Productive procrastination?
If you're reading this, you probably know me well enough to know that packing sends me into a greater panic than almost anything else. And so, despite the fact that I'm leaving for the airport, Malaysia-bound, in less than two hours, and have yet to pack my bag, this seems like an ideal time for blogging. Yes, I was just on vacation, yes, the semester has just begun, but Chinese New Year falls early this year and thus many of the expats here are heading off to beaches and the Great Wall and so forth, feeling like we've done absolutely nothing to deserve this break.
Although I'm looking forward to a week of overnight trains and kaya toast for breakfast (kaya is a kind of sweet coconut-and-egg jam, eaten for breakfast and occasionally dessert in Singapore and apparently in Malaysia as well. I'm fairly sure that I wouldn't have become nearly as obsessed with Singapore if Cyndi and I hadn't breakfasted, deliciously, on kaya toast and thick coffee with sweetened condensed milk during our weekend there last year), I'm a bit sad to be leaving Hong Kong at this point. The early weeks of the semester are perhaps my favorite time to be a teacher--the students and I are energized from the semester break, my final-year English majors are still worrying more about their courses than about finding a job, and we're all figuring each other out: a rare opportunity for self-invention and starting over, as much for me as for my students.
This semester I'm teaching two classes (later in the semester I'll add a half-semester paper-writing workshop and a series of required discussion sections for first-year English majors). The poetry elective seems like an improvement from last year's class: I'm pleased with my revised syllabus, and I have some extremely bright students (and even some who are willing to argue!-- a rare find at this university). The first set of homework assignments did not include a single poem with a title like "Ode to Louis Vuitton," or "For the Love of a Handbag," and given that I received, on average 3-4 such poems a week last year, I'm VERY pleased. Thus far we've discussed, among other things, Elizabeth Bishop's "One Art" and Li-Young Lee's "The Gift," and while it always feels a bit dangerous to start a class with poems that I love as much as these--What if the students hate them? Do I admit how much I love them? Should I attempt to maintain the appearance of cool objectivity, or admit that it's impossible for almost anything in this class to be objective?--I needn't have worried this year; the students "got" both poems, and got why I love them, and some even loved them too (this last is more important to me than I like to admit).
My second class, a debate class for middle school-aged children, takes place under the auspices of the university's gifted and talented program. My students are extremely bright and participatory (unlike my students at the university, who generally graduated from local schools, most of the gifted and talented kids attend international schools, and the difference is startling and immediately apparent--they are boisterous and delightful and almost aggressively participatory, whereas my university students are quietly respectful and, for the most part, reluctant to speak unless they are called on). It's funny to be teaching middle-schoolers again--despite the fact that these kids are, in so many ways, entirely different from my students in North Carolina, there seems to be some core of essential thirteen-year-old-ness that holds true across the ocean and across huge differences in terms of cultural background, economic status, geography, etc. The boys are still manically energetic, hilariously goofy when they don't mean to be and kind of irritating when they do, and addicted to attention. The girls are either startlingly self-assured (this, combined with the fact that they tend to be about a foot taller than the boys, makes them seem much older) or lost somewhere deep within themselves, shrinking from attention unless it is private, in which case they seem to come to the surface for a moment, to respond with an unrestrained smile or a comment about liking teddybears or a request that I let them erase the whiteboard (what, exactly is so appealing about this? My students in NC were so eager to erase the whiteboard that the privilege served fairly successfully as a reward for good behavior).
Kudos if you've read all the way to the end. Happy New Year--Gong Hei Fat Choi!
Although I'm looking forward to a week of overnight trains and kaya toast for breakfast (kaya is a kind of sweet coconut-and-egg jam, eaten for breakfast and occasionally dessert in Singapore and apparently in Malaysia as well. I'm fairly sure that I wouldn't have become nearly as obsessed with Singapore if Cyndi and I hadn't breakfasted, deliciously, on kaya toast and thick coffee with sweetened condensed milk during our weekend there last year), I'm a bit sad to be leaving Hong Kong at this point. The early weeks of the semester are perhaps my favorite time to be a teacher--the students and I are energized from the semester break, my final-year English majors are still worrying more about their courses than about finding a job, and we're all figuring each other out: a rare opportunity for self-invention and starting over, as much for me as for my students.
This semester I'm teaching two classes (later in the semester I'll add a half-semester paper-writing workshop and a series of required discussion sections for first-year English majors). The poetry elective seems like an improvement from last year's class: I'm pleased with my revised syllabus, and I have some extremely bright students (and even some who are willing to argue!-- a rare find at this university). The first set of homework assignments did not include a single poem with a title like "Ode to Louis Vuitton," or "For the Love of a Handbag," and given that I received, on average 3-4 such poems a week last year, I'm VERY pleased. Thus far we've discussed, among other things, Elizabeth Bishop's "One Art" and Li-Young Lee's "The Gift," and while it always feels a bit dangerous to start a class with poems that I love as much as these--What if the students hate them? Do I admit how much I love them? Should I attempt to maintain the appearance of cool objectivity, or admit that it's impossible for almost anything in this class to be objective?--I needn't have worried this year; the students "got" both poems, and got why I love them, and some even loved them too (this last is more important to me than I like to admit).
My second class, a debate class for middle school-aged children, takes place under the auspices of the university's gifted and talented program. My students are extremely bright and participatory (unlike my students at the university, who generally graduated from local schools, most of the gifted and talented kids attend international schools, and the difference is startling and immediately apparent--they are boisterous and delightful and almost aggressively participatory, whereas my university students are quietly respectful and, for the most part, reluctant to speak unless they are called on). It's funny to be teaching middle-schoolers again--despite the fact that these kids are, in so many ways, entirely different from my students in North Carolina, there seems to be some core of essential thirteen-year-old-ness that holds true across the ocean and across huge differences in terms of cultural background, economic status, geography, etc. The boys are still manically energetic, hilariously goofy when they don't mean to be and kind of irritating when they do, and addicted to attention. The girls are either startlingly self-assured (this, combined with the fact that they tend to be about a foot taller than the boys, makes them seem much older) or lost somewhere deep within themselves, shrinking from attention unless it is private, in which case they seem to come to the surface for a moment, to respond with an unrestrained smile or a comment about liking teddybears or a request that I let them erase the whiteboard (what, exactly is so appealing about this? My students in NC were so eager to erase the whiteboard that the privilege served fairly successfully as a reward for good behavior).
Kudos if you've read all the way to the end. Happy New Year--Gong Hei Fat Choi!
posted by Sara at 1:36 PM
1 Comments:
awesome entry -- you make what i hated doing (teaching hk students) so appealing. i like your description of those thirteen year old girls.
have an amazing time in malaysia. enjoy the time off, the airplane ride, the humidity, the food, asia in general.
xin nian kuai le!
~lisa
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