I See No Changes, and That's the Way It Is

James has been making muffins all this week. Each day, I help him take an armload full of raw materials—eggs, flour, bananas, baking powder, and water—to the main teaching building and set them up in his classroom. As I go across the hall to start my own class, he leads a couple of students back home for a second trip to bring over a collapsible round table (for cooking purposes) and a small toaster oven containing a flat baking tin and a muffin tray. For the lesson, James goes over the requisite cooking vocabulary on the board and proceeds to demonstrate the cooking words involved with making muffins in class—cutting, pouring, mixing, stirring, baking, etc. Most of the time, he leaves enough time at the end of class to actually bake the muffins, cut them up, and then give them to his students to try. But occasionally, he ends up having to haul the whole eggy, doughy batch back home before popping the muffin tin into our little toaster oven here.

Paired with homemade chai masala, these scones were lovingly made by Anne and Kelly using the toaster oven last May.

For a miniscule red box, it's certainly had its work cut out for it. In the last two years alone, it has been used to make bagels, pizza, chocolate cake, cookies, scones, apple pie, bread, and increasingly, banana muffins. Though it isn't quite ideal for the job, and indeed, the end product sometimes ends up being just as surprising as the sum of its parts, it does the work, and has the desired result of putting us closer to our American culinary roots than anything else we can buy here. As it slowly percolates in the living room, the house begins to fill with the smell of bananas, its scent feeling both close and far away—from the dust-covered fruit stalls that line North Yard to the thick bunches that hang down along the lush forests of Laos and Thailand—eventually forming into plump, lightly-browned morsels of fluffy goodness. Like every other baked good in Taigu that has come before it, it is met with equal parts greedy fanaticism and wonderment.

*

My lesson this week is considerably less interesting. I'm starting a new topic on travel and am soliciting “most interesting” stories from my students' winter vacations. In the process, I told them about my own journey, which came with a fair degree of guilt, both with respect to my disposable income as a teacher and the relative ease of mobility afforded by my passport. Still, they all got a kick out of the 50 or so photos that I printed out and the stack of bills and coins that I brought in to show them from all of the various countries. As having taught for close to two years now, I should know better than to ask these things of my students. I started every Monday class last year by asking my students what they did over the weekend. Their responses ranged from “played with friends” to “ate a big meal” to “washed clothes.” To be fair, it's not too far from the activities that typify my own life here, but it still didn't do much to inspire confidence in the kinds of anecdotes they would come up with following nearly two months without class.

For more than 90% of my students, their responses fell into a handful of general categories—spent time with their family, attended their high school reunion, watched TV, attended a friend's wedding, played computer games, got drunk and did karaoke, helped with chores around the house, cooked meals for the parents (some, for the first time ever), or looked after aging grandparents or new nieces and nephews. One of my first-year English majors excitedly related a story about playing mahjong with some of her friends. At the end of the game, she said, the loser had a punishment. She paused and scanned the room, suppressing a laugh with her hands. They had to drink cold water! Very few of them left their hometown at all and even less explicitly traveled during the break. It doesn't help that China does a uniquely bad job during spring festival (Chinese New Year) of fostering travel. In a country where tens of millions of people are all leaving where they live to take trains, buses, and planes sometimes over hundreds of miles to make it back to their ancestral hometown is an immensely frustrating feat that leaves little desire or opportunity in the way of actually traveling for fun.

Along with the “most interesting” stories, I paired this lesson with a general discussion on travel, including the question, “if you could go anywhere in the world, where would it be?” Again, it didn't make for the most stimulating conversation. Our students all seem to have preconceived notions on which places are worth visiting and why. There was “romantic Paris,” “mysterious Egypt,” “snowy Vancouver,” and “lavender Provence.” Hawaii, Tibet, and interestingly, the Sahara Desert were also strong contenders. It was as if they had all seen the same travel documentary explicitly stating where people go when they travel—as if this handful of places constitutes all the world's tourism traffic. Frustrated with the seeming lack of creativity, Gerald recently took up an experiment in his classes in which he asked each of his students to come up with an “original thought,” which he defined as something no one has ever thought of before. I did my own creative writing exercise too, having students use the photos from my travel to write their own short stories. In both cases, about a quarter did the assignment well— not basing their thought or story on a movie, a novel, or an event in Chinese history.

This lesson, along with James's impromptu baking, make up a couple of lessons I have come to coin as “greatest hits.” At the beginning of the year, there are mock restaurant lessons centered around ordering food. Around Halloween, there is pumpkin carving in class. For a clothing lesson, we come in wearing four or five layers of tops, bottoms, and accessories and manually strip each one of them off to the delight of our students; later they describe their own clothing as they act as fashion models in a runway show. A topic on marriage and dating yields both a speed dating exercise as well as a marriage counseling skit in which pairs of couples give the fictitious reasons for why they want a divorce. And just in the last year, James and I created a New York City lesson utilizing photos of places of interest that students then locate using subway maps. By their nature, these are the kinds of lessons that have been passed down for years among each generation of foreign teachers. Like a gigantic game of telephone, the best lessons are those that survive through oral history with minor changes made along the way, resulting in a kind of institutional memory. A similar thing can be said about our day-to-day lives.

Pumpkin carving in my Group C class for Halloween last year.

*

Each of us here in Taigu essentially has the same life—we all teach the same number of hours at about the same times, live in the same kinds of houses, and take the same vacations. We have meals together, share the same friends, and participate in the same group activities. The difference comes in the details. Though some of us spend more time exercising and others watching movies, some playing computer games and others writing, it is rare when any one of breaks significantly from that mold. Even for Fellows in years past, I hazard to guess that only minor tweaks have been made to the same general formula. An old favorite restaurant goes out of business and is replaced with a new one. Some exciting new fad enchants the group for a week before falling out of favor. New Chinese friends are made to account for those who have come before and graduated. Every winter, snow falls, and every fall, dust storms blow in from the north. There isn't that much flexibility to work outside of the box. New Fellows come and go, but Taigu, and, indeed, Shanxi Agricultural University, more or less remain unchanged.

When I arrived last fall to start my second year, I was surprised when Alexandra lamented that she had “stolen Anne's life.” It was true that she had inherited Anne's room, her job, her friends, her two cats, and even some of her old belongings—there greeting her near the door were Anne's old slippers. Though I never really considered it as such, I stole Ben's life in Taigu the same way that James stole Beth's and Ray stole Nick's. In not too long from now, either Skylar or Claire (the two new Fellows selected for next year) will be stealing my life and everything that comes with it. Two weeks ago, we went to the Pingyao restaurant in town, Nick's old favorite, and had a big meal there with a bunch of Chinese friends. It was like old times—we all got drunk and had a blast—and yet, it still felt different. There were no indulgent speeches, no discussions on obscure video games, and no over-the-top singing of “Just a Friend” by meal's end. Now more than ever, I'm remembering that it's the people who make Taigu what it is, and every shift in rank yields new changes regardless if everything else stays the same.

All six Americans and a bunch of Chinese friends and former students celebrating at the Pingyao restaurant in town.

Probably the most challenging and frustrating part of this Fellowship is the fact that no one is here to tell us if we're doing a good job or not or what makes a meaningful experience and what doesn't. Like our lesson plans, the best tidbits about what past Fellows have done get filtered down, but it's our job to interpret and make sense of those stories. Ultimately, it is up to each of us to decide our Fellowship for ourselves, and that is something that can't be passed down or replicated. In the same way that life has gone on without Nick, Anne, David, and Matthias from last year, I know too that life will go on even after I leave Taigu. The sadness gets tempered by catharsis—knowing that someone will be here to pick up my life where I left it and leave his or her own mark on this place. Next year will see the first time in the 100-year history of the Taigu site where the female Fellows will actually outnumber the males. The female majority will certainly make for some interesting differences in the foreigner dynamic. And so even if I see no changes, it doesn't mean that they still won't take place well after I have gone.

Top 5 Attractions To Visit India Tour

Sussane was lost deep in thoughts. After having decided to visit India in winters, she now faced the dilemma of choosing the destinations and what a country it was-so much of diversity, so many options from adventure to natural diversity, from sandy beaches to places of historical importance and not to forget the Cultural and spiritual aspects. The more she read about various destinations, the more confused she was as she had limited days in hand and what she wanted to see was difficult to manage within those days; at least not until she was put in touch with Erco Travels.


The agents of Erco Travels solved her problem in seconds. All that they asked was her liking and inclination and came up with an extremely satisfying itinerary of top five attractions of India Tour, which were:
                                                        
•Delhi: The capital of India, which in any ways Sussane had to touch base because of being her entry point in the country. However, the Erco Travels agent had explained how this was where she could get a glimpse of modern India along with the India of Britisher’s and Maharajas.  Delhi Tour also had lot many interesting museums, places of religious interest and a lot to shop.
                                         
      •Agra: Famous for the seventh wonder in the world-the Taj Mahal, Agra was always on her itinerary. The Erco Travels agent had said that she will forget the world when she will visit the monument. He had also explained how travelling from Delhi to Agra was so easy and comfortable and could also be clubbed with a visit to Fatehpur Sikri.

To the Losers Go the Spoils

Last Friday, our bosses came to James and I for help. Simply put, there was a problem at the school. As a result of not passing the foreign teacher-taught oral English classes over the last year, just under 60 graduate and doctoral students were in danger of flunking out of Shanxi Agricultural University. This is not the first time I have written about these students, nor do I expect it to be my last. The students had all failed our classes for a variety of reasons. Some had plainly never once attended class. Others had come for one or two classes before deciding to stop altogether. Others had taken a leave of absence after finding employment in another city or county. Still others never took the final exam either of their own volition or because of our mandates prohibiting students who had missed a certain percentage of classes from doing so. Regardless, school policy states that if a student fails even one class, he or she won't be able to receive a diploma.

From a Western educational perspective, this would not be so great of a problem. After all, it was the individual choices by these students that resulted in their failing grades and not a fault of the university. But from a Chinese point of view, this is a great problem indeed. After all, if of the 380 or so students who matriculate every year in graduate school, 60 are not graduating, that's over 15% who aren't getting their degree. This reflects badly on the university and serves as a warning for prospective students that they only stand an 85% chance of graduating. Like most of the cultural conflicts we Westerners come across in China, this too is a matter of “face”—in other words, a high statistic effectively discourages new students from applying, thus bringing down the school's credibility. In a country like China where ratings for high schools and colleges are weighed even more heavily than in America, every failing student can make a difference.

In truth, America sees its own shortcomings when it comes to higher education. No college likes to have a low graduation rate, in the same way that no college wants a high freshmen transfer rate. Both are indicators of a certain dissatisfaction on the part of the student body—and dissatisfaction translates to loss of prestige. Even in my high school, there had been a rumor that everyone in jeopardy of flunking out was expelled before they reached their senior year for fear that they would bring down the school's perfect 100% graduation rate. That's where supposed grade inflation may factor in to high-end Ivy League colleges and where cheating teachers flub standardized test results at Chicago public schools (see the incredibly smart Freakonomics). Still, it was nothing compared to the proposal that our bosses in Taigu schemed for me and James.

If our bosses Zhao Hong and Xiao Fan weren't the final word on the decision, they were, at least, the masterminds behind the proposition that followed. In order for all of those students not to fail, they would have a retest. That retest—in the form of a written essay in English—would come on a Sunday following two days of classes—two on Friday and two on Saturday, each for two hours. The classes were scheduled to be taught, we soon learned, by James and I, as well as a Chinese English professor—with me and James splitting Friday classes and the other teacher taking the Saturday ones. The business of administering the final exam and the grading would also fall to the Chinese English teacher. When asked about the content of those classes, our boss Zhao Hong simply smiled and laughed. Anything, she told us in Chinese. You can even scold the class for the entire two hours if you want. James and I were flatly appalled. The administration was essentially telling us that coming to four classes and taking a makeshift final exam is all that it takes to pass oral English at Shanxi Agricultural University.

It would have been easier had the Foreign Affairs Office taken a more lenient approach to disciplinary enforcement in the past. Quite the contrary, Zhao Hong was our biggest advocate last spring when it came to ­failing the scores of students who had only in the last week started coming to our classes. Now, it seemed she was telling us the opposite: that you can be a bad student and there will be no consequences to your actions, and what's more, the system will do everything in its power to help you succeed! Zhao Hong assured us that it wasn't an easy decision. With one or two failing students, it wouldn't have been a problem, but 60 was too huge a pill for the school to swallow. Under pressure from her higher-ups, she relented, despite the fact that she recognized it wasn't fair—both to us and to the dozens of students we had taught who actually deserved the grades they received. But ultimately, as is want to be the case in China, there was nothing she could do to change it. What she was asking of us, then, was to teach those make-up classes, even if we treated them as nothing more than a favor to her.

James was very resistant at first, and for good reason. It felt like all of our conventional Western wisdom was turned on its head—that those who work hard and ultimately reach the top are rewarded, and that cheaters and low-lives are punished by society. It immediately became apparent that the very act of “failing” a student may be a totally Western concept. It would seem that other departments at the school didn't have this problem—that even students who never once showed up to class were still buoyed along to subsequent grades by the Chinese education system. That might explain, at least, how we have students in our classes who have taken over ten years of English and can barely read the alphabet. Furthermore, it made English, and more specifically, our English classes, come off as meaningless—that students should not be held back or denied their degree for failing something as petty as an oral English class. With James away for the weekend in Beijing, it was up to my guilty conscience to eventually suck up my pride and agree.

*

On Friday morning, I felt like I had walked into a cold, dead place. On the front door, a crude bolt-lock opened up to a room full of lethargic spirits and dull, blank stares. The classroom lent itself to the kind of place where learning goes to die—more so than my regular classroom, the lighting seemed ghostly and hollow, the arrangement of the desks felt entirely impersonal, and the drywall paneling had undergone torpor with age. Photographs of Mao paired with inspirational quotes lined each of the four walls. The teaching building directly overlooked North Yard, and all of the honking, shouting, and loud music from the street wafted its way up to my classroom even with the windows closed. I felt like I could have been entering a rehab facility for drop-outs and delinquents—it was clear that no one, myself and my boss included, had any desire to be there.

My boss was the first to address the class. Generally an incredibly mild-mannered and sweet woman, Zhao Hong never sounded more fierce. She bluntly told the class of flunkies that they were there because of school policy and not because they deserved a second chance. She herself commented on the injustice of how coming to four classes is not a substitute for an entire year's worth of English classes and talked at length about the enormous opportunity that they had wasted—the chance to take English classes with an actual American—an opportunity that other, perhaps more motivated, students would have killed for. At the end of her spiel, she took attendance—a regulation, she told me earlier, of assessing that the students are at least capable of attending any class—before gracefully exiting and handing the floor over to me.

In truth, I was much more nervous about teaching this class than usual. Based on the nature of the class, Zhao Hong originally wanted me and James to teach because we would at least have a scant degree of familiarity with the students. After all, they were students who had had Nick, Anne, Gerald, and James and I as teachers last year, so our faces would at least be recognizable to them. The unintended consequence of that, though, is that I was once again face-to-face with the dozen or so students that I had personally failed, as well as dozens more who were in a similar predicament. It was like being a judge and getting put in the slammer right alongside the criminals that you yourself were responsible for convicting. Even more, most of the students I didn't recognize were significantly older—local politicians and businesspeople who had careers and lives outside of graduate school—who were probably looking at me and wondering who this scrappy youngster was standing in front of them and why they should give a damn.

Still, I had just been listening to Martin Luther King, Jr.'s iconic 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech with all three of my classes of graduate students this week and was feeling confident. I started class by asking in Chinese who among them could speak English. Seeing as how my good students have a hard enough time participating, I wasn't surprised when no one raised their hands. So I asked them again. Still, nothing. So I decided to be a little cruel. It's no wonder none of you can speak English, I told them in Chinese. Perhaps you would have if you had come to class last year. It was then that I decided to teach the class in Chinese. I said that they had already wasted enough of my time for having me teach them on my day off, but that I was going to waste as little of theirs as possible by not requiring them to have to decipher my spoken English. I wrote a single statement on the blackboard. In all capital letters, it read: Writing Exercise: Give the reasons why you did not come to class last year. And while they wrote for thirty minutes, I sat reading Blink, and finished class by listening to each of them stand up and recite their alibis.

A part of me wanted to humiliate them, because I too had been humiliated. Last semester I rested on a moral high ground after having failed these students in good faith. I was confident in my decision—with the strength of the Foreign Affairs Office behind me, and in spite of the numerous efforts on the part of those students to win me over, using bribes, reasoning, and guilt at their disposal. And yet here I was, nine months later, with the only result of having put my foot down in the first place was in making more work for myself. I was like a puppet dictator, trying everything I could to assert my will and dominance, but knowing deep-down that I actually wielded no power. Students were there that I had explicitly failed once before, but regardless of what they did or did not do in class that day, the very fact that they were there meant that they would pass.

For my second class, I had them write on a slightly more benign topic: What makes a good student? At lunch, Alexandra talked me down from my original writing prompt: Writing Exercise #2: Why do you think you deserve to pass this class? I was clutching my chopsticks over a bowl of noodle soup, still visibly upset and shaking with anger. I told her that I was genuinely curious in their answers—in the face of every moral and ethical query, how could they possibly believe that they had the right to pass oral English? No matter the excuse, the heart of the matter was the simple fact that they had not come to class. Sensing how worked up I was getting, she reminded me not to take it personally. Irresponsible students make headaches for teachers across all disciplines—this was not a problem unique to us as English teachers. She encouraged me to give them my “nothing” as anything approaching my “all” would have been far more than they deserved.

That afternoon, I was decidedly more hands-off. No more was the gnawing emotional vexation boring its way under my skin, and no longer did I sit, fuming, at the front of the class as I tried to appear blithe and indifferent as I read my book. Instead, I was a pale drone of myself—stern, robotic, and emotionless. For that hour of my life, it felt odd to abandon everything that I've ever learned about teaching. I made no attempt whatsoever to pretend that I was enjoying myself or give them the slightest satisfaction. There was no excitement about the English language or praising them for good work. I was past the point of empathy. I was irate. These students were slackers and good-for-nothings, and there was nothing that they could possibly learn in two days that would make up for a year's worth of careful lesson planning and dedicated teaching.

The reasons they give for missing class last year were largely predictable. Most were a combination of having to do a research project or an experiment in another city, working a full-time job, taking care of aging parents, newborn children, or a sick wife, being sick themselves, or just being so bad at English that they felt simply being in class was a waste of their time. All of them spoke at some length about how sorry they were, their obligation to their own education, and how thankful they were for these make-up classes to improve their oral English. Similar, were their stock responses for the characteristics of a “good student”: a person who tries their best, helps others, is respectful of their teachers, is hard-working, does their homework, goes to class, is responsible, has a “burning desire to learn,” and “does everything possible to achieve their goals.” Most, if not all, were probably educational propaganda slogans drilled into their heads when they were young. Few, if any, seemed to pick up on the overt irony of the question being aimed as a direct attack at their own ineptitude as graduate students.

It came as a shock to me then that, all things considered, their English levels were actually better than I expected. Most enunciated their words clearly and their accents were comprehensible enough that I didn't struggle with what they were trying to say. No more was this true than for the girl sitting in the front row. Whereas all of the other students sat as close to the back wall as possible, she sat alone, dead center in the front of the classroom. She wore glasses, thigh-high rhinestone boots, and a brown sweatshirt. A thick coif of her hair swooped seductively over her right eye. When I asked her for the reasons why she missed class, she said that she had been traveling and meeting friends in other cities. After college, it was hard to keep in touch with old classmates and there was nothing going on in Taigu anyway. She told me that class was boring and that she thought she could get away with not going. Still, she wrote, it wasn't fair to James, to her other classmates, to the school, or to me. She lamented the lost time and the wasted opportunity, and when I looked hard at her, I almost thought I could see her cry.

In that exact moment, I wanted to take everything back—the anger and frustration, the slow change to sadness, the feelings of abandonment and rejection. Hearing her story, it almost made me want to forgive her right then and there. I had so internalized her narrative that I was left only with a feeling of guilt. The truth was that this was just an honest girl who made an honest mistake. And whereas few students took responsibility for their actions in their essays, she plainly did, and actually seemed to feel badly about it. There was no fabrication or rationalization. She understood that what she did was wrong and was repenting, so who was I to punish her further? I thanked her for reading and after she sat down, I fought my way through the next fourteen essays with a resolve so strong that, by the time I dismissed class, I felt like my body would crumble beneath me.

On the way back home, one of the female students approached me after class. I had intentionally left the classroom a little later to avoid bumping into anyone, but apparently she had been wise to my aversion. She was unimaginably cheery, serving as a perfect counterpoint to my dejected moodiness. Tripping over English phrases and switching intermittently into Chinese, she begun asking me some of those basic questions reserved for first-time encounters. But it was clear, at least to me, that I had no intention of making polite conversation. Rather, I wanted to lock myself in my room and never have to think about these failing students again. Finally, she stammered out, I hope that we can still be friends. I thought for a moment, letting a deep breath rise slowly in my chest and exit through my lips. I turned to her and asked in Chinese, Who was your foreign teacher last year? She paused for a minute. Actually, she told me, I can't quite remember.