Teaching in Xi'an

Oh my, I haven't posted in a long time. I wrote an entry and then never posted it, and now I've added some more.

Sunday, 6/24: Charlie was sick. Alice took Forrest and I to the Shaanxi Province History Museum and the Wild Goose Pagoda. At the museum, there was a golden horse-dragon-scorpion monster that was cool-looking. Everything in the gift shops was ridiculously expensive (hundreds to tens of thousands of yuan) - there weren't key chains or anything for the poor students who visit. We didn't stay long at the pagoda since it was blazing hot and it was mostly outdoor gardens. The pagoda was a seven layer tower. We watched "V for Vendetta" on HBO that evening. I was afraid I wouldn't like it because I don't like violent movies, but I did like it. It was pretty good. V reminded me of Sheila.

Monday, 6/25: We went to a two-thousand-year-old emperor's tomb with the Californian exchange students. The set-up of the museum was really nice - the whole museum is underground, and they have the excavated pits enclosed in thermal glass, that people can walk on top of, so that they can control the temperature and lighting and humidity inside the pits to preserve the relics, unlike at the terracotta warriors, where everything's out in the open air. Charlie and Forrest and I went to Pizza Hut and it cost 250Y for the three of us, which is ridiculously expensive. Pizza Hut is a fancy restaurant in China. They had escargot on the menu. The salad bar was 28Y (a lot) and you only got to go once, so we saw a whole bunch of people stacking cucumbers and fruit on the rim of their bowl in orderly little rows maybe three inches high, to make their bowl bigger. A lot of people were doing it, which made me love China because I think I'd look very cheap if I did that in the US. I also wrote a bunch of postcards, and watched HBO Asia some more while I was writing them. It's the only channel my TV gets clearly.

Tuesday, 6/26: Our first day of class! We have exactly 30 students. We mostly did icebreakers and played games today, and then I spent maybe 45 minutes giving a lesson on digital logic, and Forrest administered his math diagnostic test. First we introduced ourselves, then we split the students up into 3 groups and played 2 truths and a lie, where each student read three statements about him or herself and then the teacher guessed which one was false. One boy's lie was "I have a girlfriend," which made all the other students laugh really loudly (I think schools in China prohibit their students from dating). Then we had each student ask a question about American culture or the teacher. Forrest and his circle loved it, I thought it went pretty well, and Charlie thought that it was scary, because for some reason his group asked him a ton of questions about politics like did he think the Iraq War was justified and questions about Bush etc. Two of my students asked me if I liked Bush, and I just answered truthfully that I was neutral because it is not time to vote right now.

In the afternoon, I went to the Californian exchange students' Chinese class. It is taught by Grace, who took us to the tomb yesterday. It is good because they are studying lists of vocabulary like colors, clothing, medical things, and weather, and my vocabulary is the thing that really needs work.

Wednesday, 6/27: Second day of class. We got down to business today. I lectured first (at 7:40 am), then Charlie, then Forrest. I like going first because in the morning the students pay attention and answer your questions. By the end of the day they're looking out the window and putting their heads on the desks. For a break, we played some more Mafia and played the song "Pimpin' All Over the World" and had the students fill in missing words in the lyrics. We told the students that "pimpin'" meant "having lots of friends, money, and style", which is basically what it means in American slang by now.

Thursday, 6/28: Teaching is so much easier than I expected! When I came to China, I had only prepared a 1.5-hour lecture, and I was worried about what I would teach. But I forgot about giving the students problems to do, plus each day reviewing what we did the day before, so I've been teaching that material for 3 days... so far. Teaching is also pretty fun. I never knew I could talk for an hour straight. Well, I could probably talk to Sunita for an hour straight. Today we started watching "Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory" with the students. They like it, because it's an awesome movie. The songs are very good and I have it stuck in my head.

Charlie and I decided we did not want more school food (there's less options for vegetarians) so we went to a restaurant across the street. It turns out it's famous for Peking duck, but they had other good food. Charlie got pineapple sticky rice, which had been baked inside the pineapple that it came in, plus it had an umbrella and a root vegetable flower and artistic arrangements of berries on the plate. I got a tofu skin dish, which came on a hotpot boiler thing. It was very delicious, and I got to take leftovers home. Good meal. The total was 100Y (50Y a person), which is pretty expensive, but it turns out I'm rich in China.

Friday, 6/29: We started working in the computer lab today. The students are using an applet (http://math.hws.edu/TMCM/java/xLogicCircuits/index.html) to design digital logic circuits. Today they built an OR gate using ANDs and NOTs, and an XOR gate. That took a half hour of lecturing plus an hour in the computer lab. I'm glad that teaching is turning out to be so much easier than I expected. The students are so bright, too. We finished watching "Willy Wonka." We taught the students some American slang, and they performed a skit based on each word, including "bffl" (best friends for life), "gangsta swagger," "geek," "ghetto fabulous," and "OMG," as well as some others that are not my fault (but the skit on "bootylicious" was pretty funny, and the skit on "pimp" featured the next-in-line for chairman of China). It's because we defined "bootylicious" as "attractive" and "pimp" as "someone with lots of money, friends, and style".

Saturday is our day off, so we went out in the evening. We went into Xi'an for dinner, and ate at an inexpensive restaurant on a side street. Then we went down De-something-xiang, a street with a lot of coffee shops and bars, and I had juice and popcorn (sweet, not salty :( ) and Forrest and Charlie had beers while we listened to their live music, which was a guy playing a guitar and singing Chinese romantic songs. Then we went to a different bar, where I had water (free! pretty incredible in China) and we met a nice waitress who's studying to be an English teacher. Their live music was pretty good and included "Hotel California." Then we tried to find a club to dance in. The first one did not have a dance floor. Instead they had those people who were hired to dance on a platform (EVERYWHERE has this - you can't escape it!), but this place had guys as well as girls, so at least they had gender equality. Their bathrooms also had toilet paper (very classy), but it was on the wall where the paper towels go, so I didn't discover this until after I used the toilet. I'd forgotten to bring tissues, so I was considering using paper money, until I found a receipt crumpled up in the bottom of my camera bag. Then we went to a different club, which actually had a dance floor! This club also gave two free beers to every foreigner who came (is it because the cool clubs all have foreigners? or because foreigners will buy lots of alcohol?) We danced for a long time, and it was fun because Chinese people are pretty shy about dancing but once we started dancing other people did too. We met some college students, including a shy girl who spoke really good English. I got her to dance for a while, and I think she enjoyed it. If one of the girls danced with Charlie or Forrest, then all the other girls would scream encouragingly for as long as they danced, which drove Charlie nuts but I thought it was funny. In the cab ride on the way home, Charlie stuck his head out the window and lost his favorite hat, which he bought in Japan, that has a (fake) $100 bill on it. (In Shanghai, the tea girls who try to scam you into buying super expensive tea tried to claw the bill off of his hat.)

Saturday, 6/30: Today was our day off. We all slept until about 11:30, which feels ridiculously late now. We walked to the swimming pool at an athletic club four or five blocks down the road. It was super hot so I was drenched by the time we got there. It's 30Y to swim but it was worth it. You have to wear a swim cap, and guys are required to wear those tight shorts or speedos, so we had gone shopping at the super-supermarket to buy some. Afterwards we went out for a late lunch/early dinner. We just wandered around and asked some guy "fanguanr zai nali?" (where's a restaurant?) and he led us like 3 blocks into this gated-off apartment complex that had a bunch of really cheap restaurants, so we each had a big bowl of noodles for 6Y.

Sunday, 7/1: We had class again today, to make up for not having class last Monday. 6 of our students had to leave the class because they are doing some sort of high school prep class during the summer. We got 6 new students, which is tricky because they don't know anything we taught last week, especially the digital logic. We went to the computer lab until 9 am, and the students designed circuits to multiply and add 1 digit numbers, and a 2 digit number & a 1 digit number. One student, Jack, succesfully designed a circuit to add two 2-digit numbers, which is considerably trickier. Then the students had a competition for which team of 3 people could build the tallest tower using one sheet of paper and 6 inches of tape. The winner was maybe 4 feet high. In the afternoon we watched "Requiem for a Dream" (kind of depressing... it's about people who get addicted to drugs and end up miserable) and went to the supermarket. I think we also played frisbee. I'm getting better at catching the frisbee (maybe 50% of the time) but I still can't aim it to save my life.

Monday, 7/2: Computer lab this morning - students worked on circuits to add 2 digits + 1 digit (not too hard), 2 digits + 2 digits (hard), and multiply 2 digits by 1 digit (not hard). Charlie did logic puzzles with the students - the kind that are like "Susan did not go out to dinner on Tuesday. Carol did have Mexican food. Somebody ate Italian food on Wednesday. etc" and you have to figure out who ate what type of food on which day. I like these puzzles. In the afternoon, we watched "Being John Malkovich" and the Internet on Charlie's computer broke so we have to go to the school computer lab to use the internet now.

Tuesday, 7/3: Last day in the computer lab. Due to the discovery that the applet can "iconify" circuits you design, turning them into gates, the students were able to design 2+2 and 2x2 circuits much more easily. Then they designed switches, which were able to switch between two inputs A&B so that the output depended on A or on B depending on whether the switch was on or off. Then they built a small binary calculator, which could add or multiply 2 digit binary numbers and you could switch between addition and multiplication. Maybe 7 students (out of about 27) finished. The others got most of the way there though, and everyone but the new students at least designed circuits that could add and multiply 2 digit numbers. We spent two hours in the computer lab because Charlie took groups out for half an hour at a time to have a debate on the question "Should students have to wear school uniforms?" The debates went well. Charlie also talked about hip hop and indie rock to the students and played some songs for them, and we played some music that the students had brought in to share. A popular band here is "Blue" from England, and Jay Chou is probably the most popular Chinese artist.

In the afternoon, we went to Sai ge Diannao Cheng (an enormous computer market) to look for a part that would allow us to plug the ethernet cable into the USB port on Charlie's computer so it could go on the internet. We found a part and paid 50Y but it didn't work. Oh well. Then we went into Xi'an and went to a coffee shop where I had a giant rainbow smoothie for 28Y and Charlie had a teensy weensy coffee for 28Y. We went to a big bookstore by the Bell Tower, and I bought "Jane Eyre" and a textbook to practice Chinese characters. We also went to the post office and I bought more postcards and international stamps. I paid for the stamps, which cost 54Y for 12, with a 100Y bill and then walked out. 45 minutes later I ran back into the post office but luckily the lady at the desk remembered me and handed me my change. We went to a buffet for dinner. It cost 38Y per person and you get so much. There was a giant fruit table, and a stirfry section where they stirfried all different kinds of meat (not so strong on the veggies) and a sushi section that made veggie rolls just for Charlie, and a giant table with different dishes on two sides, and another table with those steamer boxes that dumplings come in that had all sorts of foods - including pastries stuffed with bean paste that looked like pumpkins and had a little raisin for the stem. And a giant dessert table and sodas and juices and tea and water and beer if you wanted it. And a whole table of things for hotpot. I stuffed myself. My favorite things were these squash dumpling things with a strong sesame flavor, and spinach with peanut sauce, and noodles with cinnamon in the sauce. Mmmmm. Food food food.

Wednesday, 7/4: Today I gave my last lecture (on simplifying logical expressions, because the students frequently designed really complicated ways to do relatively simple things). Forrest presented on blues and jazz and played some songs for the students. Forrest lectured and Charlie did logic puzzles with the students for a while, then the students started building bridges out of chopsticks. The students get 50 pairs of chopsticks, paper, and glue, to span 35 cm, and they are competing to see whose bridge will hold the most weight. I decided to build a bridge too, but I was lazy so it is a bad bridge.

After class I went to the teachers' computer lab and worked on the character workbook and searched youtube for a video from "Stomp!" to show the students when I introduce step dancing. Forrest got skype working, which we can use to make calls to regular phones in the US, but then it got uninstalled somehow and only one person at the school that we know of has a working microphone. I also worked on writing postcards, and played frisbee with Forrest in the rain. I caught it one-handed and over my head! (Once.) Definitely making progress.

Now that we're settled in at a high school, the days go much more slowly - more everyday, mundane. I'm still enjoying myself but I'm looking forward to traveling to Hua Shan on Friday.