A photo that turned out much better than I thought it would

From the vast region of wholesale markets near the North Train Station in Chengdu.

Have you had your yak encounter today?

Did you know Jane milked a yak last summer? From the videos I've been uploading, a short video clip that she took then as a peaceful start to your morning (or afternoon or evening, depending)

Black and White

All the pretty little oranges

A week and some ago, we hosted 27 fellow teachers from our organization at our campus for a joint American / Canadian Thanksgiving. As part of the festivities, Jane went out on Friday afternoon and purchased around eight different kinds of the fifteen or so varieties of oranges and tangerines that are available at our local fruit vendors this time of year for an orange tasting at our apartment last Friday evening. She also took photographs of many of the varieties, which I'm posting below for your viewing pleasure.

Sports Day, China style

Some photos and video from an assembly at Xander's school last month. The theme was a sports competition, with each class performing their group exercises in front of the whole school. Having worked in primary / middle schools for a while, and been on the classroom management end of these types of assemblies for many more times than I care to have been, there was a lot that was familiar, and a lot that wasn't.



Familiar: Squirming kids, teachers on the lookout for trouble, announcements from the principal, parents watching their kids perform through the tiny monitor on their video cameras, tinny music with feedback from the PA system.



Unfamiliar: Whoa, that's my kid sitting there! And it's all outside, and oh, yeah, all in Chinese...

And um, weren't our school assemblies a bit less, oh.. paramilitary? I mean, we had the Pledge of Allegiance and all, but really. This is one of those times where I will have to respectfully agree to disagree with the educational system of my host country, I suppose.

A further word on the mass exercises may be in order. From Ysa's three year old class on up to the sixth grade at least, as far as I can tell, a significant part of gym class is devoted to teaching the kids some kind of dance routine to music. The routines remind me in turn of line dancing, Super Bowl halftime cheer leading routines, and North Korean mass propaganda rallies. (You know, the kind where thousands of people in the stands hold up cards to make a picture of Our Beloved Leader? Yeah, that kind.) There are some similarities to activities in American schools - Boy Scouts and high school marching band comes to mind - but this is mass activity on a higher scale.

It makes me think about some of the staples of the gym classes that I had growing up, dodge ball in particular. Or, more accurately, "bombardment", as my extremely paramilitary Boy Scout troop in Hutchinson, Kansas preferred to call it. Dodge ball, as played in the Midwest in the late seventies and early eighties anyway, was less about dodging and more about sheer Darwinian carnivorousness. Last man standing wins, and all that. (And for those of you familiar with my, ahem, uh, shall we say, "geekiness" during my Junior High Years, let me just note for the record that I usually did pretty well during dodge ball, chiefly because I stayed along the edges and took strategic cheap shots while the jocks were busy pounding away at each other in the middle.)

It's tempting to use the two gym class activities as a metaphor for the two countries - a sort of junior high contest where Communist-era faceless conformity goes head to head with good ol' American rugged bloodthirsty individualism. But of course, it's not that simple. You don't have to look much further than the the Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders to see that faceless conformity is still a big part of American culture today.

And as for Darwinian competition, the Chinese academic system, from what I've seen of it, is much more competitive than its American counterpart. There are many cultural explanations for this, starting first with the obvious fact that China has a heck of a lot more students, and going on from there. Much less sugarcoating, and many more tests, going on up to the big one at the end of high school that determines where (and if) you can go to university.

Having said all that, I've been happy with the experience my kids have been getting in the Chinese schools so far. All of their teachers, from what I've seen, have been quite caring and nurturing to their students, in spite of (what seems to this American teacher, anyway) huge class sizes and a relative lack of classroom resources.

I don't think I would want my children to go all the way through the Chinese educational system from start to finish, however. Then again, I'm not sure about having them go through the American system from start to finish either. Just a few preachy reminders (mostly to myself) to sum up:

• There's a lot of learning that happens outside of (and in spite of) the school system wherever you go, and
• If you can choose educational options for your kids, count yourself extremely fortunate and privileged. There are many people on both sides of the ocean that can't.
  

Makin' it on your own

I’d like to share a not-too-terribly deep revelation that I just had. In this world of ours, you can essentially do two things*: buy stuff or make stuff. (Or buy stuff to make stuff, or make stuff to buy stuff. Is that four things? No, I think that’s still just two.)

Even though China has been trending more and more to the “buy stuff” end of the scale, one would have to say that, in general, it’s still closer to the “making stuff” end of the scale than the United States. (Look at the labels on your stuff, all you Americans out there reading this...)



From the “buying stuff to make stuff” category comes these examples of Chinese kids’ papercraft books. Papercraft, in case you didn’t know, is the craft of punching out patterns from stiff cardstock to fold and glue three dimensional objects. In the days before it was decreed all children should be entertained by Things on Screens, it was quite common in the States, and is now making a bit of a comeback in the certain sectors of the internet, and a few cool parts of the art world as well.

I don’t know the history of papercraft here in China, but it’s certainly alive and well now. Go to any bookstore or news stand, and you’ll find several books that will help the young artist fold their own missile-heavy futuristic vehicles. Or dollhouse furniture. With, aside from fold and cut animals like our friend the zebra above, not too much in between. (Did I mention that heavily gendered toys are common here as well? My favorite was the build-it-yourself hand gernade that Zekey put together last spring. I told him it was a radio...)



(*Yeah, yeah, I guess you can destroy stuff as well, so that makes three things. But that’s probably the subject of another post...)

A little light evening reading

Xander, Zekey, and their friend Yang Dong Qi perusing the comic books at an outdoor book stall at our local night market a couple of weeks back.