I really had some plans for this blog a while back and none of those plans have come to fruit. I did finally revamp the site's appearance but I just do not have the spirit to maintain the site. Of course there are probably tons of reasons for that, and some of them I am aware of and most likely some of them I am not. First I just enjoy spending my blogging time doing my two cult/horror movie sites at The Uranium Cafe and Necrotic Cinema. This writing about myself and my feelings and what I do day to day is not so comfortable a matter I have come to find. I used to be quite the journaler back in my time and had thousands of pages of journal writing in little note books before coming to China. I threw all of those away before leaving Seattle. But this blog matter, something I never did back in the states as I did not even know what a blog was back then to be honest, where people can actually read and make judgments about you and your entries is another matter altogether and I am not sure I like it all of the time. But I have no matter writing about topics like movies on my other two sites. I have always been an insecure and private person and yet at the same time I have an urge to record some of my adventures and feelings about my life here, if only for the sake of personal posterity.
Of course another issue, related to what I just wrote, is the sheer effort it can take to maintain a half way decent site. I am already spending/wasting enough time online maintaining the other two sites and this blog here is on the back-burner most of the time. the last entry was three months ago. But strangely as w ll I find myself turning over events that happens as if they were blog entries here. So when I am doing something or something strange happens I find myself creating a post in my mind about the event and imaging it posted here. Ivy and I have been on several trips and had a lot of personal adventures (good and bad) since the days when I sort of half -assed maintained this site way back when. Since I do not maintain written journals anymore much of my feelings and experiences on those trips are long lost. I tend to recall things in a vague and general way rather than in a detailed way, or I don't recall things at all. So for example some trips I have been on in the last year include: one back to Shangahi, one to the Xinjiang area, one to Xi'an and the area around there, one to Guilin and one to Western Yunnan in Dexing, near the border of Tibet. I have pictures but not really exact memories any longer as too much has gone by. And yet to is to say that the memories I have retained and filtered are not in some way was accurate as any I would have written about immediately after the facts. Well, I guess I will be doing something on those trips here shortly (or, maybe not).
There are other issues as well but one I am sure that influences me significantly, in terms of maintaining this site, is the one I am going to try and explore next. I do not know if I am having some sort of depression or state of mid-life despair (I turned 53 last November) or what, but I really do not have the focus or energy needed to delve into my soul and thoughts and then put them down somewhere. And yet I feel that I something I need to do as well. I have been in China about seven and a half years now and have not gone back to the States even for a visit and I am a bit tired and worn out. But I am one of the expats who left his homeland with not many deep roots there to hold him or lure him back. And now I am beginning to feel the drain on my soul here in China, not the warmest place in the world to be a foreigner in. Other than my relationship with my wife Ivy and a few other things I just have never found a place here that I imagined I would when I first arrived here in Jilin City back in 2004. Of course I never had those deep ties with any place in America either, least of all with the two cities I spent most of my life in, San Antonio or Seattle. Maybe this is the legacy of a military child, moving from place to place every year. Easy (well, not that easy for me really) to pack up and move but no easy to find the roots and connections you desire to find in the new places you arrive at.
I had a really upsetting and discouraging thing happen last spring at the school I work at and I may explore that in more detail I another post, or again, I may not. After four years at the school and working through many near extreme situations and living in the neighborhood back when it was basically an undeveloped slum, the school at the last moment said that they were not going to renew my contract. I will not get too much into it, but the very edited version is that prior I had had the same groups of students for over two years or so. I had no issues to speak of at all and I had a good but strained relationship my classes. We had little left to discuss and many times redid old topics a couple times. But I got good ratings and never had a real problem. Suddenly in the fall of 2010 I had all new students and things did not go so well. I found them, for the most part, to be confrontationally lazy and bored right off the bat. On top of that the school gave the teachers no text book for the first month and when they finally did it was a horrible book I, and others, had expressed a lack of interest in using. But the books was cheap I guess and it is what they gave us, to our surprise, anyway. (Later they would replace the book after the students collectively said they hated it, but not because the teachers in advance had said it was unusable.) Well, anyway, I lost my cool a few times in some classes with the new students. I will just give one example of what I was dealing with here. There are college students now. I have no book and must rely on handouts only. In one class one of my students who I thought was going to be pretty good (and I guess later she was) made a paper airplane of the handout I gave them and threw it. How am I supposed to deal with that? She was pretty confrontational with me when I wanted to sign a disciplinary paper and when I said she will go to the office and talk to the asst. dean of the foreign language dept. she marched out the door ready to do combat. But right as we get to the door she breaks down and starts crying. Crying. Of course at this point I look like some bully and monster. She returns to the class all red eyed and panting later and has to sign the paper and apologize to me. But of course in the end all of this worked against me. This is one example only, and maybe the most extreme, but it was not the way my classes had been carrying on for over two years, though I certainly had problems before too.
I am not sure what happened as the school was never forthcoming or straightforward in any way. I was never talked to but I suddenly had the lowest of the teacher ratings (done from #2 a year before) and I caught wind of a rumor the school might cancel my contract. When I when to our contact I was told not too worry though there was some ambivalence in her emails and answers as well. But Nothing happened until then term was almost over and the contracts had all been made up. I was called and told I did not get a contract for the next year. My feeling is that this was known months and months before. It was a crappy way to handle things I was devastated. I went to the highest man in the school (though my contact asked me not to). he said he knew nothing of this and would check into it, as well another teacher friend who is the foreigner teacher leader went to bat for me and the next day the decision was over-turned and I was allowed to stay here another year at least. Obviously there was no grounds for the decision or it would not have been over-turned in about 24 hours with no struggle. But I was wounded and left a bit bitter and had some harsh reality shoved down my throat. I was told first that my contract had "matured" and it was a political matter as I had been at the school too long. When I pressed another teacher had been there as long I was then told (quoting here pretty close), "...well, the students are gods and they must be happy. They must be happy." When I asked for details I got none. Teachers are not entitled here to face accusers much less even know what the complaints lodged against them are. If students (i.e. sources of revenue for the school fat cats) are not happy they may go (taking their parent's cash) somewhere else and they may even go online and say bad things about the school. My feeling is a few students in the fall term got pissed off with me not letting them make paper airplanes of my lessons or not letting them do homework for other classes in front of me while ignoring my class and on and on bullshit. I am not unreasonable in expectations and am an easygoing teacher for this sort of situation.
I also felt from the situation that the school wanted more from me than I could give in those classes. There is a Phd. and an MA here at the school and they expect me to teach at that level and I cannot. And those guys struggle as well with the same issues I have. But they have those degrees and the school loves that. Looks good on their website I am sure when trying to recruit new students. Or, more to the point, get the student's parents to open their purses and wallets in exchange for a certificate from a three year private school. Now, I do expect to not ever have problems. I do not think I am a super high level teacher and I was really burned out last year and the new groups of students (for the most part) need not work out well for me. I am typically passive and have a reputation for that, but early on some agreements were not kept and I got really pissed off and went to my boss here and he changed my schedule to meet terms we had discussed earlier. Guess he thought I would just forget. But again, in the end that may have been just another nail in my coffin. I do not date students or drink with them, or grade them unfairly or deride them collectively in class (as many teachers, foreign and Chinese do) and do not have a reputation for complaining and being pushy. But something happened somewhere and suddenly after years of work here I was basically let go in an unprofessional manner. Add to that the fact another teacher (one who claims to be our "friend", at least when she needs something from my Chinese wife) was sure the problem with the decision was all me. That I was a "bad, lazy" teacher. This is what she felt she could tell my wife and that Ivy would never tell me, since both women are Chinese. Ivy would of course have more loyalty to her than me simply for that reason.
Now other teachers supported me or were indifferent so that is positive, and the decision was overturned a day later. I understand my contact in the office (I will not name her, but she is an angel and good person regardless) fought for me as well against her boss, and that was mainly his decision. But in the end I was left wondering who to trust and that my position here was not secure or special at all. The school had become my home really and I felt I would get the benefit of the doubt in any issue with students unless it was a serious matter such as me punching one or having sex with one.
Well, this really the first time since last spring I have had the ability to even write about the situation. I have been in such a depression and period of self-doubt. Of course things worked out, right? But I have been really paranoid this year and found myself in a similar weird situation a few months ago when I basically told a female student to "shut up". Okay, why would I say that? If you knew me you would know I am not the type to just say things like that to people (even when I should) and that I am, if anything, afraid of confrontation. Well this girl (she is 20 but she is a girl, not a woman) just wold not (again) shut up or keep her voice low. She had to just bellow to her friends. I had asked several time, politely and in a general ("class, keep it down") fashion. the way those shitty ESL sites on the web say you should do it. Well, eventually I, and other students, where stressing out. I could not hear a student three feet from me and I lost it. "Carol... SHUT UP!" Hey, it is stressful once things get to that point. It is never easy. You take the class home with you and wonder if you did the right or wrong thing. She probably did not search her soul as deeply as I did of course. In fact, she went to the school and complained which led to an investigation of me and my class by school leaders! I could not believe it. The guy who sat in on my class was happy with me and told the class (in Chinese) "Oh, great class. He is a good teacher and all complaints are forgotten!" All complaints forgotten? I went to my boss and asked about all of this and again they do not want to talk about it. "Oh, some student complained, don't worry. Mr. So and So was happy." What the fuck! Nobody comes to me, no one says anything to me directly. And I am sure that whatever that student said it was not "oh, I was basically yelling in Bill's class to my friends and laughing like a horse over and over while and he and the others were trying to talk. Yes, he asked me to keep it down, but I ignored him like I always do and finally, I guess, he just lost his patience and told me to shut up." They can say anything they like I guess and we are never confronted about any of it. Sneaky and unprofessional. And I understand much worse for Chinese teachers in this sense. I am not making it like I am target because I am a foreigner. The Chinese teacher may have lost his/her job over this really trivial affair.
Whoa. Too much for one post! Man. Talk about catharsis. I really feel better suddenly. No shit. Maybe this is something I need to do after all. The whole affair just got lifted out of my paranoid mind and is now a post on the net for the whole world (including the school here and other teachers) to read. I am going to go ahead and publish this, take a shower and study a little Chinese and then write on one of my horror movie blogs. I guess more to come here later. Maybe I am back finally.
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