Xiaoxue 小学

I thought that teaching some classes in Anhui was hard. There was no lesson plan and every day I would stand in front of a new class of kids who were less interested in learning English than they were in seeing a foreigner for the first time. Even so, those classes in Anhui were fun because the kids were only a few years younger than me, and they weren't afraid to talk to me and ask questions.

Saturday I went with one of the teachers from Hutong school, Zhangqian; an Italian, Gabriele; and three Chinese college students to a suburb of Beijing to teach English in an elementary school. I was the only native English speaker. As Gabriele put it, "Those poor kids: they're going to end up with an Italian-Chinese accent!"

I had a great time. I taught the alphabet and numbers to about 12 six-year-olds for a few hours, and I entertained them with my fantastic Chinese. Unfortunately, after we got to "12," I ran out of material (I probably could have kept going up to 100, but the kids were having a hard enough time remembering "five").

Teaching elementary school kids who have almost no experience with English is completely different than teaching middle school kids who have studied English since elementary school. These students knew the English alphabet, but I don't think they knew what it meant. Instead of teaching them to read English, their teachers teach them pronunciations by using Chinese characters--This is similar to the Chinese technique for transliterating Western names, and has the curious effect of making Chinese English unrecognizable. The teachers also don't bother to teach the meanings of English phrases: One girl caught me off guard by asking what "thank you" means: I had a hard time answering at first because I couldn't tell if she was saying an English word or a Chinese word. But when I figured out her question, I couldn't help wondering why someone would have taught her that phrase without telling her how to use it.

I think that at the end of the day I may have learned more than the kids I was trying to teach than they learned from me. I learned a lot about the condition of Chinese schools in small towns. I learned that even suburbs of huge cities can still be small towns that benefit very little from their proximity to an urban center. I learned that the Chinese version of the ABC song is different than the American version (they don't get the lmnop part). Meanwhile, the students only learned the hokey-pokey and an ad-hoc version of duck, duck, goose AKA ya, ya, e.

The best part of the day was that I met three Chinese college students. These are pretty much the first Chinese friends I have made here who are my age. They are really great because they are not Beijingers--two of them come from Hunan, and the other was from somewhere else in the south. The Hunanren were great: they taught me some dialect and were generally fun to talk to. The other student was really interesting because she has travelled over more of the world than me. We all made fun of her because she has been to so many foreign countries, but not to many places in China--She has been to Germany, Italy, America, Denmark and Spain, but never to Hunan.

After we returned to the city, we all went out to eat together, and then to a bar at Houhai where I was really excited to be able to order chocolate milk. Dinner was a rooftop joint where we ordered something on the order of 100 chicken wings for 6 people. I tried to impress the southerners with my ability to eat spicy food, but in retrospect I don't recommend trying to eat 4 super-spicy wings at once without any rice to absorb the hotness... today I lost my voice completely! At any rate, I think my daring paid off and everyone was suitably impressed. I'm planning on going out with them for Hunan food and maybe Karaoke.

The whole day was great, but exhausting. Switching between three different languages (English for the sake of Gabriele, Chinese when we didn't need to include him, and French when Gabriele and I needed to leave out the Chinese (although neither of us speak French very well)) is draining and the sheer amount of talking may have had an influence on my current inability to speak. Also, playing with the kids took a lot of energy! After chocolate milk, I came home and fell asleep.

As my Hunanese sister-in-arms against our friends who wanted to go dancing put it: "They are the royalty of dance, We are the royalty of sitting and sleeping."

I can't wait to do it again!