here's something

I'm not very good at blogging consistently. I'm going to try and post at least one thing each day, even if it's short. Here's my first try:

Today I had one of my classes listen to music as part of their grammar lessons. I played songs that have the phrase "I feel" used in different ways, because I've been teaching them different ways this phrase is used, and different sentence patterns it is used with. My students huddled around my miniature Ipod speakers and fought over who got to sit directly in front of the speaker. They asked me if I could play Sara Vaughn's cover of "I feel pretty" three times in a row. Some days I feel like teaching in a Confucian culture, though absolutely maddening at times, has spoiled me and that I will find it difficult to go back to teaching brooding, trustafarian JoCo college Freshmen. That is my moment of the day. Also, I learned that in Korea crows are bad luck. The word for the number four is also bad luck, because it rhymes with the word for death.

School Festival

Last week, on Friday, my school had their yearly festival. I’ve never been to something like this in the United States. I’m curious if some U.S. schools, maybe private schools, have festivals like this. Unfortunately, Erin and I both forgot to take our cameras. It was a real spectacle. My students told me this week that they posted a video from the festival of them singing and dancing to a K-pop song on some Korean version of YouTube. If I can find it, I’ll link it here. My student “Alex” said to me: “Mr. Cartwright, I am sure that we are going to be famous now. Our video had maybe twenty hits on Friday, and then I looked today, and we have 300 hits!” I’m kind of at a loss to explain exactly what happened at this festival in some way that makes sense. There was food. It was in a giant, fancy auditorium. Parents were there. Teachers were there. Students danced, and one student sang opera in Italian. There was a movie about two students who love the same girl that was shown. Students dressed up like waiters would run up and down the aisles and deliver things to people. There was some strange raffle where everyone had to stand up and look for a number on the bottom of their seats. A lot of my fellow teachers got on stage and danced with giant lollipops to a K-pop song called “I am kissing you.” There was a dance contest. Some of my twelve year old students dressed up in drag and sang a song called “Hey Mister!” from a Korean movie. They looked a little like the supremes. They were wearing a lot of blue, silver and gold lamay. A lot of things are more intense and confusing because of my lack of language over here. I felt a little like Hunter Thompson while watching all of it.

It was interesting to introduce Erin to my students, who are really fascinated by her. They’ve slowly gotten comfortable with talking to me, and seeing me every day, but I think Erin threw them for a loop. Some of my students would run up to us in their bowties and waiter uniforms in the auditorium and would start chattering away to me because they were excited to see me, and then you could visibly see them notice Erin out of the corner of their eye, who was sitting beside me, and they’d freeze up and get tongue-tied and the exchange would go something like this:
“Mr. Cartwright…is this…your wife?” I would say yes and introduce them and my students would sort of wave and say “hello!!!” really loudly, clearly very excited, and then they would look nervous, as if Erin’s presence threw a wrench in the script they were planning out in their head for what they would say when they saw me. I remember making scripts in my head like this in all of my French and German conversation courses. I think they’re curious about what exactly Americans do. They’re always watching me very closely, which was a little anxiety-inducing at first, but it’s just normal curiosity, and there is no cultural taboo against staring here, I think. It’s certainly not meant to make me feel uncomfortable. I always feel like I’m kind of a letdown, though. I don’t have a colt 45 to take out of my pocket and twirl around. Sometimes I think they’re waiting for me to order pizza. I’m not quite sure what I’m supposed to do at those moments. Sing the national anthem? Start a business? Call a limousine? I like my students.

burning spirit money in my neighborhood

Yesterday I saw something strange when I was walking down our street, on my way to go teach at my school. There were these charcoal circles on the octagon sidewalk tiles, and little piles of burnt paper. I sort of pushed the image to the back of my mind, and then forgot about it until this afternoon.

In my World History class that I'm teaching to the Korean students we had a discussion last week about whether or not we should study the ancient China section in our book. Our textbook has a chapter on ancient China, but I skipped over the chapter earlier in the semester, figuring that my students must have learned about ancient China in their other literature and history courses, taught by their actual Chinese teachers. I found out from my students, however, that this was not the case. They really wanted to study more about Ancient China, so that's what we're doing. I actually took several courses in my honors program at Washington State University on ancient China. Still, it's bizarre to be an American teaching Korean students in a Chinese public High School about ancient China. "Unqualified" is the adjective that keeps running through my mind while I teach this unit. In any case, today my student "Abraham" asked me if I had seen the burnt circles on the sidewalks. I said that I had, and he explained to me that people are burning paper money for their ancestors to spend in the afterlife. We also talked about the practice in China of setting off fireworks to keep evil spirits and ghosts away. Abraham and my other Korean students explained to me that in China there are many traditions to scare away the ghosts, while in Korea, there are traditions to encourage the ghosts to visit. Abraham and my other students told me that in Korea the Korean people want the spirits and ghosts from the afterlife to visit them, because the spirits can teach them important things, or help them make decisions. About a half hour ago Erin and I were walking down our street after dinner and there was this amazing line of our neighbors burning little fires of paper money. We stopped and Erin asked a nice man from our neighborhood, in Chinese, about the practice, and he explained it to her. Once we were in our apartment I decided I really wanted to try and take a picture, but then when I got back out in the neighborhood I was nervous and didn't want to do anything inappropriate, or disrespectful. Some of our neighbors saw me and smiled and motioned that it was okay, but I still only took one picture. What an amazing evening.

Chang Cheng

more photos

photos

Ancient Culture Street

In Kansas, if you go to Dodge City, people put on cowboy shows, and tourists are able to see a "real" Western town. I imagine that "Ancient Culture Street" is a little like this in Tianjin. That sounds horribly cynical, and I don't mean it to. I think it's interesting how different cultures all over the world create little areas to reproduce some time period, or place in their history, which they consider to have been a high point. What exactly, or really, "when" exactly a culture chooses to reproduce might be very telling about that particular culture. I'm not going to think about what recreating a gun fight and the graveyard of Boot Hill in Dodge City might mean for my own country. Wait, it's too late. I did think about it. Here are three videos I made in ancient culture street. One is just to show what it looks like, the other is to show this really cool stand where an artist would make little characters out of clay very quickly, and the last one is of a food vendor. I thought the noise coming from his steamer was some kind of musical instrument at first, which was what made me walk over to the area where I made the movies.



Hm. Two of my videos had some trouble uploading. Hopefully I can add them to this post.



I think I fixed it.