Worst Kept Secrets

Hot damn, it wound up snowing. I was in the office this morning and my department leader was talking about how the weather in China was making news in Missouri. That was exciting, because a. I know where Missouri is, as opposed to just about every other place that people mention to me here, and b. I feel important by virtue of living in a place that got enough snow to make the news in Missouri. It also made the news in New York, if you’d like to read the terrifying article.

It really doesn’t feel like a disaster here in Nanjing, I promise. We’re not running out of food, the sanitation is fine (or as good as it gets, anyway), etc. And everyone’s very chipper about it. When I went outside yesterday morning, I saw a workman shoveling the parking lot which was under, oh, two feet or so of snow, and the guy gave us a huge smile and exclaimed, “bao mei!” (explosively beautiful), which I think is an unbeatable attitude for the guy doing the shoveling. We did lose power for a few hours Monday morning, but we all survived (the poor students were without electricity all Sunday night, beginning at 6 pm, and if they could show up the next morning and start their end of term exams without a single complaint, I think the foreign teachers can handle a chilly handful of hours).

So yeah, it’s exam week, and that’s stressful for all parties involved. I’ve been monitoring tests all week, which sounds low key enough, but trying to keep some of these classes from cheating is a fairly athletic endeavor. It’s like The Great Escape, where the prisoners’ sworn duty as soldiers is to attempt escape, and I’m the poor Nazi official charged with making sure they don’t. It’s not only that they’re trying to cheat; it’s the extent to which they insult my intelligence while doing it. First of all, my corrective lenses do ensure that I see craning necks, especially when I’m looking directly at the would-be violator. I can also figure out the use of strategically placed crumpled pages on the floor. By the end of my first test today, I was so frazzled that every time a student coughed I was positive it was some kind of code. I don’t think any of them succeeded in actually cheating, since I was standing over them at full attention the entire time. I wound up moving a lot of desks around shoved against walls and corners, and I had one poor kid up at the front trying to use the chalkboard as scratch paper, and it took a long time for me to explain to him why that wasn’t cool (I honestly believe that he didn’t have bad intentions - he’s just that oblivious). So I will be happy when all of this is over, the grading’s turned in, and I don’t have to spend all my workday playing bad cop.

Anyway, one of my classes tried to butter me up right before the exam by telling me the United States is called meiguo (beautiful country) because I was born there and I was so beautiful (I think it’s more of a transliteration than a literal description). One of my more precocious students whipped out the dictionary and produced the word kiss ass, and they got that concept an awful lot faster than the past perfect tense. As a general rule, I try to avoid being the teacher who teaches all the dirty words, but if they ask what something means, I will tell them. I decided to go ahead with this when I had a student tell me he’d had “a raping good day.” This was the result of a well-meaning teacher teaching him a less inflammatory substitute word, and I felt it needed correcting, with a ton of caveats. It took me a while to find the words, but the basic rule for swearing wound up being “strictly in the presence of close friends.” At first I tried telling them not to cuss at those in authority, such as parents, professors, police officers and the like, but they thought that meant that it was fine to swear at anyone younger than them, so I had to explain that many frown upon swearing at small children. They understood why religious and racial slurs presented a problem, but you try explaining why rape is less obscene than fuck. I have to say that I was in ethical agreement with them.

I mean, they LOVE finding the dirty words. I don’t know who set loose the “make love” demon, but they work it into every sentence they possibly can. In some groups, it’s even been abbreviated, as in “so-and-so would like to ML with a panda.” Sex with pandas comes up distressingly frequently in sample sentence rounds, incidentally. I always feel like I’m going to get in trouble over this, but at the same time, it’s fairly important cultural information, right? Especially if they’re going to go to a western university. If they’re going to learn these words anyway, they might as well know what they mean and when it’s appropriate to use them, right?

Like I said, I hardly ever instigate this as a class topic. But I wish I could. Take the f-jewel. I would LOVE to be able to use that in a grammar quiz. A student might memorize quickly as an adverb and student as a noun, without having any understanding of what adverbs and nouns are as larger concepts, but the nasty word serves as not only a noun and an adverb, but also a verb, adjective, and an exclamation, to name only a few. It could be such a perfect tool for illustrating the actual functions of different parts of speech. Does anyone else know an equal or more versatile linguistic creation? I’m sure there are plenty, my head is just too full of corruptive influences to be able to come up with one right now.

Anyway, they all passed their English exams, and things are fine, if extremely snowy. And I’ve got Season Three of Battlestar Galactica calling my name, so I’d better go see what those nutty Cylons are up to this time (oh come on, at least watch the show before you judge me, alright?).