HAINAN EVENTS

Aiya, sorry I haven't made a post in a long long time... we have not had internet in our room in forever! I've been able to go to local 网吧 wangba (internet cafes) to check email and so on and so forth, but I was advised against bringing pictures on a external harddrive there because I might get a virus. Anyway, we're currently in 宜昌 Yichang, which is a city in the west of Hubei province. We will be seeing the 3 gorges dam tomorrow, and then returning to 武汉, the captial of Hubei. We're going back to Beijing on the 4th, and then the program ends on the 8th!

This post, however, is about our time in 海南 Hainan, the island south of China (not Taiwan, which is on the east coast of China). The first part of our stay there was in the capital of the province, 海口 Haikou. I made a presentation there about Mentorship programs in America and how they impact children, the volunteers (big brothers/big sisters) themselves, and the entire community-- ending with a quotation from Mao Zedong (whose name made a lot of people wake up and perk up).

This is me before I made the presentation. This is my teacher, Fan Laoshi, making sure our powerpoints are all set up.


3 of my fellow students and I all presented on the first day of the four day conference, but our presentation was held in the large main auditorium. Here is a picture of the auditorium:Even though it's really blurry, you can get the idea of the size... I would say probably around 400 or so school principals, teachers, and education specialists were there listening.


This is a picture of me before I presented. That's my name in Chinese on the pink piece of paper. Can you see my nervousness? My hands kept shaking during the presentation, until I finally sat on them and calmed down a bit. Also, probably somewhere on the 3rd slide of my ppt, I somehow managed to swallow a bug. Haikou is a very buggy city, being in the very warm South China Sea, so I embarrassingly coughed for a while. Overall, though, it went pretty well, I think, and I felt very relieved to have completed it.

Because our four presentations went pretty long, there was only time for three questions for all of us, and only one was directed toward my presentation. It was a question that was also asked to everyone, thouguh: "思谛同学，你说你只学了两年中文，那，你们怎么说这么棒呢？! Fellow Student Sidi (a polite address), you say you've only studied Chinese for two years, How do you all speak so well?!" Oh those polite Chinese....

After the conference was over, we went to 临高 Lingao county, a more rural and quite poor region about an hour and a half from Haikou.

A picture of farming lands in Lingao.

We taught for 3 days at a "summer camp" for Lingao 4th and 5th graders-- who were selected from their classes. Usually each homeroom class has over 70 students; we taught classes of 12. When we arrived to the school on the first day, all the children were lined up to greet us, and they were waving plastic flowers and chanting 热烈欢迎、欢迎欢迎 WELCOME!!

You can see the kids lined up before the main hall in the school.

On the first day I taught 2 geography classes, then 2 art classes. The next day, 3 geography classes and 2 art classes. The final day, 1 geography class and 2 art classes. We never taught the same class twice. Needless to say, I was exhausted every single day, and we pretty much fell asleep each night at 9:30pm.

The heat in Lingao was really ridiculous. For example, outside of our hotel I bought a type of cracker that I always like eating. It has two crackers and a sweet type of filling in the middle-- kind of like a Ritz or Oreo. When I opened the package that I just purchased from the street vendor, I found that the filling had all evaporated-- It was a bag full of crackers and nothing else! I thought of complaining, but it was 2 kuai so I just dealt with it.

Here is a picture of one of my geography classes. The activity I had planned for them was to break the 12 students into 4 groups, and have each group create a map of Hainan province and then present to their class mates (about the major cities/bordering waters, weather, population distribution, and tourist locations). In this picture the groups are following the directions I typed out and gave to each group. I was trying to emphasize working together and communication, and sometimes it was very very successful. It was great to see kids sharing responsibilities-- one student cutting out circles for the major cities, one student writing the city name on top of the circle, and the third student gluing it on the map. Other times, though, one student would take over and not share markers, etc etc.


Here are the students presenting. You can see the three kids standing next to their small map, which is hanging next to a larger map of Hainan province in the center.

I also added some new parts to the course as I got the hang of what they students understood and what they didn't. I started requiring each group to write on their group's map where they thought Lingao county (where they lived) was on Hainan island. This was really fun, because students really didn't want to be wrong. They would plead with me to tell them where it was, and my usual response would be, "How would I know?? I'm just an American!"




Here is a picture of one of my favorite classes-- you can see their four maps on the blackboard hanging next to the map of China in the center.

Sometimes it was really difficult to communicate with the kids. Lingao has their own dialect that is a combination of Cantonese, Thai, and Vietnamese. So even when the students spoke standard Mandarin (which is what we've been studying), their tones were often inaccurate or difficult for me to understand. I thought this would work to my advantage becasue then I could speak sloppy Chinese and they'd get it, but NO I was wrong.

It was amazing that saying 西边 West as xi1bian4 instead of xi1bian1 (a minor tone difference) could leave me only with confused faces and students mumbling to each other in their local dialect, probably asking "What is the guy saying to us??" I think this was the first time I really realized just how important it is to speak really clearly ALL the time-- I often get tired and/or lazy and revert back to my monotone American voice. This definitely did not fly with the kids, and they were often quick to tell me, "Teacher, you're not making any sense!!!"


Art class was also interesting. To be honest, I wasn't as excited to teach it because I knew it would depend a lot on the kids using their creativity, which is often hard because the kids are pretty shy (especially when there is a weird foreigner talking to them!). So my art class was really hit or miss-- sometimes the kids LOVED it and thought it was really fun, other times they were not about it and very bad.

The two main activities I planned for the kids in Hainan were making collages and playing an art/drawing game. The collage was interesting... sometimes kids would really use their imagination-- cutting the heads from one person and sticking it on the body of an animal or another person's body, really quite funny. Other times, though, the collages were just squares next to each other... perhaps this was my fault for not really explaining all that well, but for the most part they enjoyed it. Once again I was hoping they'd be able to work together-- each group of 6 students only had 3 scissors and 2 glue sticks. So sometimes this caused kids to yell at each other, which made me really nervous. Once a dissatisfied student said to me, "Teacher, don't you think this is wasteful? We're cutting up all these magazines!"

The second activity is a game I've played before in America, and to be honest, it's pretty challenging. Each student is given a piece of a paper and can draw whatever he/she would like for 1 minute. After one minute, though, the piece of paper is passed to the next student. So after receiving the new piece of paper with another student's drawing, you have to add to it, and then ultimately after you receive your first paper, you can see what it's turned into.

Once again, some classes really liked this activity, others did not. After students had received their initial paper, I always asked each student to come to the front and explain to us what his/her picture was about. Once again, the language barrier kinda was a problem here. I often didn't know what vocabulary they were using to explain their art... but that didn't stop me from just saying, "OH! WONDERFUL!!" after just about every sentence.

Sometimes, however, students got very possessive of their original art work and started yelling at each other when they felt that other students were "ruining" it. I tried my best to explain that it's a group piece of art, but sometimes I think there was more going on than I knew about. One class, in particular, seemed to have some built up tensions and anger, and I unfortunately walked in with them on the last class of the day. I'm really not sure what exactly happened, mostly because (I think) they were speaking in their Lingao dialect, but one male student ended up crying. I really didn't know what to do, but I knew that the guy sitting next to him (and handing him the new pieces of paper) was just scribbling all over the art-- not really "adding" anything. But so then all the kids started yelling at each other and no one was drawing. In an angry moment, I shouted, "OK, NEW RULE! NO TALKING DURING THIS ACTIVITY!!!!" Who would have thought that Stephen would have it in him to shout such a thing in Chinese at a classroom full of 5th graders in rural Lingao, China?

But I don't want to focus on the negative. Here is one of my better art classes:

They were really great-- each time I would say, "OK, Time's up! Give your art work to your friend sitting to the right of you!" They would wail and then pass the piece of paper, and then look at the new piece of paper and scream out, "Oh my gosh!!! What is this!!!!" It was a lot of fun.


My experiences in Hubei were really interesting as well. I'll write a post about that when I get back to Beijing, hopefully comparing the two locations. Hard to believe the program is almost over!!