Chinese Souvenirs: Knots
One of the most widely available souvenirs in China is the knot. How can you look at that and not think of China? It’s such a popular decoration (for good luck, as I’ve been told, which is really no surprise), three different people gave one to me in the span of two weeks.
In 2006, before I left a summer camp in Hefei to go teach in Wuwei, the director gave my brother and me a medium-sized knot. When we were getting ready to leave Wuwei, one of our students gave each of us a small Chinese knot. Two other students pitched in for a gigantic one. I’m sure the kid who gave us the small one felt foolish. What he doesn’t know is that the small one is my favorite.
How Does an EFL Teacher Teach Discipline?
In the comments of my last post, user Hopfrog asked about being too tolerant or too strict in class, which got me thinking about discipline in general. It’s always hard to establish fair discipline in the classroom, but EFL teachers face a few other obstacles. They typically don’t speak the native language, so verbally reprimanding bad students doesn’t work. Nor does trying to explain a complicated rewards system, because they just won’t get it. Foreigners, particularly in China, are also seen as a funny novelty and are rarely taken seriously as professional teachers. So how does an EFL teacher discipline their classes?
I wish I knew…
The Chinese teachers always made the naughty students stand up, so I tried that several times with mixed results. The middle school students would turn quiet whenever they had to stand, but the primary kids would either keep talking to their friends or take this as an opportunity to wander around the room. If I turned my back on them, they’d just sit down again. It got to the point where I had to take their chairs away, and if they still acted out, I made them wear their backpacks, too. Believe me, I don’t like that it had to come to that, and I was always trying to think of a better solution.
When I taught for ILP, we used a system that rewarded the kids with tokens whenever they spoke the target phrase correctly or what have you. This was to encourage them to listen and participate so they could earn enough tokens to exchange for prizes at the end of the day. In theory, tokens are a great idea, but in practice, in the hands of inexperienced teachers, it easily falls apart. 70% of the time my students fought, they were fighting over tokens. If they felt like they deserved a token, but I didn’t give them one, they threw a fit and stopped participating. They usually only paid attention long enough to get a token, anyway, and gave up if you weren’t dishing them out fast enough.
I liked the idea of students being rewarded in some way for participating, but when I started teaching classes of 50 in Changzhou, I couldn’t afford to give candy or prizes to everyone. I had hoped that just calling attention to their good or bad behavior would be enough, whether it was drawing smiley and frowny faces on the chalkboard or putting green and yellow cards in a bag. Only the good kids cared about me assessing their behavior, though, while the bad kids just wanted to see how many yellow cards I would put in before giving up. In the case of the bag, near the end of class, we would take out a card. If it was green, we played a game for the last five minutes. Some classes responded well to this, but most just didn’t care.
It’s frustrating when everything you try to get them to settle down fails. I know I said before that a good lesson could compensate for that, but let’s face it, even the most well-crafted lessons crumble when the students aren’t in the mood to learn English today. But rather than yell at the kids, which never worked and usually got more laughs than scared looks, the best thing I could do was to stop. Stop everything, stand there, and wait for them to be quiet. If we were playing a fun game, well, guess what, the game just got put on hold. If we were doing a normal lesson, maybe the students were glad I finally shut up. I had to wait five minutes sometimes before I could go on, and I felt like I was going to explode inside, but I wasn’t going to teach if they weren’t going to listen. And they eventually saw that, too.
Teaching in Retrospect
It only takes a few weeks of being back in your hometown to feel like everything you’ve done prior—all that time spent fighting for the attention of hungry Chinese students—never happened. Or it did happen, but everything you thought you learned from the experience… well… never happened. Or it did happen, but… nah, I think I’m done with that joke.
Your time as a teacher is easily justified as wasted, especially during those final evaluations when only one or two of the students can repeat a concept you spent the whole semester drilling. But most teaching positions in China are very impersonal, anyway, and your job isn’t so much about teaching a specified amount of content as it is just giving the kids a chance to have a teacher who isn’t Chinese. In a way, foreign teachers are there to break cultural boundaries, not necessarily teach, but if a little English is learned along the way, more power to you!
Some of my students still stay in touch with me, though, so I didn’t walk away with nothing. And as a young fish out of water standing in front of a class of 50 restless Chinese kids four times a day, your comfort zone naturally grows. Maybe you find you’ve only become comfortable addressing non-native English speakers, but progress is progress! When you tell people you taught in China, they’re just impressed by the word “teach,” if they’re impressed at all, but to you, it’s not that. To you, it was a lesson in confidence and endurance and resisting the urge to crap your pants and run home crying when things go bad.
Things go bad a lot.
As much as I liked my ILP classes (the first teaching I ever did in China), those kids were awful. Class time with the foreigners was “release hours of pent up energy that our Chinese teachers would beat us for” time. They would fight each other. They would pull their pants down. They would yell and throw things at the teacher. They would literally tear the desks apart. But through all that, I finally learned to just be patient and focus on creating a better lesson instead of trying to create better students. That comes later, and it’s pretty much an uphill battle, anyway.
If there’s one thing you learn as an English teacher in China, it’s patience. There’s patience, because the kids’ English is bad, and there’s patience, because their behavior is bad. It was different, though, trying to be patient with my primary classes of 50 students as opposed to the ILP classes of eight. I’ll admit, I lost my temper sometimes. Things were said. Books were thrown out the window. Nonetheless, I’m a much better person now than I was five years ago, and China has played a big part in making me that way.
Mini Game Reviews: Volume 3
Trauma Center: New Blood (Wii)
If there’s any franchise that just couldn’t be done properly outside the Wii, this is it. Performing surgery with the Wii remote is a perfect fit and can be a rewarding yet nerve-racking experience. Especially if you’ve got shaky hands. I’m always accidentally dropping a piece of glass back into the patient. Ouch! New Blood isn’t much different from Second Opinion, though, which means the same piles of boring dialogue precede every operation. I can understand that they want us to care for the characters, but the way the story is told (through still pictures) is painful. Like the first game, things start to veer into ridiculous science-fiction. The best parts of the game are the real-life operations involving tumors and blood clots, not fighting alien-like pathogens with a laser. But a great addition to the series is the new co-op mode where two doctors can tackle the same patient. It’s pretty fun, because one of you can focus on stabilizing the patient’s vitals while the other… fights stupid aliens with a laser.
Dream Pinball 3D (DS)
Remember when I said good pinball was hard to find? That rings particularly true for the DS, because there is no ultimate pinball game on the platform. Dream Pinball comes close for being a straight-up pinball simulator with none of the gimmicks a la Metroid Pinball or Flipper Critters. The developers made one fatal mistake, however. They screwed up the camera. All seven of the camera options follow the ball too closely, making it hard to gauge when it’s going to fall to the bottom. This also prevents you from being able to read the little signs that say “hit this for the jackpot.” Activating multiball complicates things even more, because the camera can’t decide which one to follow and just does a little jig at the bottom. The ball physics aren’t always accurate, either, but at least the tables are well-made and have multiple flippers to control. If you absolutely must have pinball on your DS, Dream Pinball is the best you’re going to find, but it’s far from perfect.
Tomena Sanner (WiiWare)
If you like your wackiness Japanese style, then you’ll probably love Tomena Sanner. Your character is in a hurry to get to a dance party and must overcome all sorts of crazy obstacles in his way, from dinosaurs to giant robots to men in drag. The game is played with only one button, though, so it’s not quite a platformer like it sounds. Your character runs automatically, and each obstacle he meets has a range in which you can interact with it. Push the button too soon or too late, and you’ll get a “miss” and lose time. But whether you miss or score a good or great, something hilarious is bound to happen. Tomena Sanner is more about making you laugh than it is about being a game, though the online leaderboards show there is definitely room to improve. Plus, there’s local split-screen support, which, like the rest of the game, is fun in short bursts. At the very least, Tomena Sanner is one of the few WiiWare games that’s only 500 points. If you have leftover points and nothing to spend them on, here you go.
Assault Heroes (Xbox Live Arcade)
The Xbox Live Arcade has no shortage of twin stick shooters, a gameplay mechanic I’m not exactly a fan of. But Assault Heroes feels like such an homage to classic NES shooters, including co-op support, that all is forgiven. I like how, even though you start in a vehicle, you aren’t confined to it. Many times, you’ll have to go on foot to pick up hard-to-reach power-ups or traverse underground bunkers. Or your car may blow up, leaving you mostly helpless until it reappears. This is a great way to handle “dying,” because it gives you a second chance to survive. You even rack up extra points for any enemies you kill while outside your vehicle. Assault Heroes isn’t terribly difficult, though. On the medium difficulty, I only had to restart in two or three places. Regardless, the action ramps up at a nice pace and throws a lot of big robotic bosses your way. The campaign is relatively short, but the action is pretty easy to come back to and play multiple times. You could do a lot worse for $5.
Crossing the Street in China
The following video doesn’t highlight the most chaotic moments of crossing a Chinese street. This is just a normal day in Changzhou, after all. But count how many close calls you see. It’ll be fun!
I Dream of Plastic Axes
My old college roommate and I had become infected with a disease, but this isn’t necessarily bad news. The “disease” allowed us to see ghosts, and the ghosts that hung around our apartment were smokin’ hot! There was a boy ghost, though, who didn’t like that we could see his girlfriends. Whenever he was around, he would scowl at us.
All was well until one of the girl ghosts told us the infection also attracted zombies. There was a big group of zombies headed our way right now and would be here in 24 hours to kill us. The only way we could escape them was to remove the infection, and the only way we could remove the infection was to kill ourselves. Wow. That has win-win written all over it!
It wasn’t entirely hopeless. There was an arcade game in the mall that had a big, plastic axe attached to it. The ghost said if we killed ourselves with the axe, we would still come back to life, and the infection would be gone. My roommate and I decided to try it. On the way to the mall, we passed by another girl ghost who was posing for a picture for the boy ghost. The girl waved at us. The boy scowled. Typical.
In the arcade, my roommate took the axe, slit his throat, and bled all over the place as he died. Uh… I was beginning to have second thoughts about this plan. The other customers weren’t too thrilled, either, and started screaming and running around. My roommate did get back up, though, so it worked. But before I could use the axe, the panicked crowd pushed us out of the mall.
I kept yelling, “I need to go back in there! I need to use the axe!” but it was no use. The police soon arrived and taped off all the entrances. They would not let me back in, and I only had a few hours left before the zombies would arrive. But once again, I’ll never know the outcome, because I woke up before they got there.
How to Remember Chinese Tone Order
There are four tones in Chinese, they’re numbered from one to four, and Chinese speakers often refer to them as “first tone, second tone, etc.” To review, the first tone is flat , the second rises , the third dips , and the fourth falls .
Okay… that’s swell and all, but how do you remember which one is first and which one is fourth? It’s easy to get them mixed up and makes reading typed-out pinyin a pain (wo3 yao4 gen1 ni3 shuo1 hua4).
Then one day, I wrote the tone markings side by side: . Revelation time! They looked like a minus M, or -M. The M can even stand for Mandarin. The minus stands for… look, I’m not going to do all the work. Now, whenever I forget if the falling tone is second or fourth, I just have to think of it as it fits into the -M formula.
Mini Game Reviews: Volume 2
I know, I know, this comes pretty quickly off the heels of the last set of reviews, but… I’ve been playing a lot of games lately. Gimme a break!
Left 4 Dead (Xbox 360)
My opinion of this first-person shooter would probably change drastically if I had an Xbox Live account, since the developers locked half the game’s content for paid subscribers only. Jerks. What’s left is a very short offline campaign that, fortunately, does support two-player splitscreen. You absolutely have to play this game with at least one other person, otherwise your AI teammates will drive you crazy. They always want to be a hero and won’t retreat to the safe house. I could see this being really fun with four human players, though. Even with just two humans, there were some great moments where we were holed up in the bathroom of a farmhouse, too afraid to go out and face the big monster zombie downstairs. If you thought you knew what zombies were like in games… you don’t. Unlike the slow, staggering zombies of Resident Evil fame, the zombies in Left 4 Dead are fast, crazy, and travel in huge numbers. Watching a crowd of them pile over a fence is pretty intense, four players or not.
Army of Two (Xbox 360)
At a glance, Army of Two seems like it’s just trying to rip off Gears of War. But then you play it for a few hours and start to understand what separates the two games. For starters, Army of Two is a lot clunkier. The characters, especially when interacting with objects or each other, are sluggish, and the button layout is unnecessarily convoluted. But that lovable “duck and cover” gameplay is back in full force, and it’s harder and more brutal here than in Gears. Even on the easiest difficulty, the AI’s aim is spot-on. It’s frustrating at first, until you learn how to work with your teammate (AI or human, but please choose human). It gets intense when the two of you are on opposite sides of a room filled with bad guys, taking turns getting their attention so the other can sneak up from behind. And because the AI is so good, each terrorist you kill makes a huge difference and feels that much more rewarding. Gears is still better, but I do like killing terrorists.
Jetpac Refuelled (Xbox Live Arcade)
All you need to do is spend two minutes with the original Jetpac to realize it wasn’t a good game. So why did it even garner such a polished remake? Refuelled looks really good, sounds really good, and plays really good. It’s a really good game… at first. You start out flying around a small 2D level, collecting parts to make a spaceship, then collecting fuel so you can blast off that wretched planet called Level 1. But then Level 2 comes around, and all you do is collect more fuel. Then Level 128 comes around, and you’re still collecting fuel! So… yeah, it tends to be a bit repetitive. The changes in the gameplay come from the enemies that swap out every level. It’s really great for the first 20 levels, because you are constantly seeing new types of enemies. But the developers quickly ran out of ideas and just started throwing more of the same at you. Onwards and upwards to Level 128! It’s still fun in short bursts, though, and has a nice two-player mode, which makes it worth the $5 asking price.
Dokapon Kingdom (Wii)
It’s about time somebody figured out how to do the party board game genre right. Dokapon Kingdom is one part RPG, though, making it a little harder for the whole family to jump right in. But the mechanics are easy to figure out, and, like Mario Party, much of the game is based on luck, anyway. It’s all about rolling the right numbers and being able to spot the best route to take. The battle system is just rock, paper, scissors, too, which, against the computer, is a matter of blind guessing. When you add in other players, though, Dokapon suddenly becomes really engaging and fun. There are so many opportunities to sabotage each other, whether it’s poisoning them with a spell, stealing ownership of one of their towns, or killing them in battle and changing their screen name to “ButtWipe.” What’s not to love?! Well, it is just a board game, so there’s a lot of waiting between turns. You definitely need to play with a group of people you get along with and who have a natural patience for RPGs.
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