Brain Blisters

View of the river that my Apartment complex sits next to.

Typical scene of China: Old people dancing in the evening.

View from Qingcheng Mountain just north of Chengdu. A weekend trip with the host family and relatives.

Qingcheng Mountain again

Chinese, TEFL, food, TEFL, Chinese, was the basic arc of my last week. This week is closer to: Chinese, TEFL, food, prep for teaching, teach, self/peer review. To summarize the period  between my last post and right now: brain blisters. Brain blisters are these spots on your brain that hurt whenever you think about the topic associated with that spot. To be clear, I’ve made this up. But this is kinda what a big chunk of my day feels like as I struggle to lift my foot high enough to get through the next threshold. I’m confident that through one I’ll find something soft to sleep on, or at least an air conditioner. 

The past days have been sincerely arduous. Time has been tight and even tighter for me as I squander precious moments relaxing or writing blog posts. What a fool I am.

To save time I’ve fallen into several habits that have been sustaining me. There is a great noodle place around the corner from class at which I always get suancai mian (酸菜面) or sauerkraut with noodles and a savory broth. To keep my sugar up I’ll add some tangyuan (汤圆) which are glutinous rice balls filled with sweet, soupy peanut butter or sesame seed and served in a broth of hot water. Then I hit the convenience store next door to pick up some more glutinous rice balls filled with peanut butter, but these ones are packaged and not in soup and make a great afternoon snack.

Breakfast from left to right: Soy Milk, Tea egg, Baozi.

For breakfast my little brother wakes up at 7 AM, rides the elevator down 17 floors to pick up three vege baozi (包子), two doujiang (豆浆), and two chaye dan (茶叶蛋) which are, respectively; steamed buns stuffed with spinach, tofu, and onion, fresh sweetened soy milk, and tea eggs which are made by cracking the shells of boiled eggs slightly and soaking them in some sort of broth of which I imagine includes tea leaves (chaye).

Dinner is a home cooked meal provided by my host mom and changes every night. She has decided her house is vegetarian since I moved in because “it’s healthier”. She also tells me a healthy meal has a large variety of colors (three or more is best).

She has also requested I teach her and her son meditation. In fact, we have now twice meditated together with great success. The first time I just let it happen for ten minutes without any instruction. The second time I guided them through using the breath to let go of expectation over ten minutes using a mix of English and Chinese. After ten minutes the alarm went off and my little brother hefted an elephant-sized sigh. “He’s sweating!” His mom called out in a mocking tone. Fearing this would push him toward a mind set of “good” and “bad” meditation, which is usually more harmful than helpful, I tried to explain personal experience and its significance when meditating. We all three got up and walked our separate ways; bathroom, water, computer.

To shift focus, this week also marked the beginning of model school. Model school is a two week oral English class that is offered for free to all who sign up. The site manager (the administrative staff structure is too complicated to do in an aside) plastered a few local campuses around town with advertisements for the classes. Each class has two Peace Corps Volunteers (PCVs) and 7-30 students aged middle school through college and on to adults. My co-teacher is Andrew. He’s a fit chap from Oklahoma with a passion for history, politics, Chinese, and aspirations to become an ambassador. Let’s just call him bold. 

Nonetheless, Andrew is a very solid guy that does great to balance out my whimsical nature. He moves with order, I flow with change. While we found these two to clash on our first day of teaching together, we have since found a rhythm of collaboration. We teach one at a time.

More on the first day of class. We left the room with our heads held low and our expectations somewhere near our butt holes. The good news, we had throughly digested the failure of expecting perfection on the first day. The bad news, it had not yet left our systems and was emanating anxiety, doubt, and a big red button that could set either one of us off arguing. Luckily, we both made it through the afternoon with clean knuckles and a lot of new lessons. I learned that my willingness to go on tangents and change course must be balanced with an overall direction for the class. I also learned I struggle watching students falter. Though they may not have failed yet, I feared this so dearly that I tried to catch them at every step. 

Yesterday, Andrew killed the class with good instruction, clear guidelines, and a solid foundation that was easy to build on. And, today, build I did.

Our overall goal of these two weeks is to get our students ready to tell a personal story. We’ve taught them a 5-step structure through which to formulate a story and over the next seven days of class they will practice identifying and utilizing this structure until they stand in front of the class and present.

I pass this women on my walk
 to class almost every day.

One of the challenges of this is that our class has a wide variety of levels. On day one I approached a student “what is your English name?” He looked up at me with begging eyes which he then shifted to his friend. “Help!” he whimpered quietly. But he received no help from his friend and so he looked back at me. I repeated the question and after an ah-ha moment his muse sang through him a beautiful “I don’t have one.” I turned around and walked back to the front of class, quietly whimpering to myself “help!” And on to another student with whom I can even discuss the minute differences between “alcohol” and “beverage.” 

When the first guy I mentioned didn’t show up today, the second guy sat in a sea of 11 girls as the only guy. It is not uncommon for language to be deemed a “girls” field of study. From what I have heard from other volunteers, many of our 50+ student classes will have only a few boys in them. These two boys aside, though, this same level of difference exists in many of the girls in my class.

Cherish is a small small girl by even Chinese standards. She comes in an hour early every day and chats with Andrew and I. She rocks a big smile that turns to introspection the moment class starts. On her exit slip today she wrote that she’d like to talk more. I’ll make sure to pick her more often during class.

Cloud is a bad ass. She’s got some hard core swagger and short hair that makes her big eyes and pudgy cheeks pop. Her English is short but brave. She won’t shy away from a challnge and I’m confident her English will improve rapidly. She wants to increase her vocabulary and work on grammar.

Joy sits in the front of class and arrives promptly on time every day. She speaks lucidly and I can always count on her to answer any question I throw at the class. A moment too long of silence and her head tips up to let me know she’s ready whenever.

As a result of such a great English speaking ability disparity every activity we design must be flexible enough to challenge and support, often times utilizing the advanced students to hold the hands of the lower level students.

On a similar note, the classroom dynamics are so heart warming. These students have after only three days with each other found ways to cooperate, support, and encourage one another. They hang out after class and and started a group message on Wechat (a text messaging app). When one misses a beat another shows them how to hit the note for next time. In other words, they don’t just help each other but teach each other. In stepping back and not trying to catch them at each step today, this is the beautiful flower I got to watch unfold. A nectar that warmed my heart and left me on one hell of a teacher’s high. 

Now if only I could get a few days off to let these blisters subside.