Teaching, Suicide, and Metaphor

Teaching can be a real mind-bender sometimes. I don't consider myself an adept educator by any means, and after three months on the job, I have realized just how insane this job can become!

Each of my classes is remarkably different. I teach a total of 4 different classes of children: quick-learning Tibetans from all over ethnographic Tibet, inattentive farmer kids from Qinghai, attentive farmer kids from Sichuan and Chongqing, and insolent adult students from various nearby townships.

Every week is full of surprises. Early on in the semester I was a pretty strict teacher and strict grader. I was constantly swirling around, barking at loud-mouthed kids to shut up if they were going to speak Chinese and splattering their papers with red ink proclaiming "plagiarism" and "0." This was quite early on for such cruelty, but I was afraid that the students would fall out of line; they would notice what an unsure and inept teacher I was and rebel against me. And of course, I was (and am) a terrible opponent of Chinese pedagogy - lecturing and silence, complete servitude to the laws uncritical text memorization.

When I pushed too hard, the female students in my Qinghai Chinese class produced on a number of occasions some disturbing poetry. "I am sad like the rain; I want to die." I forgot how the poems go exactly, but they were all more or less along these lines. I recognized a growing problem, and figured that my ruthless pursuits of personification and metaphor probably weren't helpful at all. They would painfully writhe in their seats as I would hover over and deter them from the most mundane of starting lines: "The sky is so blue; the flowers are beautiful like baby."

No, no! Too easy to rime that first line with something as equally vacant (an indeed unrhyming) , and what kind of a metaphor is a comparison between a flower and a baby! Hell, that isn't even a metaphor!

Their lines would shift under my scrutinizing gaze. I , the sweatshop foreman, punishing my workers for misprinting with brushes they couldn't even hold, prowling the grounds looking for the weakest links, and outing their foolish mistakes. The weaker girls started to panic, and their poetry got more and more morbid: "My quite face turned blue; the flowers are dead too; Oh, you - teacher, are so cruel!"

This week I assigned an essay to my students. The assignment was to write a persuasive essay. The example I gave them was of some sad soul trying to promote plastic windows over glass ones. "Glass windows are so expensive, and they break easily! Plastic windows, on the other hand are both cheap and durable!" The students got a kick out of the example, but as soon as
I gave them the assignment to come up with their own idea - things got messy.

One girl, lets call her Cathy (for all I know, that might actually be her English name, what a great teacher I am!), wrote her paper proposition as follows:


Topic: The changes in myself.
Thesis: I have noticed a lot of changes in myself in the last few months.

1. I don't want to get up in the morning, I get up very late.
2. I will not go to eat by myself.
3. I miss my home and parents very much.
...

WHOAH! Danger, Danger! "Uh," I said, "that's actually not a persuasive arguement. Can you really convince someone else about the changes in yourself? You have to choose a topic that people would argue with you over, that they might a different opinion on." Awkward pause - Cathy was staring into her desk very hard. A crushing silence enveloped that corner of the classroom. "Well, you know, a lot of people feel different in the Winter. They don't like to go out so much. You could write about how people change in the Winter. Many people feel the same way." Sidestep out. That was intense, and I felt a little dirty.

Many of the children in these classes act as 20-something year old preteens. They giggle, yell, and refuse to do work. It reminds me of middle school in the US! But, in actuality, these kids are adults, in their third year of college. They are dealing with some realistic and intense issues, a large one of which is that they are far from home for the first time, and that their absence puts a stress on them and their family. Add that to the pressure that they have from that very same family, and then add on regular school pressures - and you have students who grow their English writing skills through goth poetry.