Quick Notes: Sacked, Sacked, and Smiling

Well, the problem of my disastrous corporate class has been solved; they've requested a new teacher. The students' account of my first class session was that I told them Chinese English teachers spoke bad English and taught incorrectly. One student said that "as a patriot" she "could not continue to take classes with that teacher [me]," since I clearly didn't like China. Apparently she deemed the class to have "a learning atmosphere unconducive to improvement." (Both of those quotes are, of course, from Whitetooth's translation; none of the students would be capable of such speech at this point.) I told Whitetooth he should have responded, "I'm sure the teacher couldn't agree more."

Fortunately, Baolou (the teacher formerly responsible just for the Business English course at the same company will be taking over the General English course, and I'll be able to pick up some evening courses to replace it, so the only major change for me is that I can now sleep in once again on Tuesdays. There don't seem to be any other repercussions looming, so 没问题 (mei wenti--"No problems").

In keeping with the yin/yang nature of life in China, the same day I got this news (Sunday) was also the day I had my two worst children's classes yet. Sunday morning, four students showed up to sit in on my first class of the day and "have a try." Since the class is already nearly full and meets in a small classroom, this meant that two of the fourteen students total sat on the windowsill, there weren't enough books to go around, and the whole class turned into painful chaos. Since the salesgirl who had brought the students into class promptly disappeared to do something else, the chaos didn't even have any apparent benefits. But it was after lunch that things went downhill.

In one of my little-little friends classes (In Chinese, 小朋友 xiao pengyou means "child" or "children," and I often say xiaode xiao pengyou to indicate very young children) two boys have been coming to class for a while despite my protestations. The two boys have been placed in a higher level than this class and (at twelve or thirteen years old) are much older than the rest of the class (which ranges from six to ten years of age). Earlier, I'd asked them to be moved to a more appropriate class, since they tended to be disruptive and oftentimes violent. Yet Sunday they returned and, during class, refused to do anything other than hit one another in the crotch; Chinese boys think this is incredibly funny and often continue to play this "joke" well into adulthood.

So having picked up on the idea that this was an amusing pastime, one of my seven year old girls, with a big grin and a cheery "Bye-bye teacher," threw a punch at me on her way out of the class. Fortunately she's extremely short, so the punch, though well aimed, fell just a millimeter or two short of serious damage. She was promptly disciplined, her mother called, and I had to have a sit-down with the girl's mother. I explained that this was not appropriate in class, and the girl's mother agreed that this was "impolite." I said that I thought her daughter's action stemmed from her watching the bad behavior of other students in the class, and I assured her that I was doing my part to get the "bad influences" removed from the class and placed somewhere more appropriate. Hopefully the mother took the time to say something to the staff before leaving.

Aside from all that, though, things are actually going quite well as of now. As the weather slowly improves, my mood has been getting better and better, and I've been going out during the day more often just to walk or to hunt for interesting shops. I spent yesterday morning knitting on my balcony and went walking in a nearby park with a co-worker this afternoon. I've had a few impromptu conversations in Chinese in the past week--one with a person I met at Andes, another with the student's mother mentioned above--and managed not to struggle very seriously with them. 意想不到, then, things are looking up.