Check Out My Sweet Ride
I’m going to call it Hot Rod. I picked it up for 300 kuai which is only about 44 US dollars. There were even cheaper ones, around 150 kuai, but I figured those would be the most likely to fall apart in the middle of the ridiculous Chinese traffic.
Anyway, after having them tighten up all the bolts, I rode it right out of the store and back home. By the way, the store I bought it from is called Carrefour (spelling?). I don’t know if they are in other countries or not. I would describe it as a store trying to be the way the Chinese imagine an American supermarket.
It’s laid out like a western store, so it seems very familiar. The biggest difference is that it’s like a combination of every store ever. The top floor is massive grocery store with tons of fresh fruit and vegetables and all kinds of weirdo meat. It also has all of the standard food like cereal and soda and cookies and snacks. But then you take the escalator downstairs and thats where you can find pretty much everything in the world. It has furniture, bedding, toiletries, motorized scooters, bikes, electronics, clothing, jewelry, school supplies, like really, everything. I could keep listing forever.
Maybe I’ll go back and take some pictures. I also need to take some pictures of the traffic that I’ll be riding in. Until then just trust me that Chinese traffic is such a retarded clusterfuck it’s like nothing you’ve ever seen. There’s 13 million people living in this city and none of them can walk, ride, or drive without getting in each other’s way.
I have a friend who would love it though because he could ride over pedestrians on his bike and nobody would give a shit. Pedestrians have 0% right of way. Buses and cars are king. Bikers are like wiley jesters switching from highway to sidewalk swerving in and out of cars and running down pedestrians. And that’s what I’ll be now.
Update: Apparently Carrefour is a pretty huge and well-known hypermarket chain run by the French. I probably should have just Googled it. But anyway, it’s still an amazing store.
Caption Contest: Ass Hair Salon
I found this little gem walking home from work today. Welcome to China everybody! What the fuck are they cutting at this place? Ass hair or the hair of people who are asses?
Anyway, I figure this is as good a piece of Engrish as any to use for a caption contest.
Submit your captions for the above photo in the comments. McCoy and I will select our favorite and we’ll find some Chinese knickknack to give you as a prize.
Here are some good terrible examples to get your started:
- “Ass Hair Salon: The closest shave from top to bottom.”
- “Finally you can show them your best side.”
- “Proper grooming is important for any lady.”
Okay, okay. You can all stop groaning now and come up with some funny ones.
No purchase necessary to win. Multiple entries permitted. Contest eligibility may vary. Prizes subject to nonexistence.
Hot Water, Still No Internet
We’ve been living in our apartment since Saturday night. We moved in all of a sudden and the landlord wasn’t really prepared, so we understood that some stuff wasn’t working. It was just nice to have a place.
Monday was supposed to be the day we got everything set up and that pretty much happened except for the internet. Hopefully tonight we will finally get it working and McCoy and I can start pumping out some new posts.
Just as a side note, we went from Friday night to Monday night without a real shower. It was torture to try to take cold showers. The water was like freezing sheets of ice rain. And what made it even worse was that we had a perfectly working water cooler that could give us boiling hot water for tea and coffee. It just taunted us.
I actually tried filling up a Nalgene bottle with the near-boiling water and taking it into the shower. So I was in there like jumping under the ice water and then jumping back and splashing myself with scalding water. I also tried mixing them in little glass drinking cups and lining them up on my shower shelves and pouring them over my head one at a time.
Anyway, this is what becomes of you when you lose some basic amenities. Just so you know…
3 Things Wrong With The Rewards System
Most schools use a rewards and incentives system for teaching children. They are particularly prominent in younger classes where you will see things like star charts and sticker boards. The idea is that the a student earns stars or stickers or happy faces for good behavior and gets nothing (or maybe frown faces) for bad behavior.
Before I talk about some of things wrong with this system, let me first say that it is way better than a strict “do as the authority figure says or get punished” method. It actually tries to establish a consistent set of rules for what constitutes good behavior and leans much more on the rewards side as an incentive. Compared to a system that essentially treats kids like slaves to be yelled at and bullied into behaving, the rewards and incentives approach is a great leap forward (China pun, har har).
The rewards system is to strict authority what democracy is to dictatorship. Sure, democracy is better than dictatorship, but it’s still a piece of shit. Here are three things that are wrong with the rewards system:
1. It Only Teaches One Thing: Obedience
The reward system is supposed to incentivize good behavior but what it really does is teach children that being “good” means following the authority figures’ rules. Now it doesn’t really matter what the teacher defines as good behavior. It might be not talking during class or always raising your hand before asking a question. Sometimes it’s just a reward for the correct answer — which sends a terrible message to the kids that don’t know the correct answer: you’re not good.
This is especially bad when you have a big old heap of arbitrary classroom rules. For example, my Chinese assistants don’t want the kids to talk during their meals. They have a good reason for it: there is only limited time to eat and once the kids start talking they almost always ignore their food. Then lunch will end and won’t be finished and they’ll be hungry the rest of the day. But if you combine this with the rewards system you end rewarding the kids that sit quietly during their meal and punishing (with frowny faces or loss of playtime) the kids that chat while eating.
I don’t know about you guys, but punishing a kid for talking while he’s eating seems like a pretty asshole thing to do. And it certainly isn’t going to teach them anything about morality. The only lesson they will get is do what you’re told and you’ll be rewarded.
What if the rules are rational and fair? Well that certainly would be better, but I’ve just never seen it. Sure there are classroom rules about hitting and fighting — I would consider those “rational” — but there are plenty more that are about things like sitting quietly, listening to the assistants, sharing toys, not speaking out of turn, lining up before going outside, washing hands before food, etc. Again, rewarding a kid for lining up before going outside just teaches them to obey authority, nothing more.
Even if you could establish a set of rational rules, I think the message would be the same. The authority you were learning to obey would be less random and make more sense, but you’d still be learning to obey. Consistent and reasonable authority is absolutely better than random and arbitrary authority, for sure, but the lesson is unchanged.
2. It Punishes The Wrong Person
Wait, what? I’ll explain. If I’m teaching a lesson and my students aren’t listening, if they are talking amongst themselves, or staring bored out the window how is that their fault? I’m the one who is being paid to teach them. It’s my job to make my lessons and engaging and interesting. If the kids are finding my lessons boring or uninteresting I’m pretty sure that it’s my fault, not theirs.
Instead of giving them frowny faces for not listening or stars for paying attention maybe I should just focus on being a better teacher. My students don’t owe me anything, and rewarding them for paying attention to my boring ass flashcard game is just a lazy excuse for being a shitty teacher.
It applies for almost every classroom rule that you might enforce using the rewards system. You can’t settle disputes between children without the threat of a frowny face? Fail. You can’t get the students to wash their hands before eating unless you give them stickers? Fail.
I’m not saying that it’s easy to do. It’s hard as hell. I know. I’m struggling to do it. But I refuse to switch to a system that punishes or rewards the students because of my shortcomings.
3. It Establishes Artificial Consequences
When it comes to kids you hear a lot of talk about having to teach them the “consequences” of their actions. This is always done by making up some bullshit fake consequence and then imposing it on them. This is often the excuse you hear for spanking kids. Besides it being just plain wrong to hit a kid, the excuse of “it teachers them consequences” is so retarded I hate even having to address it.
Guess what everybody? In the “real world” as “mature adults” you don’t get spanked for not behaving. Excluding the one violent relationship we are all forced to participate in with our benevolent political masters, nobody is allowed to use force against you when you “don’t behave.”
What are the types of consequences we do have to face? Well, there are the outright cause and effect ones. For example, if you don’t eat, you die. These are pretty straight forward and no child needs to be taught cause and effect through punishments and rewards. Kids learn cause and effect just by interacting with the world.
There are other types of consequences too, like how your actions affect others emotionally. These aren’t learned as easily as the physical cause and effect consequences, but you don’t need a rewards system to teach them. In fact a rewards system can’t teach these types of consequences. The only way you grow to understand the emotional effects of your actions is through empathy. You have empathy for yourself and understand how others effect you and then you have empathy for others and understand how you effect them. How do you encourage this in kids? That’s probably a topic for another post, but I think you start by showing them empathy.
Quick Update
More posts are coming soon we promise! We’ve been moving into a new apartment and still don’t have internet (or hot water). Once we get that stuff sorted out you can expect a flurry of new content. We’ve got some good stuff about food (with pictures), the crazy Chinese obsession with fireworks, and a lot of teaching-related thoughts.
Keep checking back!
