Shanghai incommunicado: A pedagogical farce

Okay, so it was a bad idea to begin with.

But I needed money and at the time didn't have plans for January. And maybe I was feeling a little masochistic, or just overestimated my own virtue.

So I agreed to teach English to children in Taizhou, locking myself into eight hours a day of instruction with eight less-than-eager youngsters.

The students were prodigy of Zhejiang's monied--the ambitious and competitive parents in whose minds a fluency in English was essential in getting their children into good high schools, good universities and good careers; in short, they viewed learning English (as well as playing the erhu, excelling at sports and acing math, science, Chinese and calligraphy classes) as essential to success.

The kids, however, weren't quite that keen. They fidgeted. They brought sugar-rich snacks to class, consumed them messily and then tossed the wrappers on the floor. They threw cherries at each other. Once they realized my Mandarin was, uh, pretty basic, they talked amongst themselves constantly (in my--feeble--defence, I could understand most of what they said; it just took me a while).

I also discovered that eight hours a day, seven days a week is a long time to spend learning a language, especially when you're a hyperactive 11-year-old who should be on winter break. Each day felt like a marathon relay race as I bounced from grammar to dialogue to art-project based compositions to outdoor games that had a tenuous connection to English instruction but were necessary in order for us all to maintain our sanity after four hours inside a cold, concrete-walled classroom.

It takes a run-on sentence like that just to begin to convey how wiped and braindead (not to mention pedagogically useless) I felt at the end of every day.

I like to think they learned stuff. I definitely did.

One of the most surprising revelations was just how prudish these kids were. Yes, that's the age where kids tend to giggle over pretty much everything. But for some reason I don't remember throwing a tantrum every time I had to sit next to a boy in class. Honestly.

The best (or worst) was when I and my fellow teacher, who had a class of her own, showed the kids English-language movies with Chinese subtitles to get them used to hearing the language. Their response to both Back to the Future and The Little Mermaid was "Eeewww!" "Too yellow" (yellow--huangse--actually is Chinese slang for "sexually explicit," so you can imagine how much fun they had with "Yellow Submarine") and "Not fit for children!"

Wait, what?

I tried to explain these movies, all rated G, are actually geared towards kids in North America. But they would have none of it.

Their objections were numerous: Michael J. Fox and his girlfriend kiss. So do Ariel and the prince. Scandalous, I know. It's worth noting, however, that they were far more put off by the Sea King's long hair than they were by Ariel's skimpy seashells.

What gives? When I was their age I remember thinking Tom Robbins was dirty, but that was just another reason to read his stuff.

I'm not sure how indicative these privileged youngsters are of the rest of their generation, but if so there are millions of kids growing up with a very old-school perception of gender and sexuality.