Getting to work

One good way to restart a narrative, at least if I remember the writing classes that I took a long while back, is to start with the setting. And what better setting than our walk to school every weekday?


Yes, I know it's terribly cliched to start with your main character wake up and look out the window. So sue me. Besides, this picture represents a special occasion. See those buildings under construction way off in the background? Not usually visible. Ditto on the sunlight and shadows.

Fast forward a bit, and it's out the door, around the corner, and up the street for a fifteen minute walk to school.

 

You'll note the seasonal variation in the photos, which are a compilation of the relatively rare times when A) I've had my camera with me, and B) the bright morning sunlight (fairly rare) has inspired me to take a few pictures.

 

 


Most days, we see Hat Man somewhere along the way. He's very distinguished, with a neatly trimmed grey mustache. That's him with the black overcoat.


Then it's past the abandoned commercial building of some kind ... (snarling barking Doberman not pictured)


...past the breakfast cart...


...and the entrance to the girls' boarding school. (Said girls, who tend to travel in clumps and screech in delight whenever they see a "cute!!" little foreigner, being the bane of my childrens' existance..) 


Xander and Zekey on the final stretch.


And here we are! The bell rings in another ten minutes, so finish your breakfast and get to your classroom.

Choosing your princesses wisely

This morning while getting ready for school, Ysa made a beeline for her fancy white short sleeve dress. Which would have been fine, except that we've had an unseasonable return of March in the last two days, and it's been cold, rainy, drizzly, and muddy. So no white dress.

"But Dad, I want to be like BaiXue GongZhu!"

"And who is BaiXue GongZu?"

"BaiXue GongZHU, Daddy!" (yes, my Chinese is still at the level where my four year old routinely corrects my pronunciation) "She's a princess!" The TV has been on a lot, because, um... we've been lazy parents?... >ahem< I mean, it's been helping our kids improve their Chinese tremendously. So princesses have been on her mind a great deal as of late.

As we continued getting ready, Ysa told me more about BaiXue GongZu (白雪公主), the White Snow Princess, who, as her name suggests, dresses only in white. And then something clicks - hey, she's talking about Snow White! Or at least a Chinese version thereof. Which got me thinking a little bit more about princesses, both Western and Chinese, and what both versions have in common - namely, hefty tie-ins to promotional marketing campaigns and a heavy reliance on princes.

So that was the inspiration to head off to YouTube, and follow through on my weeks-old promise to tell her all about Atalanta, the fastest and smartest princess around. The version below comes straight from my seventies childhood, via Free to Be, You and Me. (Thanks, Mom!) And it has Alan Alda doing the male voices - who knew?



After that, what more is there to say? When I picked her up from kindergarten, she told me that she wanted black hair and clothes like Atalanta's. I told her that it was a very old story, and that nobody knew exactly what color Atalanta's hair was really. And as far as clothes go, Atalanta wears whatever she wants, right? That seemed to satisfy her, so I allowed myself to savor a small moment of smug parental self-congratulation as I watched her run on ahead of me. As fast as she possibly could, with her hair streaming behind her.

Caine's Arcade

Caine's Arcade from Nirvan Mullick on Vimeo.

A video about a kid in East LA who built a cardboard arcade in the back of his dad's used auto parts store.  I'd seen this referenced around the internet a lot this week, and finally got around to watching.  It's well worth the ten minutes to see the whole movie, not just for the portrait of Caine (who is an awesome kid, by the way), but what happened when it hit the internet, and the arcade was mobbed with hundreds of visitors.  Looking at the movie's web site today, Caine has had upwards of $38,000 donated to his college fund, and climbing!  Go, internet!

I'll be showing this video to a class or two this semester - will keep you posted on the reactions in China...

Found in translation

Here's a challenge:  Can I decipher the note from my son's first grade teacher before my son finishes his homework?  Before you answer, here's the note:

"我校定于本周五开秋季学生运动会，请家长于周五早上8：10分准时送孩子了到校，中午11：00到校接孩子。下午不到校。
请家长勿必协助做好以不工作：
1。周五必须穿上校服。请家长检查校服拉链坏的及时修理。
2。请家长为孩子准备一双白色运动鞋（周五穿）
3。长发女孩子要求马尾辫 （高一些）；
4。 男孩子头发长了，请家长带去理发。做到清清爽爽。
谢谢客位家长！"

Piece of cake, right?  I suppose I could have asked a student or an English-speaking neighbor for help, but since I already had the online dictionary and Google translate up on the computer, Zekey and I spent a fun half hour working together figuring out which character said what. 

(For those uninitiated into the wonders of typing Chinese on the computer:  if you know a character's pronunciation, you can simply type it into the computer, choose the character you want, and there it is.  Unless you've got the pronunciation wrong, of course.  If you don't know what a character sounds like, then you can draw it using your mouse into an online dictionary, and that will give you several character choices, one of which will hopefully be correct.  Before computers, you would have had to look up a character by its most important stroke, or radical, and hope that you find the right one. This is where I get very jealous of anyone learning a language that has a phonetic alphabet...)

Anyway, since that was a thirty minute investment in basic data entry, I thought I'd share the results that Google Translate came up with:

Our school is scheduled to open Friday games fall students, parents Friday morning at 8:10 am sharp to send their children to the school, the school at 11:00 to pick up their kids. Not at school.
Please parents do not do will help to not work:
1. Friday must wear school uniform. Please check the school uniform zipper bad parents timely repairs.
2. Please prepare a pair of white parents to their children shoes (wear Friday)
3. Asked a girl with long hair ponytail (higher);
4. Long hair, boys, parents bring haircut. So cool-cool.
Thank you class parents!

Poetry, no?  Certainly much better than anything I could do on my own...

Ordinary Stuff - Grinding away

- Six to eight students per dormitory room.
- Around fourteen, and sometimes up to twenty, different classes in the course of a single week.
- An educational philosophy that emphasizes the mastery of an existing field of information, often accomplished by memorization.

= People Studying Everywhere. 

Here, an unused lecture hall in the first floor of the fourth teaching building that I pass on my way back home after my Tuesday class, which gets out at six.  If it's cloudy, which means most always, the class gets out right around dusk.  The classrooms are the most brightly lit spaces on campus, spilling their light out onto the rapidly dimming sidewalks as most of the students head to the campus cafeterias for dinner.

The entrance to the kids' primary school

Now with 50% more weeds and trees growing above it.  I think I'm justified if I tell Zekey to run at top speed every time he enters or leaves the building, right?

Done

The Done Manifesto:

1. There are three states of being. Not knowing, action and completion.
2. Accept that everything is a draft. It helps to get it done.
3. There is no editing stage.
4. Pretending you know what you're doing is almost the same as knowing what you are doing, so just accept that you know what you're doing even if you don't and do it.
5. Banish procrastination. If you wait more than a week to get an idea done, abandon it.
6. The point of being done is not to finish but to get other things done.
7. Once you're done you can throw it away.
8. Laugh at perfection. It's boring and keeps you from being done.
9. People without dirty hands are wrong. Doing something makes you right.
10. Failure counts as done. So do mistakes.
11. Destruction is a variant of done.
12. If you have an idea and publish it on the internet, that counts as a ghost of done.
13. Done is the engine of more.

(From Bre Pettis.  Posted more as a reminder to myself than anything else...)

Extreme Schooling?

Extreme Schooling, China Style

An interesting artice from the New York Times this weekend made me realize, "Oh yeah, we are doing something out of the ordinary, aren't we?"  Titled Our Family's Experiment in Extreme Schooling, it's the story of a Clifford Levy, a Times reporter who's worked in Moscow for the last four years, and how his kids handled the culture shock of being dropped into a school where they (gasp!) only spoke Russian!  From the article's introduction:

My three children once were among the coddled offspring of Park Slope, Brooklyn. But when I became a foreign correspondent for The New York Times, my wife and I decided that we wanted to immerse them in life abroad. No international schools where the instruction is in English. Ours would go to a local one, with real Russians. 

I've got to admit that one of my first reactions when reading this article (and watching the accompanying video, which you should make sure and see) was a half-suppressed disgusted snort and a sarcastic "Whoop-De-Doo!"  Russian is a hard language?  They've got an alphabet, for crying out loud!  How hard can it be??  And a slight tinge of jealousy - man, I wish I could send my kids to a $10,000 a year private alternative school in Mandarin.  And his kids get mistaken for Russians all the time!  No way no how will our kids ever fit into China that seamlessly, that's for sure...

But some of the details from the article were also gut-wrenchingly familiar - the sinking feeling in your gut as a parent during that first year of immersion, knowing that you are sending your child into an environment where he understands next to nothing and is totally miserable.  And the elation and beauty of hearing another language flow effortlessly out of your child's mouth at a school performance a year and a half later.  And the familiar push and pull, now that we've been to the States and back, of "Where, exactly, does my child belong now?"

When all is said and done, entering another culture is an incredible leap to make, no matter how you do it.  My congratulations to Clifford Levy and his wife, for deciding to guide their kids along the road less traveled instead of taking the easy way out.  And more importantly, congratulations to Danya, Arden, and Emmet, his three kids, who are now citizens of the world, and seem to be much richer for it.

Okay, I've tarnished his FBI file for good, now...

Around the first of May, Xander was sworn into the Young Pioneers, which means more or less that he's in the Honor Roll, except with the added bonus that he could also be on track to join the Communist Party of China. The main thing is that he gets to wear a red scarf every day to school, and he gets a nifty plastic pin with a red star on it. Xander, externally motivated student that he is, was crushed last fall when he didn't get a red scarf like the "good kids" in the class, and thought for a while that he was a Bad Student, so now he's been officially recognized.

And yes, teachers in China (well, at least in Xander's school) are very up front about separating the sheep from the goats in that way. Good students often get to sit up front close to the teacher, with the bad kids towards the back. For a couple of days, Xander refused to play with a friend of his because the teacher had mentioned that she hadn't done her math homework well enough. Yeah, we had to have a talk with him about that one...

Turns out that he hadn't gotten his red scarf last fall because, understandably, his teachers weren't quite sure what we as parents would think. We said fine, as long as they ignored all of the reports to the Central Committee that he was sure to make on us (joke!), and so he got his scarf in an all school awards ceremony, complete with an honor guard, a speech to the gathered parents from a vice president of the university, and, of course, synchronized dance performances.

The music that was playing while they were being led up to the stage? The theme song from the 1960 American Western The Magnificent Seven. (Which was itself a copy of Kurasawa's Seven Samurai.)

Of course.

Dance Dance Fever

June first is children's day in China, so the day before, schools across the country are preparing their choreographed dance routines. The kindergarten and primary school on our campus were no exceptions, so Jane and I spent a fun-filled (and sometimes surreal, and okay, I admit it, a little boring at times) morning and afternoon watching our kids join in the festivities. And of course, there were bucketloads of cute.





And a lot of stage makeup, even for the boys.



A wonderfully synchronized time was had by all.

Jane Z, teaching ninja

Yet another way that Jane rocks the house, now with new added teaching mojo...


When she finally gets her interview in the New York Times Magazine, this oughta be the cover picture, don't you think?


This photo will accompany the article, of course...

The Original Slow Boat

Presenting a floating contraption of some kind that Xander made last month or so. I think the chopstick cannons make a nice touch...

Proof!

See, here's proof that, um....

• We were in Zigong last weekend. (for those of you not in the know, the city of Zigong is famous for its recently discovered dinosaurs)
• We actually do hand the camera off to a stranger to take our picture from time to time, and once in a while, the photo actually turns out.
• There were dinosaurs in China, too. (an interesting aside: Chinese dinosaurs have been given Chinese names, even in English. Whod've thought? This one is Sichuanasaurus. I was looking around for specimens of MaoTseTungadon or perhaps a DengXiaoPingus Prosperus, but no such luck.)
  
• Evolution has occurred.. (yay, evolution!)
• Or that somebody created the world in an insanely short period of time, changed the laws of physics, and then hid lots of skeletons far far underground as a huge practical joke to test the faith of unbelievers...
• Asteroids crashing into the planet, are, as far as we know, dangerous. And have far-reaching consequences.
• Dinosaur murals make great photo backdrops, even if they sometimes frighten three year olds.
  
• Weekend road trips are fun!
  

Books of Note

A while back, I posted pictures of a few of my Chinese notebooks here, along with the inspirational quotes that grace their covers. A week later, the entry start getting tons and tons of hits from Notebookstories.com, a web site devoted entirely to, you guessed it, notebooks, and people who collect, save, and fill them. Who knew? (Though, given the nature of the internet, not entirely surprising.)

Being as I'm into sketchbooks, notebooks, journaling, cool graphic design, and found poetry, (intentional and otherwise), I've got a few photos of notebooks lying around the archives myself. Sooo - here's wishing everyone a happy Asian notebook week! Or month. Or couple of days. Whatever. Hey, they're notebooks, okay..?

First up: some cool books that I picked up in Thailand, featuring vintage ads on the front and excerpts from old textbooks on the back:







As always, click on the image to enlarge. Enjoy!

Happiness engineering

An enlightening reminder about happiness, and how to find it, from Scott Adams (the creator of the Dilbert comic strip), of all people.

A few good quotes:

"When you feel agitated, try eating some carbs. They're like a miracle drug. I suspect that anger is evolution's way of telling you to go kill something so you can eat."

" Many people make the mistake of incorporating negativity in their humor and thinking the outcome is a net positive. That takes the form of reflexively commenting on what's wrong with, well, everything. I used to be that guy. It was a habit I picked up from my mother. I thought I was being funny. An ex did me the favor of pointing out that I was actually just being an asshole. All the time."
(Whoops, this one is me sometimes... )

Ordinary Stuff - our local Kindergarten

Some pictures I took while waiting to pick up Zekey and Ysa for lunch while in a, shall we say, reflective mood one day...

What every four year old needs to know

As long as we're on the subject of education, here's a post on early childhood that I ran into a while back that I read every time I start feeling guilty about not homeschooling our kids thoroughly enough, or worrying that they may be "falling behind" compared to their peers in the States.

From the article:

1. "She should know that she is loved wholly and unconditionally, all of the time.
2. He should know that he is safe and he should know how to keep himself safe in public, with others, and in varied situations. He should know that he can trust his instincts about people and that he never has to do something that doesn’t feel right, no matter who is asking. He should know his personal rights and that his family will back them up.
3. She should know how to laugh, act silly, be goofy and use her imagination. She should know that it is always okay to paint the sky orange and give cats 6 legs.
4. He should know his own interests and be encouraged to follow them. If he could care less about learning his numbers, his parents should realize he’ll learn them accidentally soon enough and let him immerse himself instead in rocket ships, drawing, dinosaurs or playing in the mud."

Things you need to know...

...that you won't (or in my case didn't) learn in college.

If you don't read this article, you are 12% more likely to be injured while driving.

What we need from Education

"...in a vibrant and participatory democracy, whatever the wisest and most privileged parents want for their children must serve as the baseline for what the broader community deems essential for all of its children. Any other approach essentially says that our policy toward children comes down to a simple slogan: Choose the right parents! Choose parents with access, power, and money, and the world will open for you; choose parents without access and resources, sorry, you're on your own."

(From this article by Bill Ayers - well worth a read before we start blaming teachers or students for the state of education today.)

Getting Education Rolling

In the "Links I'm posting only to remind myself to check them out more when I have the time" category comes Redu, a constructive, positive site that not only talks education reform, but has a lot of good stories on what people are actually doing to make a difference in the system.