When all else fails, eat

Between the cold, the lack of electricity, studying for finals, and a big nationwide English test coming up, my sophomores have been pretty stressed lately. They have apparently turned to food to calm their nerves, a tactic I can relate to as I'm pretty sure I used to gain ten pounds every reading week at NU. They have been kind enough to include me in their stress-eating. While I'm a bit sick of Chinese food since my town is quite lacking in variety, I always eat better when I go out with them. (But seriously, I would kill for a Portillo's hamburger right now. Or Lou Malnati's. Or even just a bowl of cereal.)

First stop this week, hot pot! Except this time my friend Sarah and I went to a place where you get to choose your own sticks with food on them from a giant refrigerator. You then put the sticks in the hot pot and pay by the stick. With each stick costing about 15 cents, I went all out.

Next up, cooking lessons round 2! My favorite girls came over to cook for me again, and were disappointed to hear I had not used the kitchen since last time we had done this. On the menu was fried bok choy, spicy pork with green peppers, dumpling soup, and scrambled eggs with tomatoes. Peanut butter and jelly sandwiches made an appearance at dessert.

Finally, Justin, his girlfriend, and a few students who come to our weekly English corner went out for a family style meal of sweet and sour pork, duck, braised eggplant, and fried tofu. Ironically, the sweet and sour pork dish is the only food I have found here that remotely resembles American-Chinese food.

So well fed and ready to work, this week starts my sophomore finals. I'm giving them a listening and speaking test on top of their regularly scheduled classes, so as a break we'll just be watching How the Grinch Stole Christmas and Elf all week. I really doubt I'll be sick of Elf after watching it three times.

I will be sad to see my sophomore classes go. They are by far my most enthusiastic and fun students. I have really enjoyed teaching them and getting to know them. Most of them have become friends rather than students. Since my freshmen started so late thanks to their mandatory military training, I still have another couple of weeks of lessons with them.

But a month from today... Chicago!

10 Things I've Learned Through Teaching

1. Teaching allows you to develop great upper body strength. Erasing an entire whiteboard three times a day is hard work.

2. You can see everything from the front of the classroom. There is no way that student sneakily texting in the back goes unnoticed. This is a warning to all my friends still in school.

3. Putting your worksheet up to block your face while you're talking on your cell phone does nothing to hide the fact that you're talking on your cell phone. That's like the college equivalent of putting your hands over your eyes and saying, "You can't see me."

4. If you correct a student 98 times about the difference between "he" and "she", they are probably still going to get it wrong the 99th time.

5. When the student finally gets it right the 100th time, your week is made.

6. Teachers look forward to movie days even more than students do.

7. Even the best kids will try and find ways out of doing work.

8. In a class of 40+ kids you will quickly learn the names of the really good students and the troublemakers. Everyone else just kind of blends in.

9. You will do things in your classroom you would never imagine doing in public. Like singing.

10. Do not agree to take a picture with one student unless you are prepared to take pictures with all forty students. It's worse than prom.

One of my freshmen classes. It was very difficult to get them to stand still for this. Afterwards they spent 10 minutes pointing their camera phones at me.

(Not a) Winter Wonderland

Hechuan is cold in the winter. Not Chicago cold, mind you. It has yet to drop below freezing and there is never any snow. What makes it cold is that south of the Yangtze River most buildings do not have central heating. In small towns like mine, there is no heating at all. That means you run the risk of getting frostbite while writing on the whiteboard in class and all of my students dress as if they're gearing up for the Snowpocalypse.

I am luckier than most because I have a tiny space heater that was stipulated as a requirement in my contract. It is unfortunately only sufficient to heat either my upper or my lower body, never both at the same time.

But I will never take that tiny space heater for granted again. Thursday morning I woke up to find that the power was cut. It came on just long enough to have night class Thursday night, and then went out again until about an hour ago. This is how I have spent the past two days:

Chicago, I promise I will never complain about your winters again.

Table manners

On Thursday one of my students was putting on an extracurricular presentation about American table manners, and she asked me to be a guest speaker. I was given literally an hours notice, so I figured since I have (supposedly) been practicing proper American table manners for approximately 22 years now I could just wing it.

Her initial presentation was in Chinese, but fortunately one of my other students showed up and sat in the back translating for me. It was a great presentation as far as I could tell, except for a few tiny factual errors. First, she described the "American fourth course" (which comes right after the "American meat course") as the vegetable dish. Okay, I thought, maybe she is just referring to the side of green beans or broccoli that usually comes with chicken or steak. But then she showed a montage of various types of salad, including one of those edible fruit arrangements. This made me giggle a little. At another point she pointed to a really beautiful picture of a steak, and then called it fish. I’m going to have a hard time forgiving her for that one. Oh, and for some reason pretty much every photo of food she showed was of sushi. So I guess this lesson was more of the Japanese-American table manner variety.

To be fair, my presentation was certainly not perfect either. I may have accidentally said the fork goes on the right and the knife goes on the left, which was in direct contrast to what they had just been shown on the PowerPoint. I guess Home Economics in 7th grade really didn’t teach me anything. I talked about tipping, ordering at a restaurant, being a guest in someone’s home, not putting your elbows on the table, whether the boy should pay on a date… I was pretty much all over the place. But I redeemed myself at the end when I pulled a real live knife and fork out of my bag. It was like I had pulled out candy. Everyone wanted to have a go pretending to cut food. They went at it so enthusiastically it was a miracle a few fingers weren’t chopped off. Some even valiantly sacrificed parts of their notebook so their friends could actually cut something up. This didn't go so well, seeing as how it was just a butter knife.

Although I really shouldn’t poke fun at their fervor for cutlery; I’m the girl who is bringing home chopsticks for everyone as souvenirs…

LiT Pt. 5