And what a month it was

Hi all, we hope you’re all happy and well wherever you happen to be. We deeply miss all of our friends and family, and can’t wait to see you and share our stories with you.

It’s been nearly a month since our last post; we apologize for remaining incommunicato. On top of our hectic schedules (22 classes a week + tutoring + Chinese lessons + social lives), we had a, shall we say, character-bulding month.

Culture fatigue, or culture shock as some call it, took a real toll on us during October.

I feel ya Ronald.

Throughout our first month to six weeks here, we were definitely in a honeymoon phase; everything was new and exciting and it seemed a fun challenge to try to communicate across a vast language barrier.

Soon, though, the unconscious toll of living in such a different place began to wear on us. Irritability, fatigue, getting upset or stressed over minor problems, a need for more sleep, and illnesses were the status quo for us throughout October.

Liz's October knitting project. It kept her sane. 

She ended up giving it to the owner of the knitting store across from school.

All of this is apparently normal; we found a book appropriately titled Teaching English in China in a box left from one of last year’s teachers, and it’s helped us realize that all of those negative symptoms are normal.

It’s hard to conceptualize what it’s like to live in a country that doesn’t even use the Roman alphabet until you jump right in.  When we go shopping, to restaurants, or sight-seeing, everything is a challenge. Even asking where the bathroom is in a restaurant could be a 5-minute ordeal at first.

Good news though: we feel like we’re emerging out of the “culture shock October” we experienced and we’re feeling more at home. One big reason for this, aside from more time passing, is a recent breakthrough we’ve had with our Chinese language ability.

One of our friends in town, Ying Ying (whose parents hosted Liz for her birthday dinner – see previous posts), and we just began a language exchange tutoring arrangement: we help her improve her English and she teaches us Chinese. Her English is very good, so we’re mainly helping her with pronunciation, reading skills, and test-taking strategies so she can pass the Chinese equivalent of the TOEFL – an English-language equivalency test.

When we landed, we were able to speak basic survival phrases – albeit poorly. As weeks passed, we gained a broader lexicon, but we spent the first two months here unable to understand anybody.

Chinese languages have such a different set of phonemes (sounds) than Western languages, so attuning your ear to them is very difficult – not to mention the tonal system.

Not to go into too much detail, as I think we’ve described this before, but Mandarin Chinese uses four tones (plus a fifth neutral). That means the sound “ma” can mean at least five different things (or more) depending on the tone of the speaker’s voice. Couple this with the fact that Chinese is a context-dependent language (words can change meaning based on the other words they’re next to), and baby, you’ve got a nice language barrier stew cooking.

mā – mother, or to wipe

má – hemp/flax, sesame, or rough/coarse

mǎ –horse

mà – to verbally curse or scold

ma – added at the end of sentences to make them questions

These symbols above the vowels show the basic “shape” of the tone you make with your voice: a high one, a rising one, a low dipping one, and a falling one.

But anyway, you get the point: Chinese is very different than English. After working with Ying Ying (in Chinese the Y’s are silent: “Ing Ing”) for a few weeks, we’ve gotten to the point to where we can now understand most people. Many older Chinese have thick accents, so understanding them is more difficult. We’ve learned most of the high-frequency words (can, want, need, where/when/why/how/what, still, but, or, because, not, etc.) and so even when we don’t understand all of a speaker’s vocabulary, we can understand most of their meaning.

It’s a very neat feeling to reach a breakthrough in a language like this. We’re very excited and it’s given us renewed enthusiasm to study harder.

Many of you have asked about the weather here. It’s not too different from weather in the mid-Atlantic, but it’s definitely far more humid due to our location in a low-lying area right below the Yangtze River. While it doesn’t rain too frequently, it stays quite hazy or foggy.

Typical Jiangsu Province weather. This is the view from our school cafeteria.

Autumn haze at one of the ecological parks in town.

Now that autumn is here, it’s gotten quite colder – and it’s a wet cold, very different from the cold we’re used to in the South. On top of that, Chinese buildings are not insulated like some in the West, so that means our classrooms can stay quite frigid. We’ll need to either get space heaters for our rooms or teach in coats, hats, and gloves.

An interesting difference here is that China does not have daylight savings time. When we first arrived back in August, the sun would rise around 5:00 a.m. and set around 6:00 p.m. Now, it rises around 7:00 and sets around 4:14-4:30. It takes some getting used to, but the early light in the mornings is nice.

Brett celebrated his birthday a few weeks back, and a local pub in town hosted us for a small party. It just so happened to be the night that the same pub hosted their yearly Halloween party for all of the Zhangjiagang wài guó rén (foreigners). All of our friends came; we all wore Halloween costumes, and Liz got a stunning dragon and phoenix cake made. It was a real treat, and the Halloween party gave us a nice taste of something familiar.

The dragon and phoenix are traditional Chinese symbols representing man and woman, respectively.

The ZJG FLS foreign teachers

Liz took Brett on a shopping spree for his birthday, where he got some new sweaters for winter. It’s difficult for Westerners to find clothes here, because Chinese have much smaller frames; Brett’s shoulders are a bit too wide for most stores, but he was able to find some that carried a Chinese XXL – he wears an American M.

Chinese fashion is very fun. While the color palettes are tamer – most are neutrals - the patterns they use are very bold. Women wear lots of lacy dresses and skirts, and tights are really popular. Men’s shirts often feature floral or paisley prints, which is right up Brett’s alley. We’ve picked up some neat items to bring back.

Liz's new tights and boots.

Hand-made and embroidered with dragons. They rock. And roll. 

In other news, as we’ve been reading through the blog posts that we’ve written, we realize that there’s a major hole in our descriptions of our life here: we have neglected to detail our classes for you, lovely readers! 

To those with whom we’ve spoken on the phone or on Skype, we’ve described what our classes are like, so I think we felt like we’d already done the job for the general readership. Let us first apologize. Now, let us rectify the mistake.

Brett and I each teach 22 classes of middle scholers per week. On a typical day, we teach four or five classes each, over the span of about 7 hours. The teaching aspect of our lives here is somewhat different than we expected it to be. We thought that we would be teaching at an IB school (of which both Brett and I are graduates), and would be seeing our students daily for intensive English training.

That’s not exactly the case. The school was affiliated with the IB school next door, and the students and teachers alike would use both facilities and get the benefit of any academic programs that were offered. That is, until this school year. The two schools officially split over the summer, and the IB program remained with the school next door. Our school is very much a competitive one and the students work very hard, but there is no longer any IB affiliation.

To say that the students are hard-working (or maybe over-worked) would be an understatement. Their classes begin at 7:30 in the morning and, aside from a 2 hour lunch break, they go until evening reading, which ends for the middle schoolers between 8 and 9 pm. They have no time for extracurricular activities like sports or plays, though they do have compulsory music and art classes. The first Friday we taught, I said, “Are you guys so excited for the weekend?” and they all, to a man, responded “NOOOOO!!! We have too much homework!!!!”

Just look at the stacks of textbooks.

I understand the importance of a good education (and their parents pay top dollar to send them to a school such as ours), but these poor kids seem to barely have time to do kid stuff, like play outside with their friends. (I’m not counting the mandatory exercises they do twice a day as “fun outdoor time”.) About half of the students are also boarders here, so their whole lives are school and exams (which are frequent and intense – although they give us days off).

For all that, the kids still are, somehow, able to be kids. They laugh freely and often, and they don’t seem to get too beaten down by the system (at least not often). There are some days when they just seem exhausted, and I’ve seen more than a few crying after talking with their teachers, but all in all, they’re upbeat, rambunctious kids. Sometimes a little too rambunctious, to be honest.

The little ones are adorable.

So, back to our teaching. Brett and I teach grades 7-9 (or Junior I – Junior III, as they call them). They do a type of tracking in the school system here. Each grade is split into 10 classes, ranked based on their test scores in all of their subjects. The students in classes 1 and 2 are the best performing students in the grade, while those in class 10 have the most trouble in their classes. Classes 1 and 2 have 36 students each, while Classes 3-10 have about 50 students each. Yes, it seemed counterintuitive to us, as well, but that’s the way it is. Brett teaches Grade 7, Class 1, Grade 8, Class 1, and Grade 9, Class 1, while I take the Class 2’s of each of the grades, respectively.

So, as I said, each of those classes has 36 students in them. For Classes 3-10, Brett and I split the students, who are either in Group A or Group B. Again, those with the higher test scores comprise Group A, while those who struggle a little more are in Group B. I take the A’s and stay in their regular classroom, while Brett takes the B’s into an auxiliary classroom. That way, each of us only has to deal with about 25 students at a time.

Brett's austere auxiliary classroom: desks, lectern, chalkboard.

Each class meets for, at most, 40 minutes at a time. Sometimes, if the class falls right before lunch or dinner, it is only 30 minutes. We see Classes 3-10 once per week. Yes, you read that right. There are some students that we see for only 30 minutes a week. Classes 1 and 2, since they’re better students, have the benefit of seeing us twice a week, but it’s still not nearly enough. We also can’t give them homework, because they won’t do it. They have too much other work to do for their daily classes, so it would just slip through the cracks. The students have intensive English classes that they take daily, and on which they are tested rigorously, but our function seems to be to allow the students to hear native English speakers for a few minutes a week.

Often, we feel like it’s just a break period for them, and they feel like they can relax and chat with their friends during that time. It can be, as you can imagine, quite frustrating. We have had to adjust our expectations about what we can realistically get done in that time, and what they will be willing to do. It’s not that they’re lazy – quite the opposite – but it can be very difficult to keep their attention. We’ve found that a mixture of helping answer questions that they have from their other English classes and doing fun, hands-on activities works best.

We’ve just begun in the last week to really focus on supplementing their textbook instruction to help them with their exams. We’ve found that many things are either explained poorly or just downright wrong, so anything that we can clear up for them is definitely helpful. 

Another thing I’m beginning to focus on is teaching them prefixes and suffixes. They all agree that the most difficult part of their exams is a fill-in-the-blank reading section that they have to do. Typically, it’s a story, and there are blanks that must be filled in by choosing one of four possible choices. They’re given words they’ve never learned, but they’ve never been taught how to break down a word into its parts to figure out its meaning. Their instruction is rote memorization and recitation. It’s pretty bizarre the things that they memorize.

A day in the life

They are not taught phonics – they’re just taught how to pronounce each word as it comes. It’s the same with spelling. I made the mistake of trying to have a low-stakes little spelling bee. Usually, each round will get increasingly difficult, until the final spellers are likely spelling words they’ve never heard. I just could not get a handle on a level of difficulty for them, because they don’t learn spelling rules – they just learn how to spell certain words. They could spell ‘geography’ with no problem, but ‘trust’ was impossible.

The students got very angry, and a few were moved to tears, because they felt like I was cheating them by giving some students harder words than others. The level was the same, but some students got words they knew – and thus could spell – and others got new words that befuddled and frustrated them. I’ve decided, therefore, to try to teach them roots, suffixes, and prefixes to help them when they encounter new words…here’s hoping.

I want to share one more example of the perils of learning a language in an intensive setting from a non-native speaker, using materials made by non-native speakers. Yesterday, I was trying to help my students prepare for an exam they have next week by reviewing their material. I used a worksheet they had completed for that unit to get a handle on what was difficult for them. This was a story about a couple who had gone to pick flowers in the mountains. On the drive home, they pass a furniture store and the wife sees a bookshelf she has to have. The obliging husband goes in to buy it. Then, there’s this sentence:

"Ten minutes later, he had to be twenty dollars poorer, and the bookshelf was tied to the roof-rack of the car."

In no universe can I imagine why the author would use the construction “had to be” in that sentence. When I told my students that it was just flat wrong, they seemed relieved, because it was hindering their understanding of the sentence. I told them that a native speaker would write:

           "Ten minutes later, he was twenty dollars poorer, and the bookshelf was tied to the roof-rack of                    

            the car."

Furthermore, their teacher had told them that the sentence meant that at the end of the transaction, the man only had twenty dollars left, not that he had spent twenty dollars. I explained that it was a comparative statement to use poorer in that sense (they were doing comparatives in that unit!) and they finally understood:

"The man was twenty dollars poorer than he was when he went into the store ten minutes earlier."

Unfortunately, their teachers often tell them things that are wrong, and their educational and test materials both have grievous errors. Brett and I are wondering how far we should go in correcting these things: on the one hand, it would help them in their fluency to know the correct answer; on the other hand, if we tell them something different from their teachers, it might just confuse them and make them perform more poorly on their tests, which seems to be their entire lives. It’s a conundrum.

Well, I set out to give a brief overview of our teaching, and I seem to have rambled for quite a while.

I’ll wrap it up with a typical day for us:

11:00–11:30  Class 8, Grade 8 (B&E split)

11:30–1:20   Lunch

1:20–2:00    Class 2, Grade 9 (E; B has break)

2:15–2:55    Class 7, Grade 9 (B&E split)

3:05–3:45    Class 4, Grade 9 (B&E split)

3:45–4:15    Afternoon Exercise

4:15–4:45    Class 1, Grade 7 (B; E has break)

4:45             Dinner*

*Dinner is early, yes. But if you want to get any food, you must bum rush the cafeteria as soon as the doors open to the faculty dining room at 4:45. If you wait until 5:00, there will be slim pickings, and by 5:15, dinner is over. Lunch is almost two hours, so we have a nice break in the middle of each day. Our cafeteria, by the way, is fantastic.

So, as you can see, it’s not a difficult schedule at all. The students stay in their classrooms, and the teachers move (and there are no elevators), so we do a lot of walking. We’ve both gotten a ton of exercise here, have lost weight, and feel pretty great, physically!

The students' dining hall.

Faculty dining room. Much nicer.

Typical faculty lunch. Watermelon, braised duck, Chinese radishes (like potatoes), 

stir-fried tomatoes and eggs, rice.

Ok, this has gotten long – as usual – so we’ll save a few more things for next time. Now that we’re out of the mire of culture shock we call “October,” we want to keep you updated more. We promise we’ll be better.

A Suzhou fast-food restaurant.

Don’t ever forget that we love you all and can’t thank you enough for making us who we are today! PLEASE come visit if you can. It is truly another world here, and it’s a fabulous place to live or visit.

  - Brett and Liz

P.S. – That sign-off reminds us: our students gave us Chinese names so it will be easier for the locals we meet to say our names:

Brett’s is Léi Tíng (“lay ting”) – like Tingley backwards. It means “thunderclap.”

Liz’s is Lìzhī (“lee jer”) – which means lychee.

  - Léi Tíng he Lìzhī