Worst Kept Secrets

That’s my city!

Saturday I went to Castle Bar with some friends and coworkers to see the Shanghai band Banana Monkey. There were posters plastered all over town for this, showing a guy in a gas mask looking very punk rock.

I’ve got to admit that I’ve had a pretty snotty attitude toward Chinese music - most of my students worship Britney Spears et al, and the most commercial pop reigns supreme. And it serves me right for making judgments about a culture whose language I don’t speak and whose surface I’ve barely skimmed. In other words, I wasn’t expecting this band to actually be good, you know? They gave me the same giggly happy dancy feeling that the Dismemberment Plan did way back in the day. Plus, the deliciously adorable lead singer looked an awful lot like a Chinese version of Amazing Friend Shaun, which alternatively delighted me and freaked me out.

It was also so weird seeing the crowd that turned up. I’m used to the private prep school crowd, and finding myself surrounded by young Chinese hipsters surprised the hell out of me - I’d never seen those kids before, and I’d felt a little lost without a huge population of fashionably detached twenty-somethings to make me feel inferior. But they are here, and I feel like I need to stay true to form and make very good friends with two or three so that I can go to their parties and feel awkward, out of the loop, and badly dressed.

(I’m speaking affectionately)

Seriously, though, if you ever run across a band called Banana Monkey (here’s their myspace), they put on a mean live show. They’re fun and they’re adorable and they gave me a live music high that I haven’t had in entirely too long.

Sunday, we spent a very wholesome afternoon at Gulin Park, which was beautiful! We tried to fly our kite, with extremely limited success. I have a video, but I’m not smart enough to put it on my website without using youtube (a source of a fair amount of frustration in the Middle Kingdom right now). But here are some pictures:

Chris was significantly better at this than I was, although I can’t remember which one of us accidentally drove the kite straight into the head of a very nice older lady in a pink sweatshirt. He also brought the right attitude, which was almost enough to keep the thing in the air.

 Then we found a playground with some of the scariest inflatables I’ve seen in a while (note that it’s a DSNLY themed site):

The dinosaur unicorn was my favorite.

 And that was my weekend. Today I had my second observation. We had two - one from our department head and one from an outside party. My first went surprisingly well. I was terrified about it, but managed to teach a fairly decent class about articles and the present continuous tense (no small trick making that engaging, by the way). So I told myself I wasn’t going to worry about the next round.

So of course I woke up in a cold sweat around five thirty in the morning, and then panicked throughout my entire first period class. It didn’t help that that class wasn’t exactly a stellar one. Those students are great students, but IELTS is a rough subject for them, and it was like pulling teeth all morning, interspersed with trying to wrestle away their ICT notes they were desperately going through in preparation for an exam. I wound up giving up the fight and gave them a little bit of study time at the end of class. I helped them review and was moderately horrified at how complicated some of the stuff they’re learning in there is.

Then I headed into the monster class for the observation, praying that no one would a. bring their cell phone, b. ask me to define sexually explicit language, c. ask to go to the restroom a thousand times in a row, d. fight other students, or any of the other usual headache inducing things that happen in there. To their immense credit, though, they were very well-behaved and engaged, but I sort of bombed. We were going over vocabulary, and they didn’t know the words, meaning I wound up trying to explain them in simple terms, which I am devastatingly bad at. Out of curiosity, how would you define “statue” to a non-English speaker on the fly? So I felt like I made a bit of an ass of myself there, but nothing that I think will cost me my job.

The vocabulary set was all about things you might find in a town, including statues, parks, temples, art galleries, etc. and I taught it by drawing a map of a fake city on the board and having the students draw each element and name it. I think it worked pretty well (and the little dears waited for the observing teacher to leave before adding in bars and brothels), and then I had a nice jumping off point for prepositions of movement. I asked students to describe routes through their city (To get from King [student’s name] Palace to the square, you have to walk along Main Street, and then turn left on Bling Bling Avenue, just past Big [student’s name] Statue, and then over Anne Bridge… etc). And that part of the lesson wound up being awesome. Unfortunately, the other teacher wasn’t around for that. Sigh.

I’m probably thinking it went worse than it did. I just spend a lot of time worrying that I’m going to be “found out” as being as completely clueless about teaching as I am. Granted, I know an awful lot more about what to do in a classroom than I did five months ago, but I still get really concerned that I should be doing things that I’m not. I understand the importance of an integrated lesson (reading, writing, speaking, listening), and I know that it’s impossible to reinforce something too often, but I still get really nervous that everyone else in this profession knows things that I don’t.

Maybe this is all just me trying to figure out a way to give myself a crisis. My usual sources of woe are noticeably absent - friends are good, romantic stuff is good, I’m not terrified that I’m wasting my life anymore, etc. and so maybe I just feel lost without something to worry about.

However, in less troublesome news, Tom Waits made a dog food commercial, and Obama made a speech that made me feel - dare I say it? - downright patriotic. I WANT THIS MAN TO BE MY PRESIDENT SO BADLY. My political views are extremely shallow, and so I won’t make myself look like an idiot by trying to explain them, but come on. Decency ‘08, I am so on board with that.