Although I’m still mourning my old veggie market, I’ve found a nice new place down the street. I miss chatting with my patient veggie lady, but this new shop is pretty good. The produce is fresh, the shop’s clean, the prices decent, and the employees, after shrieking their surprise that I can (sorta) speak Chinese, are helpful.
When I made my usual stop today, though, one of the shopgirls suspiciously asked me if I’m French.
I played a round of Who Do You Love? with my students on Friday. You put the chairs in a circle so almost everyone can sit down, and one person is left standing in the middle. The person in the middle asks someone sitting down “Who do you love?”
The person sitting down can say everyone, no one, or people who meet a certain condition. You can love people who have short hair or who wear sneakers or whose names begin with J, for example. Everyone who fits the condition has to get up and change places, and the person left without a seat is next in the middle.
It’s a fun game with a mad scramble for seats, and with even mildly creative students it gets better and better. I love people who can talk! I love people who wear underwear! I love people who don’t like Avril Lavigne! With teenagers, through, things like “I love you!”, “I love Nicole!” and “I love handsome boys!” are just incredibly funny to say.
To be honest, though, I mostly did it to see if my duds could move quickly when required. One got right into the spirit of the game, and did a great job throwing herself into different seats and shrieking with her classmates. The other whined and whined about not wanting to play so I sent her to the library for “self-study”. (Our school’s euphemism for “listening to her iPod”, but at least it’s not in my classroom.)
The game has another advantage. I have one student in that class, let’s call him Charlie Gordon, who is usually last to catch on. One kid would say “I love people who wear pants!” and Charlie would sit for a few moments trying to remember if he has pants, and then end up in the middle again. But the good thing about this game is the person who falls behind lands in the middle more so they spend more time talking the English talk.
Let me explain how Saturday morning works in our house. After I’ve been up for a few hours — and I am not an early riser — I try to get Stick moving. I offer him coffee, I remind him of the things we had planned to do today, I ask him what he wants for breakfast, I tell him there’s plenty of hot water if he wants a shower, I mention that some cultures place a value on waking before mid-afternoon. He responds with a grunt and falls back to sleep, completely unable to later remember having had any sort of conversation with me.
Finally, I give up and go back to reading my book, waiting for the sun to set and my vampire boyfriend to start moving. Around 2 PM, I’ll accidentally drop something in the living room. Today it was a jelly bean (a very sad waste, but there’s no 5-second rule in Beijing), last weekend it was a safety pin.
At the moment it hits the floor, Stick snaps awake and shouts “Baby! Are you alright? What was that?”
Listen to the podcast version here.
I heard a rumor at school today that the Tous Les Jours bakery was picketed by anti-French groups (who apparently don’t know that Tous Les Jours is owned by a South Korean company). Anyone know if this is true?
We stopped in Wu-Mei Mart the other night to buy out their entire stock of see if they had any Herbal Essences. To my great delight, I found a rack of the old-style conditioners, but I searched for the matching shampoo until finally a shop assistant showed me where it was.
In my defense, the arrangement of this particular Wu-Mei was, from left to right, an aisle of conditioner, one of hairspray and gel, then soap and lotion, then red giftboxes of cakes and vitamin supplements, and then shampoo.
I played Secretly Eating Pizza, an adverbs/verbs charades game with my teenagers yesterday and today. I put together this one for my Yantai drips, asa reward for all their hard work learning the difference between adjectives and adverbs. The game is quite simple, basically, you pick an adverb and a verb out of two bags, and then you act them out while the rest of the class guesses. Sometimes you get normal combinations, like Slowly Walking, but sometimes you’ll get Lovingly Riding a Bike or Rudely Brushing Your Teeth (I call it that because John, one of my little boys in Yantai, really really liked to “secretly eat pizza”).
It worked even better with teenagers, except for my usual duds, a girls or two per class who do about 2% of whatever the assignment is. Even activities that are usually fun get no response. I’m sort of hoping there’ll be a fire drill or emergency while I’m here just to see if they can move quickly.
I did the game in two classes, modifying the vocab a bit for different level of English proficency, and in both classes, a few duds slowed the game to an unfun crawl when they looked at their words, whined that they wanted new ones, stood in the front for a while deciding what to do, then apathetically waved their hands a little bit, so little that Angrily Exercising was indistinguishable from Languidly Waiting For A Bus, and then stood waiting for their classmates to become psychic.
I know there are dud students in every school in every city, like those kernels of corn that refuse to pop, but I’m stumped as teacher when I plan a lesson that has 18 people waving their hands and begging to go next, and 2 people looking like they’re at the dentist’s.
What do I do here? Do I let the duds sit and stare into spare (I originally wrote “doodle” here but that implies active creativity) while the games goes on, keeping everything fun, fast-paced and focused, but making participation in English class optional? Do I force them to participate, and let unenthused students make it lamer for everyone? I’m considering spiking their drinks, but I don’t know the Chinese word for uppers.
It’s impossible now to sort out truth from lies from spin from judicious editing in Tibet. Depending on who’s talking, huge numbers of innocent Tibetans were killed by over-zealous Han police… or innocent Han bystanders were killed by a violent Tibetan mob… or the death toll is much lower than believed, those names never existed at all. Depending on who you read, either the Chinese media is covering up something to make China look good or the Western media is making up something to make China look bad.
China calls whatever happened in Tibet last month an attempt by splittist groups to separate Tibet from Chinese control.
And everyone’s buying it. Even Westerners who scoff at Chinese media, who laugh at phrases like the “Dalai clique”, who can’t believe those gullible Chinese just naively accept whatever they’re told, are suddenly focused on Tibet and Tibetan independence.
A few weeks ago, there were many issues with China’s choices, but now, it’s all about Tibet.
Why is it? Is it just that “Free Tibet!” looks better on a poster than “Use your soft power to lean on the Sudan” or “Make good on environmental reforms”? Is it just that Tibet is a more romantic cause than quality control on exports? It can’t be personal relevance, most of us have never been to Tibet, but there’s something in your arm’s reach right now that was made in China. Is it the Dalai Lama’s charisma that gets protesters for Tibet… or is it because Richard Gere’s doing it?
Tough, complicated issues seem to be forgotten in favor of a cursory understanding and a Free Tibet shirt.
And that might be the greatest spin of all.
We got a package from Scep and Katie today…. guess what was in it?
YEAH!!!
(If you’re wondering what’s going on with my hair here, this picture presents firm evidence that when enough people say it’s yellow, my hair decides to play along.)
Related: My love for Cadbury Eggs,
The day that I’ve been dreading since we first arrived in China has finally come. Part of me knew it was going to happen, all the signs were there, but I was hoping I would have at least a few more months before the dreaded event occured.
The old Herbal Essences have been replaced.
“So Much Depends” with Chinese characteristics.
