A mid-semester update.

Hello faithful readers,

Because of the lack of consistent access to this site, I haven't been updating it. Well, now I am.

I figured now would be an appropriate time to update you on my travels because last week was mid-term week for my school. So I'm going to give you a general update on my feelings, attitude, and findings about China.

Before I left, many of my friends asked me what I expected from my time in China. I gave them all the same answer: I have no expectations. I simply want to travel, meet people, explore cultures, and discover hidden ideas about the world and myself that I did not know before. My no-expectations attitude towards China has made what could have potentially be a disastrous trip to a much more manageable one. Whenever you are in another culture, particularly one as opposite to ours as China, patience and flexibility are the key characteristics to not going insane. In fact, the amount of Westerners who come to China without those qualities and then cease to complain about their misfortunes baffles me. ("I didn't order this. This is ridiculous. Why can't they EVER get my food right?" "Well, that's because you're the only person this month who has spoken to them in English. Get over it.")

My school is still a joke. An absolute joke. While Buckland, the recruiting agency, was phenomenal, professional, and quick to assist me in any of my concerns, the school, particularly the administration, has been the opposite. Not once has anyone from the school shown me around the city. Not once has anyone offered language lessons. Not once has anyone from the school said anything complimentary about my work. The only time I get brought into the office is to be criticized over something insignificant that I most likely did not do. Just last week, I was told that I needed to stop coming late to class. I have not been late to class once this semester, but of course, I smiled and nodded.

I am frustrated by the lack of Chinese that I know. I have never been good at taking initiative. I'm more than content staying in my apartment in the evenings. Given the choice of learning Chinese on my own and brushing it off, I will, more times than not, brush it off. However, if you give me a Chinese tutor and a time to meet, then I'm there, prepared, and ready to learn. Of course, the school has not provided the contractually-obligated teacher, so I have been stuck using Rosetta Stone during the times that I feel compelled to learn. And while Rosetta Stone has taught me some basic words such as some of the colors and animals and whatnot, none of it is applicable to conversing with the Chinese. I doubt I'll be able to order at a restaurant before my time is up.

I do not travel as much as I would like. I'm quite jealous of my Aston friends - they work Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, which means they have four days a week off. There are so many cities in the area that I would love to visit (Chengdu, for example, is a 8 hour train ride away. If I had four days off, I could leave Sunday evening and ride through the night, spend four days there, and take the train back in the evening, getting back just in time to teach.) I'm also jealous of some of the stories of the other Buckland teachers - getting full weeks off for mid-terms, getting TWO weeks off because of H1N1 (yes, every day I show up to work I pray that a few more kids have it), while I'm stuck at my job.

The silver lining is that because of my lack of social life (see later in this entry), I have been saving up quite a lot of money. When my contract expires in February (it actually expires in July, but they don't know I'm leaving yet [I assume they can't read anything I type within parenthesis]), I will be have more than enough money (At least 12,000 yuen [About $1750]) to travel around China, and I will not need to worry about the return flight home because the school is supposed to pay for it. Since I don't have anything to do until my family's cruise in late March, I'll be able to leisurely explore China at my own pace.

Where do I want to go? Everywhere. China has a surprisingly thorough train system, which Westerners do not use nearly enough. The top of my list is Beijing, of course, but there's two major problems with that. 1) Beijing. February. COLD. Cold Cold Cold. I hate the winter, and I hate the cold. 2) February happens to the month of a little holiday called "Chinese New Year", where 1.2 billion people return to their homes to celebrate life, renewal, good health, fortune, and of course, family. What this means is that the train systems will be PACKED. And they will be packed with people going to Beijing. But...It's Beijing. How can I live in China for a year (six months) without going to Beijing?

Where else do I want to go? Well, everywhere I can. Of course, there's the big cities: Shanghai, Chengdu, Changsha, Shenzhen, Guangzhuo, Kunming (There's an ULTIMATE tournament there in February), Hong Kong, Macau (gambling!). But then there's the smaller, more historic/cultural sites that are out of the way but I would be foolish to pass up. Can I fit all this in with my money/time limitations ? Who knows.

Classes. The classes, much like the school itself, is a joke. I teach 9 classes twice a week, for 40 minutes a session. I teach 2 third grade, 4 fourth grade, 2 fifth grade, and one sixth grade class. The third grade classes are the only classes that have a Chinese teacher in them. Of these classes, the only classes that listen to me are one of my grade four classes (There is a boy who speaks excellent English who does a very good job of keeping the others in line) and my grade six class (This class is absolutely unbelievable. They respect me as they would a Chinese teacher, and we have so much fun together). The third grade classes are rowdy, but they are fun, and they are just so darn cute that even though we don't accomplish a thing, I look forward to that class. The rest of the fourth and fifth grade classes are simply ridiculous.

They yell, fight, yell at me in Chinese, and generally ignore me. A 40 minute class typically begins with me standing for about 15 minutes, waiting for them to stop talking (They know that I will not try to fight with them over their attention. If they don't want to learn English, that's more than fine with me), 10 minutes of me standing still after I say "Good morning class" and they begin talking again, a 5-10 minute introduction, and 10 minutes of actual lessons. The most frustrating aspect of this is that the moment a Chinese teacher walks in, they are SILENT. Completely silent. The Chinese teacher leaves, and it once again is like I'm not even there.

Fortunately, and as sad as this sounds, I have learned very quickly not to care about my job. For the classes that pay attention to me, I will go to no ends to make sure that you are learning English and developing your conversation skills. For the two or three kids in each class that DO want to listen, I will stand next to you during the class and help you go through the books. However, I'm not going to try, in vain, to teach over a class of 60 when it is clear that they are uninterested and are unwilling to respect me as a teacher.

Oh well.

Ah, my social life. It seems that most of the Buckland teachers either have a wonderful social life and terrible classes/school, or fantastic classes but a non-existent social life. I am lucky enough to pick the bad ends of both of these straws. Hanzhong, a city of 500,000 to 4 million (The numbers are arbitrary), has 14 Westerners. Of these 14, there are 4 that are my age and have a decent enough personality that spending time with them isn't an exercise in patience in itself. Unfortunately, 2 of them live across the river. The river with the bridge. The river with the bridge that was recently torn down so that it could be expanded. Thus, it takes them about an hour's trip to get to downtown, where I live. The other two teachers work for Aston, which means they work on the weekends, so we do not get to see each other as often as we'd like.

That, combined with my lack of Chinese, means that I have very little to do on the weeknights and even less choices on the weekend. The frustrations of the weeknights tend to be relieved at a local bar, but being the only Westerner at a bar and not knowing Chinese can be very hit-or-miss. Some days I am lucky enough to meet some people who know English and we have a fun conversation (and they inevitably pay for the booze). Other times I spend a few hours talking to a group of people....and then I find out they are sixteen years old.

Needless to say, my social life is not as complete as it could be. Another frustrating thing about China.

Now, with all my complaints that I've listed, people may be under the impression that I'm not enjoying myself, but that could not be further from the truth. In fact, my experiences here have confirmed my desire and passion for the things that I was not too sure about before.

1) I love teaching. I hate teaching these kids, but I love teaching. The time that I spend in the classroom has shown me that teaching is very enjoyable. You know that look in a kid's eye when he finally comprehends something that he has been struggling with? It is impossible to beat that. I get an incredibly amount of joy knowing that I've positively impacted a kid's life. Do I see myself in a domestic classroom setting anytime soon? Probably not. But I could certainly do ESL again, although probably in a different country. My time in China has shown me what to look for and what to avoid.

2) I love traveling. Regardless of what happens at the end of the day, i am able to look outside and ponder the improbabilities of me ending up 15,000 miles away from my home, in a culture dramatically different from my own, surrounded by a language that could not be further linguistically from English. And that makes me smile. I want to continue traveling, continue meeting people, and continue exploring the hidden wonders of Earth.

3) People. The best part about my trip to Xi'an was meeting the other Westerners and getting to share our lives with each other. People who travel have the most wonderful stories of faith, love, and hope. They are forced to rely on other strangers for the most basic necessities of life, and even though they are more than aware of the evils of humanity, they continue to put their faith in people. The fact that people still travel reveals the basic nature of people - we are desperate to know people and to have them know us.

Now, I've said multiple times that I would be coming back in February, but that may not be the case. Am I going to stay at this school? Absolutely not. However, I can definitely see myself going to a different school and having a completely different experience. I want to come back for many reasons: I miss my family, my friends. My family is going on a cruise in March that I'd like to go to. A close friend of mine is getting married in June. If I stay until July and get accepted to my graduate programs I'll be home for about two weeks before I make another trans-continental trek. But with all these reasons beckoning me back, I will have a deep desire to stay.

Like I said. It's China? I am lucky, blessed, and fortunate to take this journey, and I want to make the most of it.

Well I'd say that was a pretty sufficient entry. Hope you had fun reading that book.

For those of you who haven't seen them yet, I've uploaded a few videos to my youtube page.

www.youtube.com/cckrspnl56

There are more to come.

I might have an address!

This is what they tell me my address is, but I'm not sure:

Corey Cox
Hanzhong Experiment Elementary School
Hanzhong, Shaanxi, China 723000

Here comes the tricky part! You need to put in the chinese characters as well. I don't know how that works, but I'm assuming if you print them out and paste it on the front of the envelope it'll work. Basically, if you don't do that, your letter will sit in a chinese post office until someone who knows English gets around to it. That could take half a year

陕西省汉中市实验小学

Send me goodies! do it!

Frustration

I've been a little bit disappointed by the school so far. The administration likes to tell me things on a need-to-know basis, assuming that I only need-to-know about 5 minutes in advance. Here are four examples I can think of at the top of my head.

1) I arrived Sunday afternoon - they told me to take the week off and I would begin teaching next Monday. On Thursday afternoon, they gave us our schedules and told us that we would begin teaching immediately. Laura, the other teacher, had a class 5 minutes after they gave us the schedule. Of course we were completely unprepared, we had no lessons whatsoever. We asked to observe a class and were shrugged off. Laura did not know how to react, but the teachers saw that we were frustrated and told us that we could teach on Friday.

2) Saturday morning, Owen, the president of Buckland (the recruiting agency that I am working for) came to visit. I knew he was coming, not because the school informed me but because Jake and Alyssa, two teachers who are teaching on the other side of the city, told me. I was given a call at about 11:15 saying "Come down stairs, Owen is here." We ended up talking with the principal, who I met at the meeting (even though I had been here for a week). Then, they took us out for a lunch, which was a great honor and very nice of them. However, they did not tell us we were going out to lunch so Laura ended up going to a very fancy dinner....in shorts.

3) This morning, at about 8:15, I was naked, literally about to walk into the shower. I get a phone call from one of the teachers. "Corey, we need to have a meeting. Come to the English office at once. We are waiting for you there." She hung up before I had a chance to tell her I was 5 seconds away from showering. Oh well, I put on some clothes, walked out, met with Laura and gave her the "Yep, this is happening" look. We get there and end up waiting 5 minutes for the rest of the teachers to show up. They tell us that we are switching classes; I am doing grades 3-6 and Laura is doing 1-3. Laura spent about 8 hours over the weekend prepping for the lessons. She asks when they decided to switch, and they respond, "Saturday morning."

4) At 2:30 in the afternoon I get a knock on my door saying that I need to have a meeting with the FAO (foreign affairs officer). We have a 20 minute meeting, going over things that I have already been told.

Living and working in China means you have to be flexible. Things like this are normal, and many other teachers are experiencing the same difficulties that I am. This is not a unique situation, unfortunately. It is one of the major differences between Chinese and American culture.

Anyway, my first classes were on Friday, and I definitely over-estimated how much English they knew. However, I also got conflicting reports from different teachers on what is expected from me. Buckland has told me that because I am an oral teacher, it is my primary responsibility to encourage the kids to talk and work on their pronounciation. One of the teachers told me simply to write things on the board and have them repeat it. One teacher said I needed more vocab and that I should work on their sentences. Another teacher told me that I needed less and that they did not understand sentences yet.

At first I was frustrated because I knew that no matter what position I took, I was going to fail, lose face, and look like a terrible teacher in at least one person's eyes. But as I thought about it I realized that I honestly don't care what they think. I only care if I fail the kids. I want to be a great teacher for the kids, to show them the importance of English and hopefully instill some sort of seed that will help them in the future.

Anyway, my first two classes were 2nd grade and I did pretty badly in both of them. The next 2 classes were third grade, and inbetween my second and third classes they told me just to go from the books (The books are terrible, by the way). Because of that I scrapped my third grade lesson plans and taught from the books. The classes were better, but I still knew that I needed to improve.

I don't know why they switched us so early. They said that I would be better with the older kids, but I honestly think that Laura will do better with the older kids and that we would be about the same with the younger kids. I can't even imagine how to teach first graders when they don't understand basic commands such as sit down, be quiet, stand up, raise your hand, etc, but that's something that I need to fumble through until I pick it up. To switch us after one class period seems very pre-emptive.

Tuesday and Wednesday I am supposed to be observing the teachers to get ideas on how to improve my lessons. That's great and all, but I'm supposed to be *different* from the Chinese teachers. They have given me no structure or information about what my role is. Are the Chinese teachers teaching the same lessons as I am, so I am just doubling up? Am I supposed to be teaching something different, or am I supplementing what the students know? What are the particular English goals for each grade? (What should a competent 5th grader know about English when he is finished for the year?) My answer for all of these questions: I have no idea.

So yes, it's frustrating, being thrown to the wolves like this. It's not a matter of competency, but rather it simply takes time to get used to the classes, the structure, the culture of Chinese teaching, and the many other aspects that I did not think I would have to get used to.

At the end of my last class on Friday, a couple little 3rd grade girls came up to me and introduced themselves in textbook English style "Hello how are you? "I am fine, thank you very much, and you?" "My name is ___ What is your name?"

After we got through that, we smiled at each other and I gave them high fives. Immediately 5 other kids jumped towards me to give me high-fives, and I spent the next 5 minutes laughing and high fiving them. It brightened my day and helped put everything in perspective.

When it comes to the kids, I will give them everything I got. When it comes to the administration, I plan on giving them about as much time and energy as they give me, and at the moment, that's not a lot.

I do hope that things will change, but from what I have heard from previous teachers working here, that looks unlikely.

I haven't even gotten into the ridiculous rules and regulations they have given me so far (9pm curfew on weeknights? Yeah, right).

Update

Hey! It's working again! Somtimes it is impossible to get around the nation-wide block of certain sites, and this site in particular has been giving me a lot of trouble.

I've spent the last week in Yangshuo doing my orientation. It's a week long training course that is supposed to introduce you to the culture of china, basic teaching methodology, and help prepare your first few lessons. Overall, it was a good experience and I'm glad they did not just throw me into a classroom with no preparation.

It is said that you will find more Westerners in Yangshou than anywhere in China besides Beijing. Considering the population of Yangshuo is about 100,000, this is a pretty big claim. It is a great city to be "introduced" to China because you don't get the stares that you get everywhere else. A fair amount of people know English, or at least enough English to help you buy what you need. (Compared to where I am now, where it took me 15 minutes to order noodles and beef, and as I was eating the entire restaurant stopped to stare at me.) It's a very beautiful city. Somewhere on the blog is a picture of it but I have no idea how to move it down here.

On Friday I found out that I am going to a primary school in Hanzhong, located in central China. I requested a secondary school in southern China, but after dealing with the ridiculous heat and humidity of Yangshuo I'm pretty happy with where I am.

Friday night Owen, the owner of Buckland, took us out for an amazing feast. In China, all the dishes are put in the middle and people just grab as they go. It's also a common occurrence to order about twice as much as you need. The food kept coming, and coming, and coming. It was delicious, too.

That's all for now. I'll try to update about traveling to Hanzhong and the first few days in Hanzhong later, but I need a nap.

Quick Update

Hello Hello Ni Hao!

I'm at Yangshuo now and just wanted to give a quick update. I'll give a full update when I've settled into my real apartment, about a week from now. We are doing orientation this week, which is taking up most of our time. I'm having a great time and enjoying it. The people are great and the other teachers are friendly and fun. There are people from throughout the world: England, Australia, Canada, and of course America. The accents are sweet.

Gotta go! It turns out China does block this website, so my access is very limited. We'll see if it works when I get to my real apartment.

Preparations

One of the strangest things about this trip is that there have been very few setbacks. When I applied to the Peace Corps, it was a year of two steps forward, one step back, and eventually it came to the point where I figured if the application process was this ridiculous, I most likely would not be able to accomplish what I want to accomplish overseas.

This isn't necessarily a good thing. It's very likely that the lack of setbacks is because I haven't prepared like I have, but as I get closer to departure, everything seems to be coming together. My visa came along with very little trouble, I am holding my plane tickets in my hand, I've talked to people who used to work for this organization and they say that the place is pretty legit (which is saying a lot for a Chinese teaching agency).

I've got one suitcase packed and the rest of my stuff is scattered throughout the living room. It's starting to hit me that I'm actually leaving, and I'm more sad than anything right now. I'm going to miss my friends and family. I'm starting to prepare myself for lonely nights, but I will be able to handle it. I am excited that I'm going to be meeting new people, though.

Anyway, I'm leaving in 36 hours. I just found out that blogspot is one of the many sites that China has been blocking, so this might actually be one of the shortest-lived blogs ever. Hopefully not, though.

If you have skype, my name is cckrspnl56. Feel free to add me.

Thoughts

In five days I will be boarding a plane and spending the next year of my life in China.

I've been thinking about the course of actions that led me to where I am today. I've never been particularly interested in China, nor have I been particularly interested in foreign languages, teaching English as a second language, or spending a year away from my family and friends.

After the Peace Corps fell through, I still had a deep longing to travel the world. The world is far too large for me to stay in one place, ignorantly assuming that my beliefs and assumptions about the world are correct. I want to learn from every culture. I want to understand humanity and become more deeply connected to it. I want to see what brings people joy, what causes their pain, and how we as people can come together to create a better world. As cheesy and naive as that sounds, it is one of the most important goals in my life.

Recently, the thought of working in international affairs has been in the forefront of my mind. Being a citizen of, by far, the most powerful country in the world, I believe it is our responsibility to be the leaders of this "better world", to ensure that people have food, that people can express their beliefs without fear of reprisal from their governments, and that they are given a solid chance to create their own destiny.

I am not saying that the United States government should play father to all peoples in the world, I am simply stating that we as people need to fully understand the implications of our actions in a world that is increasingly globalized. We have more of an opportunity now to produce a world of equality than ever before. My philosophy comes down to this: If it is possible to do something that makes the world better, we are morally obligated to do so. Most people would argue that it is our moral imperative to help a wounded person on the street. I would argue that the majority of the world is a wounded person on the street.

One of the most rewarding experiences of my life has been the "Free Hugs" campaign, where, sporadically throughout the school year, I would take out a sign that says "Free Hugs" and give out hugs to people who want them. It is a reminder of our shared humanity and the importance of love and empathy. Although many people shy away, tease, or laugh, the people that give a large hug and whisper, "This is what I needed today, thank you," ensure that this is a tradition that I will not stop.

What does that have to do with foreign affairs, or more importantly, why I am in China? I'm not particularly sure, actually. I think I am trying to get across that I do want to understand people, and somehow I think that this trip to China is going to help me do that. By experiencing a culture drastically different from my own, I will get a greater, broader sense of the world as well as understanding my place in it.

When this opportunity came up, I knew I had to take it. I am scared as hell, (I am a 23 year old child), but I know that if I don't go I will regret it in the future. I'm mostly scared of failing, that I won't be able to spend the entire year there because of various reasons, but I am not going to let my fear take away an experience of a lifetime.

And maybe I'll bring home a panda.