Often China & Japan Related.
Every Friday Chris and I have been taking a one hour adventure to the city limits to volunteer at one of nearly 40 migrant schools in Nanjing. Every school has at least 1000 students and ours is not an exception. We usually leave our apartment at 11:30, eat lunch and then walk to the subway. There are two stops that are equidistant away from us so it is about a 20 minute walk to either one. When we get there, we take the subway to the end of the line and from there take a bus to the school. From the end of the line on it is pretty obvious from the gawking stares and constantly yelled “HELLO!”’s that foreigners do not make it out to this part of the city very often. The bus takes us pretty close to the school and we have to walk less than five minutes to get there. But it is quite a dusty and dirty five minutes.
Every week is different. At first we explained to the Headmaster and teachers that no, we would not be teaching English to the students. We are only there to help them with pronunciation and enhance their English classes in any way we could. They said this was great and were very excited. So, naturally the first day that we went both teachers asked if we had anything planned. When we looked confused, they showed us where they were in the book and that was that. I ended up teaching the entire class while my teacher read the newspaper. Because my Chinese is slightly better than Chris’, I got the group of younger kids who know very little English. They are grade 5, his kids are grade 6. Both of our classrooms have over 60 children in them.
My kids look between the ages of five and ten. Some are really short and thin, others seem regular size. Also, it is pretty easy to tell which children are well taken care of and which are not. Some of the children are filthy (which could be there own doing since they are children and kids do get dirty, I know), whereas other kids look fairly well groomed and are wearing different clothes each week. I haven’t noticed any particular trend or differences between male and female students. In fact, there are two girls in the class who look like they are taken care of better than most of the boys. Their hair looks clean and brushed, they wear nice clothes with no stains and have good shoes. Coincidentally these two girls always pay attention in class, they participate when I ask and they help me if I need something, like chalk.
After some of the kids giving me a bunch of little gifts, such as origami stars, a small hand fan (quite useful for the bus ride back to the train station), a seashell and some small photobooth photos of them and their friends, Chris and I decided we should think of something similar to give to the kids. Since my cousin was coming, we decided we would come up with something small that she could bring. But what? What could we get 200 of that were small, cheap and American? Then I realized: pennies. So, last week my cousin brought me four rolls of American pennies.
This Friday we brought the pennies to the kids. Chris played a game with his kids. They try to say an English tongue twister and they get a penny for trying. Good idea, right? I wish I had been as clever. Rather than do this, I decided I’d do the regular lesson with the kids and then at the end hand out 1 penny to each child. That’s fair, right? This worked for about .00001 seconds, until every kid in the classroom got up, surrounded me, put out their hands and started screaming. I kept telling them that I would give everyone ONE and that they needed to sit down if they wanted one. I repeated it again and again, actually screaming in order to be heard over them. But to no avail. Meanwhile the real teacher just sat there, reading his book. Finally some kids sat down, but as soon as I thought they were calming down some kids were stealing other kids pennies, or switching seats thinking that I wouldn’t notice so that they could get two. Other kids just outright begged for more. Some kids asked for a different one, if they thought they had one that was less shiny than the rest of the kids.
When we left, Chris said “You know, if nothing else this experience has taught me that kids really need things to be strictly structured, otherwise they just go crazy.”
So true. I wonder if the pressures and rigidness of the Chinese education system makes these kids go even more crazy without it?