random pix: spotted in Jiu Long Cheng (my building)

Remember what I said before about trust issues? Well this is the entire contents of someone's apartment, sitting in the first floor elevator waiting area. It stayed here like this for almost three full days and I didn't notice anything missing any time I walked by.

Speaking of trust and safety, this apartment was completely open with no one in it for a decent amount of time (I wandered in and poked around). Apparently no one thought this was hazardous for say, children in the building.

 

Nothing strange about an elevator full of old logs. Nothing at all.

new school

My current school is the polar opposite of my old school in Songyuan. They recognize that Chinese students are really good at memorizing, and that memorization is the backbone of most English education here, not actual learning and comprehension, so they take a different approach.

In Songyuan, I was making up almost all of my own course material and curriculum. Here, for 90% of the classes, the curriculum and even the lesson plans, minute by minute, are already set up based on their philosophy.

Chinese teaching partners gather all the materials and make sure everything is ready for classes, so really, all foreign teachers need to do is show up to teach what they're told most of the time. There are no textbooks. Most classes (outside of feature art, drama or test focused classes) are based around a story. Each class has songs, games, activities and arts and crafts using language from the story, so students have a better chance at actual comprehension. It's also a lot more fun for kids than staring at a textbook for an hour. In most classes, you basically never do the same activity for more than say eight minutes.

It does have a tendency to make you feel a bit like a dancing bear (sing this song, play that game, teach this nursery rhyme, read that story, sing this other song, etc. with none of it being your idea), but you can make little tweaks to the lesson plans to make them your own, which makes you feel a little less bear like.

The school focuses on kids two to 12, but most of my students are between four and six. The max class size is eight, so you get a lot of time to focus on each kid. Naturally, this is a huge change from teaching mostly adults in large classes or teenagers one on one. It takes a lot more energy, but a lot less of the not-so-fun office hours for lesson planning and the like. Wracking you brain for things that are going to keep both you and the students interested and also teach something got kind of difficult at times.

Naturally, it has its problems though.

All the stories that classes are based around are unique, created just for the school, but many aren't really stories, in that they don't have a beginning/middle/end, or a point at all. I think that's offset for the kids though by the fact that they ARE in a non-native language. Many of them have some repetition throughout that the students like to chime in with (if they haven't already memorized the story to tell it word for word with you).

A lot of the English songs or nursery rhymes are a little off somehow, in words, melody, something. Part of this comes from the fact that Chinese people are finding and executing the materials and part of it comes from the fact that the bulk of the lesson plans and associated materials were created by an older man that grew up in the States but lived in the UK for most of his adult years, so he's got American and British ideas mixed into one idea.

Regardless, I think they have a good strategy. My SO disagrees and is of the textbook/study/grammar/sentence structure school, but to each their own.

All the foreign teachers' contracts are structured a little differently; they like to try to make use of everyone's talents. My SO has created the curriculum for a theater class where the kids create the costumes and set as well as put on the final performance. The guy that wrote the lesson plans does a lot of video editing (you might not think a school requires a lot of video editing, but apparently this one does?). Another guy I met up in Songyuan handles a lot of admin stuff.

As for me, I'm contracted for up to 30 hours a week: up to 15 teaching hours and up to 15 office hours, which have including, marketing, event planning, social media management, graphic design and interior design. More on my non-teaching stuff later. For most of us, the rate for our teaching overtime and whatever various other overtime is different, but better than Songyuan and we get paid for office hours.

It might not sound like foreign teachers require office hours, considering the lessons plans are mostly set and the Chinese teachers gather the materials, but feature courses, or those outside of the core program, fall outside of those plans, and also they're big on parent communication. If anything major happens in class, good or bad, I touch base with parents afterwards, but we are also required to fill out monthly progress reports on all students. It can be extremely time consuming, some kids are so middle of the road, nothing great, nothing awful, nothing ever changing that I have to reference all my past reports to make sure I'm not just repeating myself.

All in all though, it's not a bad gig and is MILES better than SAGE Foreign Studies Academy.

follow up: old man skin

An awful patch of my random old man skin disease reappeared on my shoulder yesterday and has been bugging the ever living crap out of me (it itches like the dickens). I was complaining to some Russian friends of mine and they looked at it and immediately went to interwebs for translations.

They kept telling me it was "the mange", which I didn't know of as a disease, but turns out it is- a disease for dogs. The human version is called demodicosis and is commonly associated with pityriasis, which my dermatologist said I had when I went back to the States last fall.

Awesome = finally being confident in knowing what I have and knowing that since one of the Russian guys had it and kicked it, I will too, after almost a year.

Not so awesome = knowing I have a dirty dog disease, and I'm almost certain it came from these guys in Cambodia. Thank god I'm not losing my fur like they are.

random pix: lavatopy directions, a huge butt & a Mexican Burrito

 

I wonder, where does the inventory go when it's closing time...

Why wouldn't you want a giant ass on the hood of your car?

This, my friends, is a Mexican Burrito. It is scrambled eggs, beef, Tabasco sauce and cilantro on top of Doritos.

random coffee/burger/waffle experiment

A really modern and hip looking bar down the street from my apartment called "Drink" was unfortunately remodeled recently and turned into a psuedo-Victorian looking coffee shop, so the SO and I decided to give it a go for lunch the other day. After all, how can you go wrong at a place that advertises coffee, waffles AND burgers???

Naturally, none of the staff spoke English, but the fake books on the bookshelves throughout had English titles on the spines, so we were surprised not to find any English "subtitles" on the menu. All the section headers were in English, but none of the food line items. So, we choose one random from the "Burger" section, one random from the "Waffle & Pancake" section, and this is what we got:

Why are there two sort of mini-sandwiches? Who knows. Why is one an egg sandwich and one a burger? Who knows. All in all, not too bad though.

Now this one had some fatal flaws. See how the waffle looks like cake and/or foam from inside your couch cushions? Tastes like the latter. The yellow pile on the left side of the plate is a flavorless, gelatinous custard of sorts. The pile on the right is strawberry ice cream. The swirly, twirly things are marshmallow candies. Buddy the Elf would love it.

Welcome to western food in China :)

trust issues

Chinese people have very interesting ideas about trust. I am forever having Chinese friends or even strangers on the bus, tell me to be mindful of thieves trying to steal my purse. It has a long strap, so I wear it diagonally across my body, and it usually falls behind me. It has a snap closure, so I very seriously doubt that short of cutting it off of me, there's any way anyone could relieve me of it, or any of its contents, without my knowing. They always want me to wear it in the front though, so I can see it and be sure.

Chinese are also people that put bars on their apartment windows... regardless of whether they live on the first floor, the sixth floor or the twentieth floor. Naturally, The Crack Den 2.0, my old first floor apartment in Songyuan, was an unfortunate, rare exception to that rule. People were always telling me there that I shouldn't open my windows even if I was home because I might not hear an invader. Here in Xiamen, my eleventh and a half floor bedroom windows have bars on them (though they're not very secure so I'm not even sure what the point is). My eleventh floor living room balcony does not have bars.

So you have things like that, where people are maybe a touch paranoid, but then you have things that go 180 degrees in the opposite direction...

As I've mentioned before, China basically doesn't have clothes dryers (I have met one person that owned one in past 14 months). The washer will either have a killer spin cycle or it won't spin at all and you'll have to manually move the clothes to the "dryer", which will just spin them a bit.

So everyone hangs their laundry out to dry. Everywhere. Apartment building rooftops, public parks, in front of restaurants, I mean everywhere; there is always laundry hanging in random places you KNOW nobody lives. And apparently no one is worried about their clothes being stolen. Now, I don't worry about my purse being on my back or someone coming in my eleventh story window (heck, if they can manage that, I will just GIVE them something for the effort, I'll be so impressed), but my laundry is something I wouldn't leave to dry outside of my own apartment.

More importantly than clothes, let me tell you about money. Actual money. A lot of businesses that I frequent don't have a cash register. Maybe they have a cash drawer, a completely unorganized drawer full of loose change and bills with absolutely no system of accounting for it at all. Or if they're fancy, maybe they do have a cash register, but usually the cash isn't divided like you might think, with a slot for the 1s, a slot for the 5s, a slot for the 10s and so on and so forth, the cash register is just a facade for the cash junk drawer. And it's common for someone to give me change out of their own pocket instead of the drawer. You trust your employees this much?! Granted a lot of businesses are small and family, but not everyone there is family...

And then there's the weird situation I am in with my rent and utilities. I pay rent quarterly here, same goes for utilities (water and electric). My landlord gets the bills for the utilities and then I pay when I pay rent.

After living in my apartment for one quarter, when I should have seen my first round of utility bills to pay, the property manager said she didn't have them because she had too many properties to manage, she just told me an arbitrary amount and expected me to pay. After quite a bit of back and forth, I paid the random amount and she agreed to email me all past and future utility bills. Never got a thing. 

After the second quarter I was here, I asked for the bills so I could pay, but she wouldn't even let me pay rent, she was on holiday and couldn't be bothered to pick up any money I transferred to her. I ended up paying rent three weeks late and still no utility bills. She told a Chinese friend of mine if she didn't produce them I didn't have to pay.

This sounds great and all, except that this woman has 3,500 RMB in deposits from me that I want to get back when I move out- 3,000 RMB for the apartment and 500RMB for utilities. I'm thinking if she keeps not asking me to pay, she's going to screw me in the end, never show me any bills and keep my deposit. My Chinese friend says that the landlord and I are friends so she probably just won't make me pay at all. What?

So, we don't trust people with purses and breaking into our apartments, but we trust everyone in the public with our laundry, all employees and utilities don't need to be paid... or something like that.

bizarre old man skin disease

One piece of my health problems I had beginning in August turned out to be a kind of eczema, eczema pityriasis rosea to be exact. I found this out during a trip to my American dermatologist on a short trip back to The States in late September-early October of last year.

Unfortunately, she got my biopsy back after I had returned to China, so I have had to rely on intermediaries or interwebs for more info like: How did I get this? (Interwebs don't know. It's not a thing anyone else in my family has.) Will it ever go away? (Probably, say interwebs, but I apparently belong to the two percent of people that suffer recurrences.) How do I prevent outbreaks? (I don't.) Interwebs also suggest that eczema and pityriasis rosea are two different things, instead of pityriasis rosea being a kind of eczema, like my derm seemed to say.

I still have it now and have been getting regular-sick, the cold or flu-ey kind, more often since I developed this, because it's a fun kind of dermatological thing that also can come with upper respiratory tract infections, fevers, headaches, nausea and fatigue, yay.

At this point, I'm sure you're thinking, "This might be a bit of an overshare, or at least significantly less interesting, compared to her usual posts..." BUT, there's a reason for it.

An older, American male friend of mine here has another form of eczema that has gotten significantly worse since he moved to China.

Another American male coworker, my age, was complaining last week about a weird skin patch on his leg that developed since he came to China and hasn't gone away in months. He showed me and the older gent and we both agreed that it's definitely eczema.

Same thing with another younger, American male friend here.

I think it's a little strange that so many people around me have developed, or aggrevated their existing, eczema here. The coworker that's had it for a while before China explains it to me as allergy related, and he alters his diet and what touches his skin in his affected areas (not an option for me anyway). Wikipedia doesn't seem to be saying mine is allergy related though, and as far as I know I'm not allergic to anything. 

Weird. Sucky and weird.