Our Little Dumpling Shop
So Anderson and I have been looking for places to eat near our sweet apartment, and we found a little alleyway when Anderson, had to take a cab to work. There are a bunch of really cheap places to eat including a place that I am dubbing our little dumpling shop.
It’s really good food for a really low price, (13 yuan each or 1.90 USD) and also has cheap beers. Below are some pictures of our dinner tonight.
Here’s the inside of our shop.
Here are the dumplings or Jiaozi in Chinese.
Here are the xiaolongbao (which are nothing like the real things in Shanghai, too doughy).
More Jiaozi next to our 3 yuan (44 cents American) beers.
Jiaozi Soup.
The food being cooked outside.
Why I’m Failing At Participative Rule Setting
Yesterday I tried to have a participative rule setting session with my students. Since I’m obviously not a big fan of imposing rules on children or using a system of rewards and punishments I wanted to attempt a group discussion on what classroom rules we should have. Here’s the basic idea behind participative rule setting:
This process can be initiated by teachers at the beginning of the term to establish rules that the whole classroom finds fair and are willing to follow. Students are more likely to keep to their end of the bargain when using No-Lose Conflict Resolution and participative rule setting because of a simple bit of common sense called The Principle of Participation.
Simply stated, the principle holds that people who are invited to participate in making decisions or setting up rules that affect them somehow are more willing to abide by them or keep to their part of an agreement. We all like feeling that our views are being represented.
Sounds great. But it isn’t easy to do. Yesterday’s class didn’t go well. I’ll explain some of the reasons I think I failed.
I Don’t Speak Chinese
This is a pretty obvious one but I think it’s important to understand how hard it is to communicate with children that don’t speak the same language.
There are some native English speakers and a few kids who are semi-fluent. But for most our interactions involve very basic, merely functional English communication. It is simple stuff like hello, how are you, go outside, go to the bathroom, who wants to play and whatever phrases we’re learning that day.
Oh yeah, there is also upside down. (This is a frequent request from the girls who want me to pick them up and carry them around upside down. It’s like some kind of drug; they get high on having blood rush to their brain. Anyway, I love the game too so I’m not complaining.)
The rest of the communication is nonverbal. This shouldn’t be underestimated. I know 100% that the kids can tell from my body language, the way I smile or laugh, how I pick them up, and everything else that I’m different from the Chinese assistants.
But when it comes to communicating an idea it gets much harder. I said to the whole class “I know this classroom has a lot of rules and I know that you guys don’t like some of them. I was hoping that we could spend ten or fifteen minutes and talk about the rules and see if we can come up with some that everybody agrees on.” The English speaking kids understood this sentence (partially at least, more on that later) but the Chinese kids had no clue. And how could they? I tried to simplify what I wanted but it isn’t easy to do. And it just confused them more. This led to the second problem.
The Chinese Translators
In my classroom there are a couple Chinese teachers who are there to help. One of them is my assistant and part of her job is to translate for me.
Usually, this isn’t a problem. She’s the nicest of the Chinese assistants and treats the kids very well. Unfortunately, this whole Principle of Participation thing wasn’t something she was even remotely familiar with. So when I said “I know you guys hate the no-talking-during-lunch rule” she translated it to “no talking during lunch.”
She wasn’t doing it maliciously or anything. When I told her I wanted to talk about the rules, she probably just assumed that it meant we were going to recite the rules. What else could it mean?
Either way, her translations essentially came out the exact opposite of what I wanted. She turned it from a participative rule setting session into a reminder about all the rules currently imposed. Fail.
This Idea Is More Foreign Than A Second Language
This is the issue that even had the English speakers confused.
Children in schools are not used to getting a say in the rules. Even if they have great parents that practice these techniques (and there is probably a 1-in-2-billion chance of that being the case) there are even fewer schools that do. Kids are used to being ordered, prodded, pushed, commanded, controlled, subjected, restrained, adjusted, confined, directed, punished, silenced, and finally questioned. They’re like terror suspects minus the water-boarding (or not).
I’m some foreigner, that they’ve only known for a week, sitting them down and essentially saying “we’re going to do things the exact opposite of every thing you’ve previously experienced.” They had no idea what I was getting at. It was kind of like when I first told them we weren’t going to do rewards and punishments back on day one and they all just looked at me like confused puppies. Only then it was cute and funny. This time it was sad.
So What Do I Do?
I think I’ve laid out the biggest three issues. I can’t speak Chinese, my translators don’t know what the fuck is going on, and my kids aren’t used to this sort of thing at all.
So how can I make this work? I don’t know actually. I’m going to keep trying. But short of learning Chinese myself or hiring my own excellent translator I’m not sure what to do. I can’t go back in time and make their parents start them on this system. And I can’t change the way the entire school works.
This is why I’m writing this post. I want your ideas. I know there are some extremely intelligent people who visit this blog and I’m sure you are one of them. Help me.
Leave a comment or email me. Or, if you have no ideas, maybe you could pass this post on to a friend. Thank you!
Chinese Furniture Market
Today me and two friends went shopping at a Chinese furniture market. A “market” is a huge building with all kinds of different vendors. It’s kind of like an indoor flea market.
If you want to know why there is a plane parked in the front of the market, I’m sorry, but I can’t answer that. Like most things in China, the why seems more or less irrelevant. There’s a plane in front of the furniture market. Period. You don’t need a back-story.
Inside the furniture market looks like this:
Room after room just packed to the walls with whatever you might need. They even have the kitchen sink (har har okay I’ll stop).
If you’re interested in a shower that can also travel through time, you’ve come to the right place.
If you’re not so into the luxury of using space technology to shower, don’t worry, they have alternatives.
Who is using these things? My theory is that someone used the time travel shower to bring these things back from around 400 A.D. But what do I know? I’m just a guy who takes pictures of bathtubs.
This isn’t really related to furniture but one of the vendors had it on her desk for good luck. It’s pretty ridiculous.
It’s a golden frog surrounded by a bunch of coins. I’m assuming all of this nonsense is used to increase luck. With a high enough luck rating the vendor will receive +3 to their Ripping Off Foreigners skill.
McCoy’s Food Corner: Cafeteria Food
I’ve decided, actually it was probably about a week ago, back when we didn’t have internet, that I wanted to try to do a weekly post about different foods in China, with a Chinese vocabulary section in it. I’m going to start taking pictures and stuff now that I know I’m going to do this, so get excited for that. However for the first week I’m just going to give you a normal post.
Vocabulary words for the week: 啤酒 pi jiu – beer
冷水 bing shui – cold water
(I’ll put the tones in there later when I figure out how but for now I’m not going to)
These words were very dear to Anderson and I upon our arrival, because we wanted cold water and also beers. See the Chinese have a habit of drinking boiling hot water (probably to kill the bacteria), but being from America we expect our water to be cold. Anyway back to actual food post.
So I found out that they are going to feed me at my school, which is pretty nice, because I can save money by not paying for lunch. I also found out that cafeteria food is actually not that bad. Monday was rice, vegetables, and pork; Tuesday was rice, a vegetable, and spare ribs; Wednesday rice, vegetables, and chicken; and Thursday rice, vegetable, fish; and Friday was rice a vegetable and chicken wings.
Are you sensing a pattern? Yup that’s right, rice meat and some sort of random vegetable. It’s actually very good though and they give you a lot of food, so I’m not complaining. The kids are also fed the same thing as the adults for lunch but they also get breakfast and dinner, which I find to be kind of odd.
The other problem is that they are fed the same thing for breakfast and dinner. It’s always a soup that has tofu in it for breakfast and something rather similar with rice for dinner. It seems like it would be pretty boring, and it’s also weird that they are fed all 3 meals, but hey, it’s China and they aren’t starving in the fields like in the past so they deal with it.
Anyway my food corner will be better when I start incorporating pictures and get into more interesting foods. While I’m still trying to get settled and on a real schedule I’ve been eating out of the school and the convenient store downstairs. Hopefully this week I’ll start exploring the food more in depth.
And I’m Back…
Sorry guys, I’ve been really busy moving in and been really tired from actually having a job. Also Anderson and I were watching Dexter, so any free time that I’ve had has been spent falling asleep to that. By the way if you’ve never watched Dexter, start, now.
Anyway so I’ve started at my new school, and it’s pretty awesome. The kids can get pretty rowdy at times but that’s more on me than it is on them, but they are freakin’ awesome. The one problem that I am dealing with is the fact that I have like 120 kids so trying to learn all their names will be quite a task, but I’m up for the challenge.
The one problem is that even within classes some of the kids are on much different levels, so some of the kids are way ahead of the words I’m trying to teach, and others are way behind. This I suppose is a dilemma of a lot of teachers (and is also a problem with schools in general), but there isn’t too much I can do about it. I try to work with the kids who are behind and try not to favor the kids who are ahead (they are usually easier to work with and I have an urge to favor them).
The school that I’m at is much better than I expected. From the stories that I’ve heard about the school they never usually help the foreign teachers, but on the first day my 90 minute class went really well and they brought in a translator so that I could communicate with the other teachers, and they said that they really like me, which means job security.
This is important because teachers tend to be moved around a lot. This means that they could move me out at any time, which seems to happen a lot. I don’t think that I will have much of a problem because as far as I can tell I am doing a pretty good job, and I assume that most of the people who come to China to teach are not here to actually teach. In fact I’ve often come across this with the teachers that our recruiter brought in.
I’ve also talked to other sources who have said the same thing applies for other countries like Korea. Why would you come to China if you don’t like Chinese food, for instance or if you don’t like kids. It really makes no sense. Anyway I’m going to leave you all with the clip below in case this post was terrible. Enjoy!
Here’s a video to entertain you with in case this post was bad http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KjGfgV7rJHI
