"...these damned claws!"

Last night we were asked to come help the Chinese students who are preparing for an English competition to be held on our campus this weekend. We thought it would be a pretty easy, straightforward thing, with the students standing up and presenting their stories to us and the audience. Wrong.

We walked into a conference room near Rory's office in Teaching Building 1, and every seat was packed, all these teenage Chinese faces sitting around a giant conference desk, staring at us, wondering why we were there. Rory and I don't teach any of these students--they're all Cecilia's.

From the get-go it was like a freaking circus. We tried to get all of these kids to be quiet for two seconds so that their classmates could read/present their stories. I didn't want to immediately walk into a room and start yelling at a bunch of students who don't know who I am, but at the same time, I wanted our time spent there to be useful to the students who actually cared. And I didn't want to feel like I was wasting my time. There were plenty of other things we could have been doing. Also, there was a Chinese teacher in there to help us "maintain" the kids. She wasn't doing anything. So I finally just shouted "HEY!" and told them to be quiet. That lasted for 10 seconds. So we said "screw it" and just made all the kids come up to us and read, standing right next to us.

It was still impossible to hear, so Rory went up to the lead troublemaker and made him read next. Each time he would start reading, I'd say "What? I can't hear you?" just to annoy him. So we made him start over a bunch. And the kids didn't understand a word of what they were reading. They just learned how to pronounce the words. So "psychiatrist", "plausibly", "externality", "interviewer" and other similar words were just murdered. We suggested that they try to look up the words in their dictionaries so that they know what the hell they're saying, but I think that suggestion fell on deaf, rude ears. Homeboy who was talking a lot had a story that ended with "...these damned claws!" He didn't know what claws were. I kept thinking that if he knew what claws were, he could have really emphasized his story, raising his fist and pumping in the air (I had a romantic notion of this little guy being like a teenage Charleton Heston in Planet of the Apes...maybe next time).

Rory demonstrated how to read, and to make it sound like a joke. After he finished I started to (pretend) laugh and guffaw uncontrollably like it was the funniest thing I'd ever heard. The kids just stared at us, but we explained that this was the desired response. Again, deaf ears.

One girl actually had most of hers memorized, so she stood right by Rory and me, staring at us with this vacant, zombified look on her face while reading something about washing a cat in a washing machine..."No, doctor, it wasn't the washing machine that killed him--I think it was the ironing..." I know, hilarious, right? Anyway, this chick sort of just creeped us out, even if she was the best one there.

The whole thing was pretty ridiculous. Eventually another Chinese teacher came in, and while we were shouting about how rude the students were being, the teachers went around the room, taking pictures of girls on their cell phones and chatting right along with them. It made me wonder what a Chinese classroom (at this school anyway) is actually like, or how much English learning goes on. Seems like the school is trying to breed a bunch of Chinese parrots.