Worst Kept Secrets

The torch came through Nanjing today, practically right outside my school. The powers that be dictated that class would remain in session, which was a joke - I trotted down to my 10:00 to find four unhappy looking students in a class of twenty-five. Chris was out of class, though, and he got pictures, if you’re interested. I hinted as strongly as I could that maybe those four should tell me they needed an extended toilet break or something, WINK NUDGE, because I felt awful for them, but they elected to stay and do absolutely nothing, and then watch their classmates return beaming and suffering no disciplinary consequences.

Class was a little bit of a zoo after everyone got back. I’m not sure it’s possible to exaggerate the extent of my students’ patriotism (and my students are well-educated, relatively liberal kids), and the Olympics are a HUGE point of personal and national pride. They returned from the street positively glowing with happiness and excitement (while the five of us glumly made the rounds to see the pictures and feel sorry for ourselves).

On a different note, I’m starting to feel really worn out and overworked. One of my classes is seriously struggling, and the only way I know to help is to take a really muscular approach that involves a lot of from-scratch materials. My other class is on the opposite end of the spectrum – they’re too advanced for the textbook we’re using, and so I’m spending hours and hours trying to figure out a way to work something challenging into easy material – which also comes straight from scratch. That class is also HUGE, and I keep winding up with stacks and stacks of things to grade. Plus I keep having students ask me for things, which is great - I’m glad that they trust me enough to do that. But still. Compiling lists of the most important lower level works of English literature, teaching the international phonetic alphabet, or helping someone hunt down nurse and doctor costumes add to the list of things to do.

It doesn’t help that I’ve overloaded myself with personal projects again. I’m currently running a schedule that includes an average of two hours of class preparation, plus up to an hour of daily grading, at least one of hour of self-taught Chinese writing (usually winds up being two), thirty minutes of guitar practice, and I’m trying to write more. I hate to whine about my blog’s quality, but it just seems like it used to be a lot more interesting, and blog time equaled happy time. I’d like to get back to that – not because I think this is a fantastic site or anything, but just because I used to enjoy it so much, and I’m starting to feel like all of my creativity is slowly draining out of me in a death spasm of IELTS essays and staff meetings. But it just seems like I never have time to really sit down and come up with something GOOD and INTERESTING to say. I wrote a huge post on the ecological significance of elephants yesterday, but got too tired to find enough links to round it out, and now it’s sitting in the drafts folder along with the epic post I’ve been trying to finish about the local punk scene, a half-finished essay about jumping into the deep end of ESL, the beginnings of what I thought was shaping up to be a pretty good piece about the things I hear out my window, etc.

I had it in my head that moving to China and working twenty hours a week would give me more time to work on personal crap, but it seems like I have so much less free time here than I did in the states. This probably has to do with cultural difficulty – at home, it wasn’t such an event to buy toilet paper or mail a letter, but here these things warrant their own bullet point on a to-do list. That’s ok, I’m just feeling like I’m in a position where I HAVE to find some down time, and I can’t figure out how to do it without compromising my integrity as a teacher or without losing a lot of hard work I’ve put into characters and guitar.

I’ve felt like this before (in China and in the US), and it never lasts forever. I just wish I could find a way to accomplish the things I want to accomplish without being a total stress freak case and maintain some semblance of a social life. I just feel like I can’t calm down. I keep having to force myself to stop worrying about things long enough to have a snack or watch a movie. There’s always something I *should* be doing, and it seems like I’ve got a list of things I need to do running in my head from the second I wake up to the second I fall asleep. BLAGGGGHHHH, and it’s only Tuesday.

Aiee, done, sorry. Just needed to vent.

I’ll end on a funny note. Today in my golden class, there was a section on polite language. I elicited some examples - please, thank you, excuse me, etc. and then asked for some examples of rude behavior. I was going for things like “hey you,” pointing, spitting, stuff like that. Instead I got a VOLLEY of profanity that positively made me blush, and I’ve been known to use some pretty raunchy language myself (this class is also composed of hard-working, overachieving angels). They definitely hit George Carlin’s seven, plus an astonishing variety of sexual terminology, compound words, and full collocations. I have to say, though, I was most impressed that they knew the word “skank.” I tell you, that class is totally ready for America.