Six Impossible Things... (before the weekend!)

As if the beginning of a new school year isn't hectic enough....

Last year, I made friends with Tom Frost, an American who teaches in the Primary division of our host institution here in Hangzhou, the Greentown Yuhua School (GYS). He offered to let some of our students come over to his classroom on their free afternoons, to observe or participate in his lessons. We could only find a few - all girls - who were interested in taking up the offer, but they all really enjoyed it, and started attending his classes on a regular rota as 'teaching assistants'. One even gained enough confidence to demand the opportunity to take some classes on her own towards the end of the year.

And so... Tom and I had talked about whether this year we might try to extend this scheme, to make more of our CIS students aware of the opportunity and enthusiastic about trying it out. But we had been thinking only of small numbers of our students working with just one or two year groups at GYS, as an occasional co-curricular activity - perhaps part of our 'Community & Service' programme.

Great oaks - great, huge, monstrous, unwieldy oaks! - from little acorns grow. While I was visiting our parent school in Hong Kong for some liaison meetings at the end of last year, the rest of my colleagues held an advance planning meeting for the coming year. And, when challenged to suggest a major event for the early part of the first semester, a possible first item for our 'Inter-Disciplinary Experience' (IDE) schedule, someone put forward this teaching activity - as my suggestion.

Well, how nice! I'm flattered, yes I am. Except that.... the conception of the activity was now that it would involve our entire school (which has a significantly larger intake this year than last) rather than just a handful of volunteers, and the whole of GYS Primary rather than just a few classes or a single year group. And it was to be a major 'event', taking up two or three full days of our timetable, rather than an ongoing activity throughout the year. And it was to be hosted on our own campus, not in the usual GYS Primary classrooms.

And, apparently, the only slot in our crowded timetable in which this could conveniently be fitted was the end of our second week here. Wow - not much lead time there!

Oh yes, and no-one had remembered to tell me about this until a few days ago!!!

So, we have to co-ordinate with our partners in GYS to arrange for 700 or so young kids (and some dozens of their teachers, and other assorted hangers-on, no doubt) to move from their school over to ours for most of a day. And we have to figure out a way of wrangling them smoothly through a number of different locations and 'lessons'. We have to divide our kids up into teaching teams, give them some tips on how to prepare entertaining lessons, and schedule time for them to do some preparation for this. It is a HUGE logistical challenge. And I've got to sort it all out before next week. Oh dear.

The first thing I have to do is get Tom to help arrange a meeting with the GYS Primary teachers, to make sure they're all up for this. That shouldn't be a problem, I don't think. But then - this being China - there will have to be a more formal meeting between one or more of their senior staff and one or more of our senior staff. (Strictly speaking, this should probably come first. But I fear that the GYS leadership might stall or conjure problems and obstacles, unless we present them with a fait accompli: "All the teachers on both sides have already agreed to do this.")

If our partners give us the go-ahead (and I fear they will just laugh in our faces when we tell them we want to do this next week), I'll then have to obtain GYS timetables and class lists. And, oh god, I don't even have class and house lists for our own students yet.....

We're also bumping up against a number of major practical constraints. We don't have anywhere near enough classrooms to deal with these sorts of numbers, so I'm going to have to work out what other areas around the school might be usable as teaching spaces (we're probably going to have to use a few rather non-ideal ones, like the entrance foyers of our two buildings). And even with the still relatively small numbers of students we have this year, I fear we're going to have to put them in groups of three or four (pairs would probably be better for a teaching activity, I think; but threes should work OK). 

I think this (over)ambitious event will have to be a one-off: it just won't be feasible to run something like this in future years, when our student body is larger.

For now, though, it looks - touch wood - as if the numbers may turn out to be uncannily convenient this year. Preliminary indications I've been given about the size of the GYS year groups suggest that we'll be able to divide each class fairly neatly into three groups of about 10 each (which should be a nice teachable size, and enable us to use a number of smaller spaces around our school), requiring 24 teaching teams in total.

I've got a plan for how to randomise the selection of the teaching teams, so that it mixes genders as much as possible (our boys and girls often live rather too separate lives) and cuts across classes and boarding houses (which very soon become the dominant focus of friendship groups).

And I've successfully pushed back against the notion that this should be a three-day activity (ridiculous, impossible!), restricting it to a day of classroom observations over at Greentown next Thursday, and a half-day of teaching next Friday morning - with a few additional timeslots for preparation and reflection.

Yes, it's all starting to fit quite well. "I love it when a plan comes together."

'Directing traffic' on the day, though - that's probably going to be a nightmare!

And I only have a few days to sort out all the timetabling, etc. Just what I need at the start of the year.....

Thought for the week

"Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work."

A pick-me-up

At the end of the school year, teachers try to solicit feedback from their students.... and some of it is positive. And we have such well brought-up students here that most of them make a point of thanking their teachers - but it often seems a little token, perhaps insincere.

At the weekend, however, one of my students surprised me with a very heartfelt and thoughtfully written e-mail in which he thanked me for being so open to any kind of question or topic of discussion, and said that he'd found his English class this year much more "fun and interesting" than ever before. He capped his reminiscences of our year together with the nicest compliment I've ever received: "I think you are the most adventurous teacher I've ever met." I'd be happy with that on my tombstone.

Of course, my 'teaching style' has not been so well received by everyone. What one student finds 'interesting' may baffle or bore others; what some greet as 'fun', others resent as 'frivolous', 'unfocused', or 'lacking in rigour'.

You can't win. You can only keep on trying.

Thought for the week

"To be an idealist, one must thrive on disappointment."

Interviewing Cindy Pon

I was even more crazily busy than usual last week, hosting the visit of my school's first writer-in-residence, the American Chinese YA author Cindy Pon (who I'd first got to know several years ago - an e-penpal relationship that started in the comments of a mutual friend's publishing blog).

Last Monday, I interviewed her in the school library about her life and work. 

Thanks to my student Hayson Chu for filming this

Wot - no 'Thought for the Week'?

Alas, no - I've been too busy.

But since the end-of-year reports and so on are looming, it seems appropriate to reflect on these wise words from John Holt for another week.

25 years on

The violent suppression of the Tiananmen Square demonstrations in Beijing in June 1989 was a key moment in my life. I had just started my first teaching job, and it was at a school that happened to have quite a large contingent of Chinese students (mostly from Hong Kong) - so, we were especially interested in the events we saw unfolding in China on the news through April and May that year, felt a particularly intimate connection to them. And thus the wave of bloodshed that was unleashed on the night of June 3rd/4th was a devastating shock to our little community; not only to the Chinese students, but to all of us who had been drawn into sharing their emotional investment in the situation. As the patron of the school's Amnesty International group, I spent much of my next three years there co-ordinating letter-writing campaigns in support of various victims of the crackdown - one of whom, I recall, was a local government employee who had had the temerity to lower the flag at his office building to half-mast on the first anniversary.

Picture from the New York Times

I had hoped our students here might do something to mark yesterday's 25th anniversary - but I wasn't going to prompt them into doing so. And, in the mad rush that is the end of a school year, they were, alas, too preoccupied with other things.

I am glad to see that the occasion was marked in Hong Kong - as it is every year - by a massive turnout for the candlelight vigil in Victoria Park. And I liked Tania Branigan's article about the anniversary in The Guardian today.

Thought for the week

"We destroy the love of learning in children, which is so strong when they are small, by encouraging and compelling them to work for petty rewards – in short, for the ignoble satisfaction of feeling that they are better than someone else."

Thought for the week

"Failure is merely proof that the desire was not strong enough."

Now, I don't in general approve of this kind of sentiment. It seems to me rather too aggressively go-getting, and perhaps dangerously delusional. Much of the time, failure is simply proof that something was indeed impossible - and shouldn't have been attempted in the first place. However, I like this particular expression because it occurs in a favourite film of mine, The Hairdresser's Husband, where it is illustrated by a charming fable.

Thought for the week

"Remember - when you are most convinced that you are right, you are highly likely to be wrong; and least likely to persuade anyone else, either way."

Stanley Kubrick's fondness for one-point perspective

I recently shared with my Film class students this montage of scenes from the films of the great director Stanley Kubrick, which highlights his conspicuous penchant for compositions with a one-point perspective.

Lots of directors like shots looking down a highway... or a corridor... or a path through the woods, but... maybe not as much as dear old Kubrick! As we see here, he managed to create that vertiginous, sucking-you-into-the-frame feeling in many other situations too. 

For anyone who's not too familiar with Kubrick's reputation, here's a good rundown on his creative 'insanity'.

Supplemental 'Thought for the week'

"Tact consists in knowing how far we may go too far."

This seems an irresistible corollary to my own jest at the start of the week.

Thought for the week

"When you've already gone too far, you might as well keep on going."

Thought for the week

"A master in the art of living draws no sharp distinction between his work and his play; his labour and his leisure; his mind and his body; his education and his recreation. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence through whatever he is doing, and leaves others to determine whether he is working or playing. To himself, he always appears to be doing both."

I usually leave attributions of these weekly bons mots to the 'Labels' in the footnotes (where unattributed in this way, they are, ahem, my own), but on this occasion I feel compelled to include a link to more information about the great French historian and aphorist, François-René de Chateaubriand.

Thought for the week

"Planning a lesson is like caging a tiger. Sometimes you have to do it, to make sure that everyone feels comfortable and safe; but whenever you do, you have to feel sorry for the tiger."

CIS Hangzhou 'TV Channel' launched

After much discussion and delay (and a vexing last-minute assault by the massed gremlins of the Blogger platform!), our long-planned video blog for CIS Hangzhou is finally live: CIS Hangzhou TV Channel.   Check it out.

Thought for the week

"None of us want to be in calm waters all our lives."

Travels through China

Last week, as one of our 'Project Week' excursions around China, I led a small group of students (all girls, oddly enough) on an 1,800 km odyssey from Beijing back to Hangzhou.
Since China's celebrated 'Grand Canal' has its origin point in Hangzhou (branching off from the Qiantang River, just to the south of the Yangtze Delta) and is a central element of the city's identity, we thought it would be appropriate to consider the history and the continuing importance of this mighty thoroughfare, and explore some of the major cities along its route. 
Our party flew to its terminus in the northern capital of Beijing, and then returned to Hangzhou tracing the route of the canal (although there's not very much of the original waterway left any more; nothing, really, north of the Yangtze) - with stops along the way in the canalside cities of Dezhou (the 'capital' of China's burgeoning solar power industry), Xuzhou (home to a bigger lake than Hangzhou's, and a collection of terracotta warriors smaller than Xi'an's but equally impressive), Wuxi (famous for its Jichang Garden), and Suzhou. We made a point of trying to use as many different modes of transport as possible: 高铁, local train, bus, taxi, long-distance coach (on all of which my French colleague M. Biret and I managed to sleep!) - and even a waterbus, for the very last leg of the journey in Hangzhou, from Wulin Square Wharf back to our local Walmart on nearby Gudun Lu.
It was a fascinating journey. And I think I'll definitely be going back to Xuzhou at some point - the nicest city I've found in China!

Thought for the week

"The end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time."

Thought for the week

"One shouldn't go to the woods looking for something, but rather to see what is there."

As we head out in to 'the wilds' for our 'Project Week' expeditions, I hope we can maintain this ideal of receptiveness to whatever we may encounter.

A little bit of Zen

As a child, I developed a great fondness for the Czech writer Karel Čapek, a marvellous fabulist and wit (I particularly liked his collection of outlandish re-imaginings of famous moments in history, Apocryphal Tales). Today, alas, his work is falling into obscurity, but he has attained enduring fame as the begetter of the term 'robot' for a humanoid mechanical servant (although he would generously acknowledge that he got the idea to use this word from his elder brother Josef, a painter).

Gardening was one of Čapek's great passions, and he wrote a rather oddball book about it - which includes perhaps my very favourite piece of his, a prose poem called 'How To Grow Clouds'. A few years ago, I discovered online a delightful piece of visual poetry inspired by this piece, a stop-motion animation by a young Polish art student, Alicja Cioch (you can read about the process of making the film on her blog here, and also see some of her charming original storyboards for the project).

How to grow clouds
It takes a lot of work: it is necessary to weed very carefully, to toss out muck and small stones by hand, to kneel on the earth, bend over, dig about in the soil, water profusely, collect caterpillars, exterminate aphids, loosen the ground and serve the earth; when your back hurts from all this and you straighten up and look at the sky, you will have the prettiest clouds. Probatum est.
Karel Čapek (1890-1938), translated by Andrew Malcovsky

Whenever somebody asks me for my 'philosophy of teaching', I direct them to this.

Thought for the week

"Between the great things we cannot do and the small things we will not do, the danger is that we shall do nothing."

I'm in two minds about this beard thing

Thought for the week

"If 'compromise' means reining in your selfishness a little, it's a good thing. If it means betraying your principles, it's not."

Thought for the week

"Am I really eccentric or am I just wearing a funny hat?"