A Day in the Life of a Fake Teacher in the Real China
24 Jan 2010 Leave a Comment
in Teaching Tags: education, favors, gao kao, journey, private schools
One day I found myself squealing like a pig in front of children. I pushed my nose up, grunted, and oinked. We were playing a simplified version of charades. It was a Sunday afternoon in the bleak of January. And this being China, it was bleaker than bleak. The dean of my university had loaned me out to a private high school as a “favor.”
My latest rendition caught the students’ attention. Girls stopped texting and boys ceased roughhousing long enough to look up and shout “pig!” in unison. I asked the teacher if they’ve played this game before, adding, “They’re very confident.” Either the blood of Shakespeare coursed through my veins or the children were very smart.
I spent the next ten minutes striking curious poses. I shapechanged into a frog, duck, and cow. By some feat of thaumaturgy, I even managed to turn an ordinary seat into a flying bicycle, which I rode around the room. But the archfiend boredom was in the room as well. It stalked the children. One by one they fell prey it. I wondered if I could win their hearts and minds back if I showed them the wonderfullest trick of all – the coffin trick. That is escaping from a coffin after it had been nailed shut.
Teaching British Romanticism in China
17 Oct 2009 Leave a Comment
in Teaching Tags: alchemy, education, Hermes, Luddites, poetry, revolution, Romanticism
I’ve been procrastinating. A recent trip to Montana left me in a swoon. Now it was just a Movable Feast. But I needed to get back on track and prepare a lecture on American Romanticism & New England Transcendentalism. As I wrote this students were reading excerpts from The Scarlet Letter, The Raven, Song of Myself, &, Moby Dick. Each excerpt consisted of just 4-10 pages because that was all to their anthology. Luckily I was here to remedy the situation with my “traveling library”: 3 Norton anthologies, and several paperback novels.
So this unit on Romanticism wrapped up the first half the semester. We started with Thoreau’s “Reading” to frame the semester. Then we read The Alchemist. It was a simple allegorical novel written in 1988, but as I read it again and discussed it with the class it fit perfectly into the curriculum as a warm-up exercise. The story of Santiago, an Andalusian shepherd on a road trip to fulfill his dream, practically introduced Romanticism. Clever readers saw that it was a very Romantic text, building on the ideas of Thoreau and Transcendentalism.
The Government-Issued Literature Textbook
01 Oct 2009 Leave a Comment
in Podcasts Tags: allegory, education, Literature, metaphor, The Alchemist, The Cave, theme
I describe the government-issued anthology textbook for Chinese Students. It is good, but has the obvious deficiency of containing only snippets of the greater works. A story by Steinbeck, for example, has only one chapter. So this is just one reason why I began the semester with an allegorical novel about following your dreams.
Will Chinese Students One Day Appreciate Thoreau?
01 Oct 2009 Leave a Comment
in Podcasts Tags: Bartleby.com, consumerism, education, environment, life-long learning, Literature, Project Gutenberg, Thoreau
With the fast pace of growth in China and its emphasis on modernism, I wonder if my students will one day come to appreciate Thoreau’s ideals, especially his love of nature and his concern for the environment.
Understanding Thoreau
01 Oct 2009 Leave a Comment
in Podcasts Tags: adventure, alchemy, close reading, critical thinking, education, journey, liberal arts, Literature, nature, self-reliance, Thoreau
In this literature class I help Chinese university students decipher passages in Thoreau’s essay, “Reading,” pointing out that it may take multiple visits to his works — a journey over a span of years — to gain more understanding. I also answer a student’s question into why Thoreau thought reading the classics, preferably in the original Greek and Roman, was so important.
