Due Dilligence

While we're on the subject, a few shots of Ysa in action, drawing intently while we were waiting for a veggie burger and fries on Lantau Island, Hong Kong.

Ysa tells it like it is

Hey, our laptop is now fixed! Jane is back, the semester is well underway - what better way to get back into the swing of blogging than a musical interlude featuring the indomitable Ysa on the piano?



Make sure you keep watching past the intro to catch the lyrics, which are a moving portrait of the Chinese kindergarten experience. A sampling:

"In class, there's a lot of classmates that's my friends and I love to play with them.
And some, they don't like me and I don't like them, and I don't play with them..."

Don't worry, though... the song ends on a triumphant note. With lollipops. And ice cream. Enjoy!

Looks like the Slow Boat has gotten even slower...

Okay, so you want some really slow boats, do you?

Here's one of them, with me and the kids on it. A couple of weeks ago, I single-dadded the kids for 36 hours on the train, from our conference in Hong Kong back home to Chengdu. On the way, we stopped by Guilin, and the nearby backpacker town of Yangshou. The picture is of us on the Li River, en route to Yangshuo, with us and our luggage on a homemade bamboo raft, chugging slowly downstream through a forest of "bloopy mountains", as we called them.

See? They're bloopy!

You'll notice our butts are not in the first picture, mostly because we nearly froze them off at times. Because most of our traveling was in Thailand, we packed only the very basics of cold weather gear, and Yangshou in the winter is very chilly, clammy and wet. But we huddled together on our bench on the raft, and had fun biking around the town once we got used to the weather a bit. Having lots of good reasonably priced restaurants around and a good kids' movie selection at the hostel we stayed at sure didn't hurt, either.

Xander can now order up a mean bowl of street vendor soup!
So yep, I've been a single dad for the past couple of weeks, rediscovering some board games, starting back into teaching, and keeping myself occupied. Blogging has fallen, however, by the wayside, and doesn't look to be resuming for the next week or three at least. I haven't quite gotten the hang of writing blog posts effortlessly from our iPad, and since we've gotten home, I've been unable to get our laptop online. (Except for Skype, oddly enough.) With the combination of a slow local network that's often overwhelmed by students, a now ancient (2006) MacBook, and the varying internet policies of our host government, it's never easy to track down the cause of internet weirdness here.

However, I got a pretty big hint the other night, when our laptop refused to start up. The power had been off all day, and when it came back on... nuthin'. Or rather, a grey screen, followed by a progress bar which freezes, followed by the computer shutting down again, for those of you who are interested in such things. And yes, I did try to do a safe boot, reset the NVRAM/PRAM, and all sorts of other technogeekery, all to no avail.

So it's off to Chengdu tomorrow to see what the Apple authorized maintenance folks can do. Apparently, out of the fifteen or twenty "Apple Stores" that have sprouted up in Chengdu over the last year or two, there is one repair shop that is licensed by Apple to make warranty repairs. Even though our computer is out of warranty. (It's in the building with the KFC in it, across from the other computer city building. On the ninth floor, which you get to by taking the elevator up to the seventh floor and then walking up two flights of escalators that don't work, then continuing down the hallway and taking a left past the second of three HP printer repair shops. Go past the sign that says "Beware of Tigers" in Chinese, take another left past the dilapidated men's room that smells like a cat lady has set up shop in the dirtiest truck stop bathroom imaginable, and when you come to a room full of discarded office furniture and barrels of industrial solvents, you're almost there.)

Oh, and does anyone know the Chinese for "cooling fan"? Wish me luck, everyone!

So where to start..?

Hmm, how about "I'm back!" After some time off in Thailand, a conference with our organization in Hong Kong, and two overnight train rides across a good chuk of southern China, the kids and I are back at home outside of Chengdu, where it's just a bit, um, colder than it was in Thailand.

You'll notice that I said "the kids and I" - Jane is still just outside of Bangkok, where she is participating in an ecovillage design conference. It's a great opportunity for her, and ties directly in to several paths that she'd like to take professionally once we leave China. The conference has been a long one - seven weeks total - which puts her back in China by the first week of March.

So in the meantime, I'm here at home single dadding it, which I'm enjoying in an ever so slightly hermit-ish kind of way. Classes don't start for another week, and because the weather has been so gukky (yes, that's a word), I've been enjoying spending some time at home with them, with no big plans other than making sure they've been properly introduced to all of the Star Wars movies and an extended Monopoly game or five. And while the Lego intergalactic trade routes have been established through our household (much to the chagrim of Ysa, who would rather be playing school), Im slowly finding a balance between easing back in to the China groove on one hand, and planning ahead for our next steps after our time with MCC ends this summer on the other.

Which means writing reports for our organization, writing lesson plans, and getting a resume or six into circulation. Balanced by an occasional dose of procrastination. (My routine for writing material for a deadline: 1) Spend an entire day doing Absolutely Nothing Productive when I know I should be writing. 2) During this time, become increasingly grumpy and frustrated. Give up on any hope of ever getting anything useful done Ever. 3) Open a Word document. Decide on the formatting and the font. Write a sentence, then delet it. 4) Go to bed in frustration after looking at a few web pages vaguely related to the topic. 5) Wake up with the introductory sentence fully formed in my head, with the next five paragraphs writing themselves within a half hour. 6) Wish that I could send a note back in time to my yesterday's self to tell him to chill out a bit and stop the worrying already.)

So in and amongst my routine, I hope to be back to life on the blog again, if only to reassure friends and relatives that yes, we're still around. Content will, as always, be fairly nonlinear, and there will probably be the usual nonapologetic random pauses between posts. (By now, this (and the addition of randomly nested paranthetical remarks) should come as no suprise.)

Anouncing a change in venue

Yes, the Slow Boat has headed for warmer territory, and is now anchored in the Gulf of Thailand on an island named Koh Kut near the Cambodian border.  No pictures as of yet, and nothing that we've done that's incredibly different from previous trips that we've taken to Thailand.  We're doing many of the things that we did last year - watching the kids run around on the beach, eating yummy street food, looking at piles of disassembled automobile transmissions near our favorite hotel in Bangkok... Traditions are traditions, after all.

And some new experiences as well, including the first Thai transvestite vampire movie that I've ever seen (shown on a bus while the kids were asleep - try seeing that on Greyhound!)  As per usual when the Slow Boat is in ports elsewhere, more details to follow as internet connections and my personal whims and motivation dictates.  Enjoy your Januaries, everyone!

The Mathemagical Awesomeness that is Vi Hart

Here at Slow Boat's main shipyard, we (and by that, I mean "I") have been doing a lot of thinking about education lately.  (Hmmm, could it be related to the next direction I want to go in my life?  Crazy, huh?)  As a result, you just might be seeing a few education-related thoughts, videos, or links crop up here from time to time.

And speaking of education and awesomeness, what better place to start than Vi Hart?  A rare mix of mathematics, creativity, music, art, and humor, flavored with a healthy dose of girl power awesome.  Here's one of her latest videos. If you haven't checked her site out, be prepared to park yourself in front of the computer for a while to check out her past videos as well.  Bring the kids!

Lessons learned while falling

Last spring, I was headed off to one of my freshman classes that I had been discouraged with.  They were fine talking with each other, but when it came to talking out in class, they just wouldn't do it.  "What was missing?" I asked myself, and the answer came very clearly; Trust.  You can read and write by yourself, and you can listen by yourself, but when you speak a new language in front of others, you need to trust the people you are making yourself vulnerable in a certain way, and placing your trust in the people you are speaking to. So how to start talking about trust, in a foreign language, in a way that would possibly be understood?

Hearkening back to my oh so many days as a camp counselor, and in church youth groups before that, I immediately thought of a trust fall.  A bit cheesy, perhaps, but essentially simple - one student stands on a table or desk and falls backwards into a group of eight or more other students.  As long as the person falling keeps their legs and back perfectly straight, it is totally safe and easy, as the weight of the person falling is distributed among so many people. Ah, if only I could get my students to do a trust fall... but no, I didn't think they'd go for that.  Not when saying an English sentence in front of twenty students was too difficult for them.

All that to say that thirty minutes later, I ended up standing on a desk counting slowly backwards from twenty with a panicking cluster of fifteen of my students behind me, all freaking out because they were quickly realizing that I was indeed going to fall backwards into them when I reached zero.  Which I did, and quite safely, too.  In fact, it worked so well (aside from a very elevated heart rate on my part) that I went on to do the same exercise in all my other classes last spring, and in all of the classes that I taught this fall as well.

So, after doing this a few times, and giving my students a chance to write about the experience a bit before discussing it with the class (giving my heart rate time to come back to normal), here are a few things that I learned from the experience:

• Trust is very surprising to people.
• There is often a big difference between perceived risk and actual risk. (In other words, we usually think a given activity is riskier than it actually is.)
• Making yourself purposefully vulnerable is a very powerful act.
• If you are going to embarrass yourself in public, do it memorably.
• It's necessary to continue to push boundaries - others' perhaps, but mainly your own.

As this new year is now coming in, it occurs to me that this year more than most will be a year of closing my eyes and falling, both backwards and forwards, for us, as we finish our teaching contract here and look for the next steps to take.  New situations, new jobs, new risks, and most of all new opportunities.  Here's wishing you all an exciting, risk-taking, challenging, safe, and happy 2012!