Teaching Nineteen Eighty-Four in Mao Country
06 Jul 2010 Leave a Comment
in Teaching Tags: Literature, Orwell
Every Wednesday evening six Chinese girls came to my apartment. By the middle of the Spring 2010 term at Xiangnan University in the home province of Uncle Mao and General Tso, I had come to depend on them to keep me happy. They were junior English majors and picked English names like Tina, Victoria, Christie, Helen, Cherries, Emilia, and Emma. Without their attention, kindness, and passion, I surely would have gone crazy as is so much the fate of many foreigners who come to China looking for love or a new life. But I am getting ahead of myself.
It was a dismal cold day in March when I met with the vice dean of the English Department. A frigid mist blanketed the campus. The college itself clung to the sides of a green karst peak. It was the day before the official start of the Spring 2010 term. Students were still arriving from holidays spent with their families in the countryside and the cities. And I had just returned from a tour through Yunnan, Laos, and Vietnam to prove to myself that a nuclear winter had not in fact descended upon the heartland of China, and that this information had somehow been censored by the government in order to a maintain its grip on social harmony.
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.
Traditional Chinese Medicine & Elizabethan Theatre
24 Sep 2009 1 Comment
in Teaching Tags: alchemy, Bartleby, Bee-Bee, chi, death, Drama, education, fate, freedom, Gee, Julius Caesar, life, Literature, madness, magic, Project Gutenberg, Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare, TCM, The Congo, theatre, Traditional Chinese Medicine, tragedy, troll, undead, Vachal Lindsay, yin and yang
With 16 teaching hours per week and a four day weekend it seemed that I had an abundance of free time. There were no office hours required, but I provided nine hours during evenings throughout the week for students wanting to talk about literature, culture, or life. It had to be evenings because the studentry were in classes all day long, day after day. But despite this I was practically on sabbatical.
I had the free time to get literary, practice yoga, explore grimy Chenzhou, and plan my upcoming Tibet expedition. I contacted the Xiangnan University medicine school faculty to meet with them for a tour of their facilities, and learn about the Chinese health care system. It would make for another podcast. And I researched online. Research was the first step to finding out what I wanted to learn and explore.
Before I contacted the medicine school, I acquainted myself with Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM). The internet enabled me to consult the starry forest of the night, and find homeostatic balance between yin and yang, anima and animus. The stars aligned and those who had the sight could decipher them and see the interrelationship between the macrocosmos and the microcosmos. I felt chi flow around me, through me. But I was not a Jedi yet.
