Adventures in Guangzhou!

My reeducation began a few weeks with my tutoring. Last year, I was working with two Korean boys to help them with their basic English to get admission into the American International School of Guangzhou. The boys did gain admission, which it turns out has been a blessing and a curse. As ELL (English Language Learners) students, they are hardly at the level of a native born English speaker, yet they are expected to perform at such a level in the classroom--not an easy task.

So this year I have been working with the boys on their homework, be it editing essays, explaining texts, or basically answering questions. Recently I have been reading Agatha Christie's "Ten Little Inidians" with the younger boy. First off, what a read! I went through a few of her books when I was younger but only remember seeing "Ten Little Indians" on the stage adapted as a play. The book is great but certainly not easy for a 13 year-old who has never really read English literature before.

It's been a challenge to try and explain not just the vocabulary, but also all of the literary terms. I mean, really, how many people can *actually* explain the difference between a simile and a metaphor? But even more difficult is explaining some of the western cultural things that we all take for granted. For instance, the first person to die in the book remarks that he thinks the legal life is too dreary and that he is for a life of crime. He then raises his glass and downs a mouthful of poisoned coffee. The teacher's worksheet asks the students to explain the black humor of the situation.

After some rumination and dialogue with coworkers, I've decided that it must be a completely American (or at least Western) concept to regard human suffering as "absurd rather than pitiable," or to consider our existence as "ironic and pointless but somehow comic." Somehow I don't think Confucius was quite on the same wavelength. I tried every way I could think of but no matter what I said, my tutee just didn't find it funny.

The older boy is in his freshmen year of high school and is immersed in the world of Biology. This has been a serious test to my memory when he asks me questions like, "does facilitated diffusion still count as passive transport if it uses the energy of embedded proteins in the phospholipid layers of a plasma membrane?" If he said it fast it would almost sound like a foreign language to me. Yet as any teacher will tell you, the best way to answer a question is often to force the student to answer his/her own query. So I ask him to define each term, sometimes going back to the book, and in the end he figures it out himself. Good thing, too, since it has been approximately ten years since I studied that stuff. I will say this, though, I had SO much fun helping him design his "edible cell." Is there anything more fun??

Reeducation has also found its way into my Chinese classes, as I have found myself rememorizing characters that I had seemingly learned earlier this summer. I know that you will slowly but steadily lose any foreign language if you don't use it, but Chinese seems particularly prone to this with the extra wrinkle of characters. It's embarassing to stumble over a character from months ago, especially when the teacher explains that it's a simple combination of fifteen strokes. Sure it is.

To go along with my earlier entry on lifelong learning and the educational cycle, I have a small reeducation story regarding a staff member here at my school. There's an older woman in the copy room that always smiled while helping me last year. It was common for her to make side comments to the other women in the office as she put together my handouts (they *never* let you use the machine yourself), at which point they'd all laugh. This year I was determined to listen in and figure out if they were laughing at me. Unfortunately she switched over to Cantonese once she figured out my Mandarin had improved so much. But that's besides the point.

This woman sits in the copy room all day and insteading of gossiping or listening to music, as I expect many workers in the states would do, she diligently spends every free moment practicing Chinese calligraphy--a painstaking process. As such, she spend countless hours attempting to improve her strokes and make her artwork more beautiful. I inquired as to why she was working so hard and she told me that she was trying to learn this skill and be able to show her work to others, as well as teach those who wished to learn. Wow. That's pretty impressive coming from someone who could just as easily never study anything ever again. I only hope that I will also be eager to learn new skills forty years from now.