An Overabundance of 7 Year olds

There is a point on extended trips where a person’s morale falls low. At SYA, they call it the wall, a point where everything falls to pieces, or at least seems that way. But I don’t want to call it the wall. I’d prefer to call it an overabundance of Chinese 7-year olds. Yes, this is my failed attempt to try and teach English at a migrant workers school. Migrant workers schools don’t really have an American counterpart. They are for the children of rural families that moved to the city to make money, but can’t attend normal schools because they lack a hukou, or a registration of their birth and current existence, from that city or are lacking a hukou at all. Hukou’s are used as a form of social security and due to the one-child policy, having more than one registered child loses the benefits of the social security. Of course, in rural areas, the more children a person has, the more he ensures his own, “Social Security,” by having people to fall back to when he grows old. These children that come to the city live rough lives, having been uprooted from the green, ever changing fields, which only represent work to them, and have been placed in an unfamiliar city shrouded in smog. But something about teaching them, maybe it was just a bad day, maybe they crushed my confidence, and my soul along with it, I don’t know, but I do know they brought me down.

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I got on the bus to the migrant school with the other students planning on teaching, and the usual bus going crowd at Beijing. I sat down next to Chris and Li Laoshi. Chris was teaching 5^th graders and I was teaching 1^st graders. Li Laoshi was just bringing us to the school for the first time and that was it. And as we drove the thirty minute bus ride to the school and started losing room for mobility, Li Laoshi asked us all if we had prepared our lessons. A gasp in unison erupted from us. They weren’t giving us the material we had to teach? That’s not good. That feeling when your heart feels like it stopped treading water and just sinks for a few seconds hit me hard. And it looked like everyone else felt the same way by the looks on their faces. Chris whipped out some candy and came up with an idea to reward good work. Everyone else started to come up with ideas for their classes and I just drew a blank. I kept trying to think, but the “ABC’s” song kept running through my head. I looked out the bus window and saw the grandeur, the beauty of the Beijing I came to know slip away. It was replaced with a very concrete, grey, square feeling area. Run down shops, and fruit carts with broken wheels littered the sidewalks along with an abundance of trash. The bus stopped and Li Laoshi ushered us off the bus in a line to start our teaching careers. We walked 2 minutes ‘till the giant gate of the school loomed in front of us; it’s bronze bars sticking out amidst the ocean of grey around. We walked in and there were a lot of kids. I can’t even think of any other words to describe them than “a lot.” All of them looked at us, and then began a mad dash towards us. All of them looked different, their clothes, their hair style, their height, their weight; an adorable mass of children swarming over their “Teachers.” I looked up and realized the school, was grey like the rest of the area, dust carpeted the ground, and the only distinguishable features were the red characters on top of one building and the wooden basketball hoops. But we kept walking towards the principal’s office. He introduced himself as Wu Xiaochang, or Principal Wu, told us how much he appreciated what we were doing and how the children loved SYA student teachers from years past. He looked tired, wearing a tattered blue suit, grey hair speckling the front of his receding hairline and he tried to put on a smile for us. He proceeded to say there were only 430 kids at the school, from pre-school to 9^th grade. The biggest class was the first grade class with 70 kids. My heart felt like it wasn’t just sinking anymore, but actually drowning. I was expecting maybe a small class of 18 kids, sort of like Peter Hessler’s description of teaching in Fuling. Of course that was at a college. They led us to the rooms and I walked in. 140 eyes looked at me, all passive like an elephant’s eyes. The teacher left and I was left alone in the front of a classroom of 7 year olds, no plan, no idea what to do, but slowly feeling those soft elephant eyes change to lion’s. So I introduced myself.

“Wo jiao Shi Laoshi, keshi zhe shi wo zuihou de zhongwen juzi. My name is Mr. Weiser.” I suddenly felt incredibly old. Mr. Weiser. That’s my dad’s name. I’m still in high school, I thought. The class room was small, probably 10 feet by 25 feet. Or at least it felt smaller with that horde of children in there. The windows were barred, like a prison. There was nothing on the walls, except for two black boards, one in the front for me to use, and one in the back, that had a flower and Winnie the Pooh drawn on it. Using my board, I wrote “A,” “B,” and “C” on the board and asked them to say them. 70 incredibly high pitched voices all screamed “A,B,C!” Except “C” was wrong. They said, “TSEE” and I tried to correct them, using my hands as two different sounds and then connecting them, like those commercials, and that one thing on “Sesame St.” “Suh” and “Eee.” “C.” They mimicked my every action and sound, but that was the last time they listened. The back began to get rowdy. The front tried telling me something, but I couldn’t hear, and the room got progressively louder. One little girl, wearing a pink shirt which said, “I’m Tubby,” came up to me and told me to hit the desk with the stick to get everyone’s attention again. I grabbed the stick and slammed it on the desk, while yelling, “ANJING!” A giant thwak erupted through the room and it all went silent. I used my stick, which I went on to call my cane, (only because it helped me hobble through class,) to point to the previously written letters on the board. I asked the left half of the room to say it, then the right half. I realized that I couldn’t use any English. They didn’t understand one bit of it. Understandable, considering they lived in the countryside for most of their young lives, but I didn’t know enough of the words needed to teach a language in Chinese. So I began to say simple things like, “Left side, stand, say this,” point to a letter, “the other side was better, keep standing.” This kept them entertained for 15 minutes but then they got more and more out of control and my cane, started losing its potency for quieting them down. One kid even began running on top of the desks. High pitched talking came from everywhere, desks screeched as they slid against the floor, chairs rocked, and amidst it all, the sound of sobbing came from somewhere. “Shei zai ku yaaaa?” I asked, then everyone looked in the back to this small boy, buzz cut, white shirt with the English words, “Be My Slave,” on it, sitting with tears on his face. The class rebelled. They stopped listening; I grabbed a teacher walking by the classroom, asking her simply, “Bang wo.” I didn’t even care if this was the right way to say it or not, I just wanted help. She was a petite woman, but she came in and commanded them into submission. I felt awful. I couldn’t even control 7 year olds. Today just wasn’t my day. It started off bad, and this just made it worse. The bell rang, and they all screamed, “XIA KE!” and I was glad. Those were the 40 longest minutes of my life. Ok maybe second longest 40 minutes of my life, but I lost all faith in myself. One of my ambitions before this experience was to become a teacher, but this destroyed it. It made me despise teaching, and gave me great respect for those who do. Those kids all left saying good bye. It was the last thing I taught them. I hadn’t completely failed. I left and met up with Chris and the others. They were all talking about how well they had done, and I just stood, emotionless, resenting myself for volunteering to teach these kids. Everyone just talked about how much they had taught, how they had struggled and prevailed and how they felt better for it. I felt the exact opposite. That grey compound was sucking the remaining bits of optimism from me. And then it happened. My fountain of optimism dried up. Depression hit me, and I needed time to myself. I hopped on that crowded bus, hoping for a seat, but standing cramped between sweaty business men, wearing knock off Italian suits. Getting home 30 minutes later, I waited out the bad feelings, checked off Teaching from my list of things to do before I die, and got to studying.