Exercise in the Yard

My five boys from Hong Kong and I had the classroom of ten third-grades fully engaged in games of tic tac toe. Supposedly a bell rang, but I didn’t hear it, so I was a little surprised when all ten of our students simultaneously jumped up and ran out of the room. Hey, where are you all go . . . . Well, I guess that activity is over for now.

By the time I reached the balcony, all ten kids were already down the stairs, in the yard, and at their assigned spot among the other children of the school. The forty or so kids formed a perfect grid. One girl -a fourth grader- was standing on the cement platform with her back to her fellow students.

Loud Chinese music with cheerful female vocals started to play and because it was coming over a cheap speaker the music was a little tinny. On cue, all the students started doing their morning exercises. It was one part stretching, one part tai chi, and one part aerobics. They swung their arms, stepped forward, stepped back, bowed, and did leg lifts. And they did it all in perfect unison.

Well, most of them.

The students from the elementary school were joined by several four- and five-year-olds from the village who formed their own line on the outer edge of the group. They were trying their best to mimic the older kids, but their movement were rough approximations and they were always half a beat behind the older kids.

The song went on for seven or eight minutes. I was so mesmerized, it could have gone on all morning as far as I was concerned. When it was over, the kids all dashed back into their classrooms as quickly as they had left.

I was just about ready to open my mouth to re-launch the tic tac toe activity when I looked down and saw that all ten of our third graders –without any prompting- were doing some sort of post-exercise cool down.

They all had their eyes closed and were lightly pinching and rubbing the bridge of their noses with a forefinger and thumb. Then they lightly massaged their eyebrows and forehead.

I think its important in life to know when to step back, be quiet, and just watch. This definitely qualified as one of those moments. My five boys and I just stood there watching the kids and glancing at each other. After ninety seconds, all ten third graders stopped, opened their eyes, and stared at us waiting for whatever we had planned next.

We all resumed playing tic tac toe.

-Jack

The Local School II

My five boys and I had been assigned to third grade. We walked up the open air stair case and found the room. While it was about the size of our classroom back in Hong Kong, the similarities ended there. Despite the fact that it was about 45 degrees outside with a slight breeze, the two doors and the windows were wide open.

Even though the school looked to be fairly new, the white walls were stained and discolored from use.

The room had a chalkboard in both the front and the back that looked as if they had been recycled from the old school. One each side wall hung a faded portrait of some unlabeled person. One of them, inexplicably, was a western-looking woman.
On the one window ledge were two dozen paperback books.

That was it.

No educational posters on the wall. No samples of student work hanging up. No cupboards full of colorful math manipulative. No calendar. No bulletin boards. No computers.

We went around the room and introduced ourselves. The class had just ten students in it; seven boys and three girls. Later, I asked my colleagues and they reported that each of the classrooms –while not at drastic in its disparity as the third grade room- had more boys than girls. I don’t have an explanation for this.

For the next three mornings we practiced small bits of English dialog with the kids, performed a rollicking rendition of Jack in the Beanstalk in English, made and flew paper airplanes, played musical chairs, drew pictures for each other, and played with the bag of matchbox cars we had brought for them. For several of the activities we did, we moved their desks out of the four rows they had been in. Based on the local kids’ reaction, this may well have been the first time their desks had ever been out of rows

While all of my kids had a chance to practice their Mandarin, thank heavens I had Sam in my group. Sam is a seventh grade who is actually quite accomplished in Mandarin. He was able translate for us, Otherwise, I would have had to do even more pantomiming than I was already doing.

-Jack

Movie recommendation: The movie Not One Less depicts life in a modern, rural school. While the school we served in was not quite as desperate as the one depicted in the movie, it was pretty close. Not One Less is available from Netflix and at some Blockbusters.

Spreading Rice in the School Yard

Volunteering in a Local School

Our trip to rural China was not just meant to be adventuresome, it was also meant to be a service trip. The company that was facilitating our trip had also lined up an opportunity for us to volunteer at a poor, rural school. We knew that we would be working with first through fourth graders. We had already divided our kids into groups of about five students each and we had planned activities and brought materials for each level.

This was the first time that either of my colleagues had chaperoned the Yangshuo trip so none of knew exactly what to expect.

We got our first clue when our charter bus was a quarter mile from the school, the driver had to stop, get out, and go examine a low, rail-less cement bridge. Our driver talked to a local man who was fishing from the bridge. “Oh, you should probably be able to make it across.” After we waited for a woman to finish walking her bike across, our driver slowly inched the bus across the forty-foot bridge.

We finally made it across and pulled into the school yard. The school yard was a large, cement square. On the east side was the two-story poured-cement school building. It looked new and was painted a fresh, crisp white. The windows and door trim were painted a contrasting green. It had a total of eight classrooms. In the center of the building was an open stair case.

Around the rest of the square was the old school building, a building with teacher offices, and outhouses.

The large cement square in the middle of all this served as the kids’ playground. It also doubled as a place for one of the local farmers to spread out and dry his rice. As we pulled up in the bus he was busy spreading out one bushel after another on the play ground.

As we got off the bus, we could also see the students lined up in perfect rows in the school yard. A few of them were standing on the farmer’s rice. The school principal was standing on a large cement dais addressing the students.

Whatever lesson, exercises, or lecture they had been receiving came to a stop as we started to unload from the bus. As our representative from Dragonfly went over to make contact with the principal, my middle school students and I nervously stared at all the little elementary kids in their colorful winter coats. They stared back waiting for somebody to do something.

Finally, the local children were dismissed and scrambled back to their classrooms.

Each of our service groups was pointed in the direction of the classroom they would be serving in.

Seeing a bus load of volunteers pull up intending to keep their kids occupied for the morning, the local teachers had managed to make themselves scarce.

I think I probably would have done the same.

-Jack

Graffiti: Chinese Style

Rural Yangshuo

Rice field with water buffalo and farmer

Prepping to Climb

Half Way There

Rock Climbing

We rode our bikes to where we would be rock climbing. Our students –none of whom had been rocking climbing before- were very excited. I, on the other hand, was smitten by the small cave entrances near our climbing site. It was obvious that at some point in the past, someone had enhanced the cave entrances by partially blocking them up with makeshift rock walls. They had managed to reduce the cave entrances to door-sized openings. One of them was even outfitted with a rough bamboo door. Who did this? Were they trying to keep something in? Or were they trying to keep something or someone out?

I asked Phil, one of our three guides from Dragonfly. He told me what he knew. The local villages had hid out in these caves during the Japanese invasion during World War II. They would live in them for days -sometimes weeks- at a time. The caves were used again during the upheaval that came with the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution.

Now it was a rock climbing site for middle schoolers visiting from Hong Kong.

My students didn’t seem too enamored with the caves. They were too busy figuring how they were going to climb the fifty feet up that rock wall face. They were anxious to earn the free ice cream sundaes Mr. VanNoord had promised to anyone who managed to get to the top and ring that bell.

-Jack

Waiting for Elise

Elise Waiting for the Train