooms, and vermicelli. I actually doubt that what we had last night was frozen tofu but really some potato-derived bread-like substance that we'd eated on a previous night. Alice may have misunderstood what I'd asked for. But it was essentially what I was after. Both frozen tofu and this mysterious substance have a sponge-like consistency that is really bizarre at first bite. What I'm saying is that it's like eating a sponge. But it's like eating a DELICIOUS sponge. What happens is that all the little pores lock in the super-spicy soup and it's like an endorphin-explosion in your face. Then we got some noodles on the house-- someone comes by with a plate of dough pieces about 3-4 inches in length, then wh-ptsch! they grab both ends of one, whip it up and down a few times, and you've got a noodle a yard long. If they're the right thickness when they go in the soup, the noodles come out nice and chewy.

Because of the operation on her throat, Alice's mom wasn't in a position to eat spicy food. So all that stuff that I just described... I ate about half of it, and Alice ate the other half. I mean, it's an exaggeration: Mrs. Lee ate many of the chicken wings and we had a lot leftover in the end, but... anyways, that brings me back to the beginning of this entry and the stomach that was full for nearly 12 hours.