The Long Update

Dear America,

I like to think of myself as technologically competent. I may be absent minded. I may leave my camera on a window sill, forget completely where I put it, scour the entire compound and my own luggage for two days before mentioning it to one of the house mothers who, after being dissuaded from organizing an immediate 40-person search for camera returns an hour later holding it triumphantly high with the story of the gatekeeper who took it, saw it was so beat up that it must be something the kids had discarded, and decided to keep it and see if anyone asked about it. I may go to a tiny shop to get some digital photos printed and then walk four blocks away before realizing I don’t have my camera card, walk back four blocks, only to be told they gave me my card – and a search of my backpack reveals it. I may accidentally lock my room key inside the room after the man who has the only other key has gone home, and only regain entry after an acrobatic young ninth-grader climbed through the two foot by two foot bathroom window eight feet up from the floor and unlocked the door from the inside. These things I have come to accept as part of my life, just like poor vision, ignorance of popular culture, and a weakness for gummy candies.

Despite my many failings, I do like to think of my technological prowess as something of which if I am not proud, I am at least not ashamed. Thus it is disheartening when in the past few days my camera has gone crazy, taking over-exposed photos, or photos with streaking lines through them. My mp3 player, won in a college library drawing (the only drawing I’ve ever won) and kept despite a tempting offer to exchange it for a chemistry textbook, inexplicably only plays about half of the songs on it without old-style CD or LP hitches. And, of course, there is my dead laptop. Most of these items I never use during the school year, where they sit happily in fine working order in a drawer, yet when summer and a trim to China rolls around, they conspire against me. Some might consider it a consolation that when I tried to get a camera SD-to-USB adapter so I can put my photos on a computer (never mind that my photos may look like a psychedelic merry-go-round, or that my computer can’t start), the HP outlet fellow got two such adapters and they both broke for him. It was not much comfort, however, as it resulted in along and fruitless walk to find another place which sold them. As the midafternoon sun beat down on my weary head, I reflected that renouncing the world, becoming a Daoist monk and sitting on a rock on a mountain humming sounded pretty nice. My biggest comfort at this point is that I have almost no technology left that can break. I have noticed recently, however, that my pen is running out of ink…

As I was mulling over my past update, it occurred to me that some of my gentle readers may not be familiar with my writing style. Typically my written work has been family tales, during which dry witticisms and wry observations are hard to take too wrong, even if misunderstood. As none of my family has tried to learn Chinese (and I used to think they were foolish!) they aren’t here and there is little write about them, except that I think I get the last laugh, since despite the heat here, it’s hotter in America now. No, most of my writing now is about other cultures and other people, and when one is not writing about one’s own kith and kin, the broadest allowable literary freedoms shrink somewhat, and it may have seemed to some of my readers that my descriptions of life here (my descriptions of the food comes to mind) are unduly harsh. Please let the reader understand that I have great respect for the people here, am very grateful for all they do, and do not in any way mean to convey (except through satire) a skewed and American-centric perspective on how life should be lived. I hope this assuages any concerns that may have crept into the minds of my readers.

My time here at the orphanage draws to a close. I leave tomorrow, after postponing my departure for several days at the request of various folks. From here I am going to visit the other orphanage run by the same organization. I originally had no such plans, as this orphanage is not at all on my way back to Beijing. It is sort of like going from Chicago to St. Louis on your way to New York. I found out, however, the most astonishing fact: I knew someone there! Last spring I lead a mission trip to Belize to help paint a school being built there; one of the girls, Michele, was a senior then. She graduated, and then went to teach English in China. She sent out an update a year or so later explaining that she had gotten involved with an orphanage, which I replied was coincidental, since I was also at the time planning on coming to an orphanage in China; neither of us mentioned the name, thinking the other would not be interested – but when Ben found a picture of her (whom he knew from visiting that orphanage) on my Facebook page, he told me about it. The coincidence is really too much, so I decided to join Ben on a trip down there this weekend and surprise her.. From there, I go to the capital, meet some local Beijing friends, and then buckle down to learn some serious Chinese.

Michelle (Ben’s wife, not my college friend) usually teaches English in the kindergarten for an hour and half. Sickness fell upon the Godard household, however, so I have ended up teaching her section most of this week. Teaching has been a typically hair-raising experience: one day I didn’t realize I needed to teach until a few minutes before hand. The next day I had more forewarning and prepared a solid list of activities to do during my time, when the Chinese teachers switched up my time, giving me the slot when the 3 year olds come (who don’t speak much at all, and don’t speak any English!) at the last minute. I am proud of the way I overcame that challenge, however, taking to heart an old ploy first encountered when I was on the other side of the table: M&Ms. Though this trick was first used on my by my then-hated French teacher, a witch-like woman who lived in a haunted house with her dark brood, I decided what had once been used for evil could now be used for good. By hiding the M&M’s in a box and shaking it tantalizingly, I got them all to sit down quietly (which is success enough for one day with these kids!), eager to find out what I had inside. I laid out the rules that they had to answer a question correctly in order to get one, and if they were noisy, or disobedient, they didn’t get any. It worked amazingly well (only one person melted down, and she recovered even before the activity was finished). Tailoring my questions to the individual level of each student was the only way to navigate the huge spectrum in age and ability.

My kindergarten successes reached a peak, pleasantly enough, today on my last day; from practice uppercase and lowercase letters, my students were able to move on to copying down short sentences and phrases with punctuation and spaces (e.g. “Here comes the dog!”). Then, in their free coloring time, they independently decided to practice tracing more letters, including one girl who began trying cursive! It was a good day. I may have it in me to be a kindergarten teacher after all.

My doubts about my kindergarten talents stem from the role I usually have at the kindergarten, which is door guard and damage control. The Chinese teachers are almost certainly well-trained and definitely well-meaning, but they switch on and off throughout the day, and the younger of them is not able to control the class. This, combined with what seem to me to be arbitrary and difficult requirements of the kids, make for a hard time to maintain order. As an example, every morning at 10:30 the children receive 220 ml of whole milk – if they are good. Up until that point, threats of milk penalties are employed to keep the kids in check. When the time comes, typically old sins are forgotten so long as current insurrection isn’t happening, but everyone must sit straight, with hands in the lap, not talking before their bag of milk is placed in front of them by today’s designated student. They then must wait in similar posture until each other student gets his or her milk (unless the milk is revoked), which may take an agonizingly long time, as one’s milk can be temporarily taken back again if the posture fails at any time (as it frequently does). If there happens to be one or more particularly truculent or antsy children at this time, their shouting and disobedience naturally draws others into the fray. I leave the readers to construct the rest of the scene.

Lining up against the wall before an activity, before going outside, and so on are all required, and while I recognize the necessity for some order in a classroom, and for the kids to learn how to listen to teachers (a necessary skill for the next 12 years of their life, if not more), the level of the regimentation seems silly. I end up thinking to myself, “What really is the point of the kindergarten?” Most of the activities really are just play, of a slightly more organized sort; so why does the day continuously involve crying or yelling youngsters, when after class is over they happily play for hours with only rare tears? And why dispense as much punishment for big crimes and small misdemeanors?

It’s been a long time since I was in kindergarten, and my memories of it are almost certainly all false plants drawn from the times when I accompanied my mother to pick up my younger brothers when they went. Many of the activities that we did, such as lining up and group work are the same, and yet I don’t remember too much crying or rampant disobedience. Furthermore, somehow our punishments, less frequent, must have been more effective, because I do not imagine for a minute Chinese kids are worse behaved than American ones. I think that it stems from a couple different sources. I here submit my suggestions for a good kindergarten:

Don’t sweat the small stuff. If the kids are almost all right, or all mostly right, then start with that. You can deal with the individual problems later when you have control of the situation.
Figure out what exactly you want to teach the kids. Then find a way to make this something they want to learn on their own, so its interesting and fun rather than a chore. Your job is now easy and fun rather than hard and painful. The point is that they learn, not how they learn.
Use positive reinforcement instead of punishment as much as possible. Motivate kids with the promise of rewards rather than the threats of punishment, because it will get better results while making them like you rather than hate you. This is important for #4.
Be absolutely firm when necessary. Children need to know that there are some lines not crossed (e.g. hitting the teacher or blatantly disobeying an order), or fearsome punishment ensues: and you’re not afraid to punish. Don’t go half-way, or make threats and then not carry them out, or you’ll get no respect. But see #3.and #1.
Have more than one teacher. Sometimes you need to deal with a student individually, and it’s nearly impossible to do effectively without someone else managing the rest of the class.

I’m sure that there are more that could be added or amended. I believe that establishing rules early and maintaining them consistently are also important, but having arrived in the thick of things, my own observations are not sufficient to say.

If any of you want to become kindergarten teachers, my best advice to you is to forget the colleges. Go into several classrooms; experience it; see the good and the bad; then find the absolutely best teacher learn everything he does and then do just that when you start… and then customize to your own style once you know how it works. When I taught this week I certainly stole the majority of my activities from Michelle. It works well.

Still, most of my time in the kindergarten has been damage control – telling students to listen to their teachers, not to put their feet on the table, preventing kids from slamming the doors or running out of the classroom, or occasionally taking the oldest boy (who has an attitude problem and would probably be best served by a half dozen solid paddles served daily until he stops being the most misbehaved in class, but I’m not in a position to do this) making him stand outside of the classroom so that the teacher can accomplish something with the others. It’s not the most thrilling of jobs, but I feel that if nothing else I am providing a productive service.

There’s not much more to say about the kindergarten. If I were to come back here after Ben and Michelle leave I would ask Nathan (the big boss) if I could teach kindergarten the whole morning. I think if I had the whole morning, and if I were here for more than two weeks, I could do a lot with them. Maybe it’s hubris, maybe it’s right. It would interesting to try. Unfortunately, it doesn’t pay well.

(One interesting side-note: I realized today that I could live here year-round at a cost of no more than $2,500 per year, living and eating at the orphanage. I’m not sure what it means, but it’s interesting.)

The afternoons here are long, hot, and quiet. I have taken advantage of the time in various ways, from napping to shopping to writing these updates to going for a second round at the kindergarten. (I sleep a scary amount: something like 9 hours per day when naps are included. I blame the heat without air conditioning.) I also have used the time practice writing Chinese characters for which the house mothers and students grant me greatly undeserved high praise for my industriousness; even when I tell them I used to know these words and learned them before, so should never have forgotten them, the Chinese are still unmoved. I have been reading through the New Testament, starting with Matthew and then skipping the rest of the gospels. Right now I’m in I Corinthians. It’s been very nice to read long passages at a time without feeling pressed to finish up and get on with my day’s work. I brought along my Sudoku book, and have done some and failed others, before passing it on to one of the kids here. It’s a quiet but thus far a satisfying diversion from my work.

According to one of the high school students, consensus among the kids is that I’m shy. This surprised me, since I thought I had been very outgoing (the previous paragraph notwithstanding), and had been attempting connect with the kids as much as possible. In fact, I had thought that shyness lay not with me, but with them! It may be that in my uncertainty about a new environment as well as how to best to interact without making massive blunders, I may have come off as a bit reserved. My natural instinct when landing in a new place is to clam up and watch to see what’s happening lest I put my foot in my mouth. This, combined with a lack of overtures from the kids themselves may have resulted in our mutual thoughts of shyness. (Ben and Michelle, for what it’s worth, solidly back my judgment that the older kids especially aren’t as interested in coming right up to you and talking.)

Shy or no, I have been able to connect more and more with the kids, having taught them nearly all the games I know: Set, Egyptian Rat Spit, finger jousting, and dueling (which, again somewhat coincidentally, I first learned on that trip to Belize). This last could be described as a manly-shooting-version of pattycake, which has the advantage of being quite fun and requires a little strategy. One college-age fellow here that I taught visited the other orphanage and taught all the kids there: and apparently they loved it. It will be amusing if teaching that game is my greatest legacy here.

My big splash here was this past Saturday’s fun and games. I decided, after hearing about all the amazing things another group had done here, that I just needed to get down and organize something. I chose my dozen-plus years of summer camp experience to draw from, and designed a competition of epic proportions, with relay races, three-legged races, egg-and-spoon races, basketball free throws, algebra completion and English sentence creation puzzles, and much more all a part of this great day’s events. I scoured the whole place to make my scavenger hunt list, and enlisted the helf of a half-dozen people to help cut down poled for the spin-your-head-on-the-bat contest, cut strips from an old hose, for the thee legged race. I was especially proud to have salvaged an old fire hose to use as my tug of war rope. It was an event to make any man proud.

I talked up the event to the kids, only giving the rare hint here or there what sort of event it would be, and encouraging them all to come. I knew that such a large undertaking would require on-the-fly adjustments, and so was well-prepared when I had to scratch the egg race because of a one-day egg famine in the city. I also realized that a number of other events would need to be scrapped because of time constraints, and the order of events had to be rearranged. There was also, of course, the problem of herding 30 or more kids into doing what I wanted, especially when my Chinese vocabulary does not include the words such as “dodgeball”; at more than one critical moments I almost lost the kids on more than one occasion: first the girls mutinied at the three-legged race; later the boys wanted to play basketball more than tug of war; finally they all wanted to watch a fascinating TV program more than the last event of the day. In each case Hazel, one of the high school students and my de facto translator/ co-organizer, and Ben were amazing helps in corralling the kids back to the events. We found ourselves in a breathtaking tie (which I didn’t engineer, but may have nudged a tiny bit) after the last event – which meant we needed a tie-breaker: a watermelon eating contest! I brought out the two quarters Ben had cut ten minutes before, and everyone watched and cheered as each team’s champion, without using their hands scarfed down their piece. We took the winning team to KFC (the height of class here in China, and the only one in the whole city) and I bought them each an ice cream cone, while the losing team got the remaining watermelon and a half. If I found out a way to post pictures, I will post some of the many that Ben took. It was a great day.

I just took a short break from this long epistle to give the kindergarteners the photos of them that I had printed, and arrived in time to find some actual discipline occurring, both in general and with the particular child I mentioned earlier. I may need to revise some of my earlier statements, or at least acknowledge that these teachers in the long term may not be as willing to lead as chaotic classroom as it seems.

As I look back on my time here, it is with mixed thoughts. My experience has definitely had fewer concrete results than I had expected and hoped for. Certainly I did not sail in and solve everyone’s problems, but then again, what is needed here is not short-term saviors, but long-term stability. Certainly for me the experience has been educational, the friendships forms real, and the generousity given to me by the kids, staff, and volunteers has all been more than I could expect. As I leave tomorrow, I want to do something really nice for nearly everyone here, either for helping me wash my clothes, or finding my camera, or getting a seat for me a the dining table, or giving my bowl a few extra dates or pieces of meat, or taking me shopping for necessities, or showing me the ropes. And while I do look forward to adventuring again, meeting new people and going wherever the trains take me, I do want to come back. Maybe next year.

Cheers,
Chris