Chengdu One: 'This Land Is Your Land'

So what happens when you go to a small Chinese town to teach English?

Do you know that scene in prison movies where the new inmate arrives? He follows the guard and holds his cloths while the seven stories of prison cells go crazy all around him. Balance that image with the Beatles arrival in America. That was kind of how it looked when I entered the school.

Fast forward one hour later and imagine me leading eighty twelve year old Chinese students in singing 'This Land is Your Land' and 'I'm Gonna Lay Down My Sword and Shield'. Once I got the swing of it I split the class down the middle and had a call and response with half the class singing 'down by' and the other half singing 'the riverside'. Every class began with me walking into a class of cheering and clapping students and ended with an applause.

Mary is the 'English name' of my Chinese friend. She helped me get this one time job and literally lead me through the entire process. She got me the one time job, took the bus with me one and a half hours outside of the city, she ordered the food, knocked on my door in the morning to wake me up, she translated the lessons for the students. She also walked in front of me when I entered the school - thus leading me.

There is a courtyard surrounded on three sides by four storied buildings. Each level has a terrace filled with Chinese kids hitting and chasing each other. The universal language of the 12 year old is hitting and chasing. As I glided through through the school gates, stunned at the reaction to me, the kids stopped hitting each other and started pointing at me. Then they combined hitting each other, chasing each other, and pointing at me.

Chinese students are respectful and hard working. Starting from about seven years old the teachers just lecture and the students just take notes. So what the teacher says and how the teacher looks are of chief importance to these poor little devils in their daily lives. As Chinese kids from a small town the fact that I look non-Chinese, my different skin color, my different color eyes - this is already very amazing. Being in the class room with a westerner, me, for forty five minutes basically blows there minds.
*Even Mary, (late twenties, married, fluent in English), who has spent a fair amount of time around westerners told me enthusiastically about meeting a girl with green eyes.

I understood my job like this; foreign teachers come to school about once a month. The school rents out a westerner, ideally a white person, to 'teach' the class. The school wants the teacher to provide some relief to these poor bored children, to be fun, and to demonstrate some correct pronunciation of English. I think the school sees it as a rare opportunity to show these kids with limited means a little peice of the world.

As a result the job combined a lot of things that I really appreciated. My presence alone was generally appreciated by the students. Also there was a magic formula at play; low expectations, freedom, and attention - not to mention money.

I also like the fact that in this teaching stint I taught twelve separate classes of seventy to eighty students. I spent about forty five minutes with about eight hundred to one thousand separate Chinese kids. Does that sound amazing to you? I realized that If I did twenty days of that I'd reach about as many people as my Automato album sold. There are clearly a lot of differences but its something I thought about.

The highlights of my class for you folks you read this writing was this. I reviewed the family words like 'Grandparents' 'Parents' 'Aunt' 'Uncle' and 'Cousin' by writing a simple family tree starting with Frank and Betty. "These are my... Grandparents" Then I wrote (95) next to Frank and the class always gasped with appreciation. I also wrote a couple anecdotes about the family to teach some simple words. 'Frank hates weapons' was one sentence and then I taught them 'weapons'. 'Harry wrote a book about beer' was another sentence.

Finally, Mary asked me to teach the class a childrens song as part of the lesson. I couldn't think of childrens songs so I taught them folk songs. I taught the first classes the first verse of 'This land is your land' and then later I tried teaching 'I'm gonna lay down my sword and shield'. The second worked so much better that I only returned to Woody Guthrie once again.

So I feel happy to report back to New York city progressives that after two days of teaching I have taught about 850 Chinese children not only how to sing an anti war song but also that Jesse's grandfather "Frank(95) hates weapons".