Happy 2015

(post) New Year Update

       New-Year’s day 2014 began with an early-morning surf session with Kate (my sister), Sara (my mom), and Uncle Dan. A good way to start off a good year. January saw the beginning of my second quarter at UC San Diego’s International Relations and Pacific Studies master’s program, where I study international economics and political science. The end of 2013 and most of 2014 were devoted to study, though I managed to have some fun along the way. In January, February and March I took classes on data analysis, game theory, finance and accounting, Chinese, and Chinese politics. I returned to Colorado for spring break and found some deep powder at Eisman Hut near Vail, and then at Silverton—all with great friends from Lakewood HS and Whitman College.

       During my spring quarter I took classes in international economics, advanced data analysis, policymaking processes, international law, Chinese, and a seminar on PhD research projects. I also worked as a teaching assistant for a sociology class, and while grading papers about sociology isn’t my favorite pastime, it paid my tuition. In the spring I found out that I had received a Boren Fellowship to study Chinese and research environmental issues in China from September 2014 to September 2015. I also was the recipient of a summer research fellowship that paid me to work with a professor on research about pollution from rural cookstoves—an interesting combination of chemistry, data analysis, environmental science, and international law. Hopefully I’ll get a paper about this topic accepted into a journal in 2015.

       Aside from a river trip in CO with my mom and a few other short trips outside CA I spent most of the summer in San Diego doing research, surfing (nearly every morning) teaching an intro class about economics to new masters students, and playing tennis. I also decided towards the end of the summer that I would be applying for PhDs in political science this fall, with the fallback option of returning to UCSD to finish my masters after the end of my fellowship. At the end of September I moved back to Chengdu (the big city that I lived nearby from 2011-2013 when I was an English teacher) and started taking Chinese classes at Sichuan University and helping with language editing at the Journal of Mountain Science—part of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. My Chinese has improved a lot since I got here. I’ve learned to read and write over 1000 new characters, and just started a novel in Chinese at the end of December. I submitted 9 PhD applications in December, but I won’t hear back until mid-February at the earliest. Among the potential places to get a PhD, UCSD looks like a great choice with great weather, the ocean, friends and family, and a short and often cheap flight back to CO.

       In December 2014 XiaoMin and I celebrated out 3-year anniversary, and I’ll be going back to her parents’ house for the Chinese New Year in February. We have a solid relationship, and we enjoy playing sports, cooking, and practicing language together. We’ll be traveling to Cambodia and Thailand in 2015 during our winter holiday—this will be XiaoMin’s second trip outside of China and my 31^st country. I she will be able to come with me back to the US this September, but we are still trying to figure out the best way to make that happen.

       Where I will be at the end of 2015 remains a mystery for now, but most likely I’ll be heading back to the US once in the late spring, and then permanently in September 2015. 2015 looks like it will be an important year with a lot of big decisions, so wish me luck…

       If you find yourself with spare time and money during the summer of 2015, think about visiting China. Chengdu has great food, pandas, and easy access to the mountains that mark the edge of the Himalayan Plateau. I’d love to show you around.

Best wishes to you in the New Year,

Luke

April Fools Day Part 1

April Fools Day has always been one of my favorite holidays, so it has been my intention for a while to prank my classes. After asking a healthy sampling of Chinese people if they know what April Fools Day is (愚人节 in Chinese) I decided that my class would probably get it if I pranked them. Fortunately, I stumbled across a great video a couple months ago:

In the video people speak what sounds like English, but really they are saying complete nonsense. The second part of my midterm partially focuses on Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (which we recently watched) and partially asks questions that either don't make sense or are much too hard to answer. This part of the exam had instructions at the top that said to read the entire exam once before beginning to answer questions, and at the end it says not to answer any questions and turn the test in. Here's the test:

Listening Comprehension

First Listen:

What is the dialogue about? Write 2 sentences.

Second Listen:

What did the woman buy the man?

What do they talk about at dinner?

What does the man say to the woman to make her cry?

Final Listen:

Write down 15 words that the people use in the movie.

*** Before you begin read ALL of the questions and ALL the instructions.***

Short Answer

1) Write 4 sentences explaining the meaning of “literary criticism.”

2) In Butch Cassidy and the Sundance kid, name the following characters:

a) The character that keeps newspapers. ____________________

b) The character that gets blow up in the train. _________________

c) The character that chews tobacco. _________________

d) The character that can’t swim __________________

e) The character who is a teacher___________________

3) Give examples of the following grammatical terms:

a) Metaphor

b) Adverb

c) Assonance

d) Coruscant

e) Gerund

f) Beeblebrox

Name Student Number

Essay Question

In “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” a dialectic forms between the concept of “lawman” and the concept of “outlaw.” Pick your favorite character from the movie and describe the dialectic inherent within his/her transformation. Write 10 sentences.

Multiple Choice, Fill in the Blank

1) Percy: “Yes, there are ___________, lots of ____________, don’t you want to know why?”

2) What does News like to do?

a) Rob banks and trains

b) Read his name in the newspaper

c) Read the news

d) Fly airplanes

3) Translate the following word into English: 芦笋

a) Broccoli

b) Cauliflower

c) Asparagus

d) Pumpernickel

4) Percy: “_____________. I’ve got ______________ on my team.”

5) Translate the following word into English: 势不可挡

a) Ultrakill

b) Unstoppable

c) God-like

d) Megakill

6) What was Sundance’s favorite food?

a) Mutton Stew

b) 饺子

c) Cheeseburgers with Bacon

d) 回锅牛肉炒饭

Do NOT answer any of the questions on this test. Write your name on each page, and give them to me. When you are done, you can leave class. 愚人节快乐。Happy April Fools Day.

Limits of language in China

the other day Matt shared a story with me. It went like this:
"I was teaching kids in my writing class about metaphors and similes, and I wanted them to make a simile describing how cute a baby panda is. I started the sentence for them: 'a baby panda is as cute as a __________.' After much hesitation, someone ventured a word: 'baby.' Having an idea of what might come next, I pushed the question--'a baby...what?' Another student volunteered then now inevitable answer: 'a baby panda.' This seems like an inevitable mixup in an English learning environment, but I prefer to think that these students simply couldn't conceive of something else that could compare in cuteness to a baby panda. In fact, the cuteness of a baby panda could only be described by the words "as cute as a baby panda," and those words could only be applied to a baby panda. Baby pandas are really cute.

九寨沟

JiuZhaiGou

I’ll let the pictures do most of the talking here, but what should be immediately apparent is that this place is amazing. Best described as most of the wonder of a high rocky mountain valley with many of the quirks of China, JiuZhaiGou took my breath away (and not just because it was 8,000 feet higher than Chengdu). A mountain stream full of Travertine disperses rather than channelizes, forming a wide, shallow stream that occasionally rockets over waterfalls and makes turquoise blue pools.

The non-scenic excitement of the trip was largely negative for me—I ate something bad the day before and was a little sick on the ride there. This was exacerbated by a night of frequent trips to the bathroom, a supposed 5:30 am start time (further exacerbated by a phone call in the local dialect at 4:45 am telling me [I think] that our start time had been changed to 5:00 am), a 12 hour bus ride, and a tour guide who not only loved to hear himself talk. Matt and I were shortly in trouble with the tour guide because we didn’t want to pay an extra US$ 30 to go to a bonfire party. However, he taught me that it is important never to sleep above 3,000 meters, or else you might stop breathing. Unless it is night time, then it is ok.

Two other non-scenic parts of the tour were notable: the first was that when some of the others noticed that I was not eating much at dinner, they ended up toting me off to a pharmacy where they argued over whether to get me traditional medicine or western medicine for whatever I had, and then gave me a slew of advice including that I should take a 30 minute hot shower with the water pointed at my neck to make me feel better. In a hotel with no heating, done and done.

The other was that we got a great deal on our trip because the tour we joined included stops at five (5!) shopping centers on the way back where they first give you a lecture about the importance of their product (crystals, medicine, yak meat, jewelry, or bamboo products) and then send you into a maze of a shopping area to buy overpriced but very very important goods (they will improve your energy, cure any ailments, give you strength and taste great, make you look professional, or dry quickly). I bought a wash cloth made of bamboo fibers for less than a dollar, which I needed to wash my face.

Hi from Thailand

I'm in Thailand on week 4 of a crazy 4 week winter break. I've been writing about it, but haven't been able to post anything thanks to the GFW (Great FireWall). Look for a slew of posts around February 17th.

Finals

It's finals time here, and it feels oddly similar to finals time at any US university. Tons of students are locked down in the library, I always see my students toting around some book for the next test they are taking (the learn through osmosis theory also has followers in China), and on whole everyone is stressed. Here are the highlights and/or interesting things about finals here:

First and foremost on my mind as a teacher is that kids are not allowed to fail their finals. This is a very strange concept to me, but I'll try to explain: If a kid fails a class (for whatever reason--bad attendance, never doing the homework, failing the final exam, or some combination of the above) they have to retake only the final exam at the beginning of the next semester. If they pass, they get credit for the whole class. If they fail again, they take the final again until they do. This is especially troubling for classes in which most of your grade is homework or participation. We had a drawn out argument/discussion with one of the office workers here about this. Their reasoning: the student has paid for the class, so they should get credit for it. This sort of makes sense in a very basic capitalist sort of way--you get what you pay for. It also raises something interesting about our US education system: you pay for the opportunity to get credit for classes, or maybe you pay to take a class, which doesn't necessarily mean getting credit or passing that class.

As a teacher, this changes things. I have decided that unless a student never comes to class, does not show up for the final or cheats, or is totally disruptive to the learning process of others, I will not fail them. If I do, it just means re-writing my final exam several times to accomodate their bad performance. Fortunately, I didn't have any of this type of students.

Second interesting thing: lots of people cheat on tests. I'll begin with my test. I had 4 classes of freshman english majors. I told them ahead of time that the test would be easy. I told them exactly what would be on the test. The average grade in my classes was above a 95%. I still caught students cheating on my test--from really quietly asking their neighbor to having copies of course material (like the study guide) underneath their test to passing whole pages of their exam to their neighbors. I was really surprised. If you can average a 95% on a test (and nobody got lower than an 80%) why would you ever risk failing the test by cheating? While discussing this with some of my chinese friends here, I was sometimes asked if I cheated on tests in school. My answer (I have never cheated on a test) is always met with surprise. I guess I've never been faced with the hard decision of cheat or fail, but it seems like not cheating should be the default assumption. Maybe not in China. On my midterm exam, people's cheating was more sophisticated: I deduced that students took photos of their multiple choice answer sheets and sent those pictures to their friends in other classrooms who have different teachers. This type of cheating is really hard to catch unless your teachers really work together. On the other hand, it's easy to tell that the student who can't say a sentence in english but who got a 97% on the difficult midterm somehow managed to cheat. If I know they did, but don't know how, what should I do as a teacher?

Third thing (and this one is more fun): I wrote down some pretty funny responses to some of the questions on my final exam. Here are the best:

Question: What group of people are responsible for the first Thanksgiving, and also appeared in our version of "Rudolf the Red Nosed Reindeer?"

Complete the song lyric:

"you'll go down in history! (like the _________)"

Correct answer: Pilgrims!

Students:

vampires

turkeys

indians (half credit)

satan chrasms

lightbulbs

plumps

poligrams

god

bulmbs

dogs!

Question: Who brings you gifts on christmas if you are good?

Answer: Santa Claus

Students:

Sutu Claws

Satan Clown

Christmas old man (literal translation of the chinese word for santa)

Santa Claus who is an old man

Santa but in fact it is your parents (NOOOOOOO!!!!)

Question: What animals pull Santa's sleigh?

Answer: Reindeer

Students:

pronghorn

turkeys

Question: What do you get in your stocking if you are bad?

Answer: Coal

Students:

pencil and notebook

book

stone, sank, and so on...

bad things

take a deep breath

regrets

An extra credit question was complete the following TV show (which we watched an episode of)title:

"Buffy the _________ Slayer"

Answer: Vampire

Students:

turkey

angel

reindeer

suspected

Another extra credit question: What's my favorite sport?

Answer: any of the sports I like.

Students:

fly dish

flossbean

skilling

skitting

skinning

If you read this post, you should subscribe to my blog so that you'll know whenever a new post of mine comes out.

This is a fascinating article that I recently read about a very chinese way of raising children:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704111504576059713528698754.html

新年快乐，Happy New Year!

Well, my last post reveals that it has actually been 2 months since I wrote a blog post. The reason for this long lapse is not that nothing interesting has happened recently (quite the opposite in fact), not that I haven't had time to write blog posts (I have), but that I've fallen out of the habit of doing so. So, one of my new years resolutions is to try to update this blog at least twice a week. Just about every day I think of something interesting, and often I think "gosh, this would be a great blog post" and then I get home and it's time for tennis and then I run to the gym and then to dinner and I get home and decide to turn on the movie channel and Jurassic Park is playing (like it does several times a week I'm sure, given how often I've seen it randomly flicking on the TV) and Dr. Malcolm is saying, "That's an impact tremor" and then a T-Rex bursts out of the foliage and of course I'm hooked and then I fall asleep after studying some chinese characters for a few minutes once the movie ends. Well, my plan is to add writing about my interesting 3:00 pm idea before studying the characters (or perhaps instead of watching Jurassic Park for the 20th time this year, but probably not, or maybe doing both at the same time!) and even if its just a couple sentences I think it'll help me reflect on my time here and hopefully entertain whoever bothers to read this blog.

New Years Eve/Day:

On new years eve I went out with a few chinese friends to eat roast rabbit and fish, both of which were delicious. Then, we went to the grocery store to search for a bottle of whiskey to drink for new years, and our disappointment at not finding one quickly changed to excitement at finding a bottle of brandy for 25 yuan (!!!) which we purchased and drank while singing KTV (Karaoke) with a group of other teachers. Matt and I went to the roof of our apartment building to watch some fireworks and I came home and left tipsy phone messages on my mom, dad, and sister's cell phones. I woke up this morning and embarked on a quest for a hamburger in Chengdu. Success ensued, and now I'm back home downloading the movie 2012 which I can finally watch without it spoiling the rest of the year for me. My other new years resolutions include:

dunk a basketball (before Willie does--I think we bet something on this but I forget what)

independently study chinese for at least 3 hours each week

lesson plan at least one day ahead, and have a quiz each week to make sure that students remember what they learned last week

Happy 2012 from China,

Luke

香港 Hong Kong

Hong Kong

Our trip to Hong Kong began on a Thursday afternoon. Matt and I hopped on a bus to Chengdu where we would spend the night at a hostel before flying to HK in the early hours of the morning. Upon arriving in Chengdu, a wild goose-chase led us to our destination that afternoon: a modeling studio. Matt and I walked in for our voice test and read an advertisement for some company in a sound room. I then read a similar transcript in Spanish (but there were more spelling and grammar errors than I could count) and we were told we would be contacted if anyone wanted us to read or act in their advertisements. Wish me luck—I imagine moonlighting as a model would be pretty fun and a great source of Frisbee-tournament funds. I then met up with one of my friends from the Kunming train ride (吴彤) who lives in Chengdu. We went and had a great dinner and then found an open area to throw the Frisbee a little bit. I made it to the hostel and fell asleep around midnight so I could wake up at 5:30am to catch the flight to Hong Kong. When we got up, nobody else was awake, and the hostel door was chained shut (fire hazard?). Fortunately, someone got up to let us out. My airplane nap was only interrupted by a really good breakfast omelet that comes with your dragonair ticket (remember when you used to get food on US flights?).

After a bit of wandering, Matt and I found our hostel and tried to check in. The story gets long and tedious at this point, so I’ll skip to 6 hours later when our security deposit was returned to us and we ended up getting a cheaper room in a different hostel. Our room had been given to someone else (ultimately) and we found a different one with luck (someone else canceled at the last minute after seeing their room, and Matt happened to be there at that precise moment). Anyway, after getting lodging worked out for that night, we headed off to the registration party for the tournament. There, we met our team, most of which I didn’t know, or had only met once before (either at worlds, or at the practice I went to in Shanghai). I also met Derek Ramsay, a big-time movie star in the Philippines who plays ultimate. He was a super nice guy, and was surprisingly chill about hordes of girls constantly running up and getting their photo taken with him. He told me “yeah, it’s really annoying sometimes, but if it weren’t for them, I wouldn’t have a job.” We returned to the hostel and crammed 5 people into our room, taking up every bit of available bed and floor space.

The next morning after another hostile negotiation with hostel #1’s owner, we headed off the fields. I’ll spare you the specific drama of the games in favor of some more general ideas. First, I was the tallest person at the tournament, which was awesome. Second, our team was really fun to play with. Our girls were really good, our team as a whole was really spirited, basically everything you could ask for. Day one found us at 3-1, with our loss coming to the one-seeded team at the tournament (also Derek the movie star’s team). A group of us left the tournament a little early to head to our sleeping spot for the night: an island that’s an hour ferry ride away from Hong Kong proper. We hopped on a ferry (Matt managed to get on the wrong ferry to a different island) and made it to our camp on the beach(!!!!) where we set up tents and went swimming. A sky full of stars and an ocean full of shimmering phosphorescence brought back memories of a trip to Mozambique with my parents. The float also rejuvenated my tired body, and after a beach shower I felt ready to head back into town to take on the tournament party.

The tournament party was located on the 29^th floor of a posh hotel on Lan Kwai Fook (street) in Hong Kong. The theme was reality TV and after some discussion, our team decided to go not as any specific show, but rather as the film crew for a reality TV show. Someone managed to put together a couple fake cameras (black tape, boxes, Dixie cups) and some pretty real looking sound booms (pvc pipe, cotton balls). When we arrived, the party had just been opened to the public (no longer a private Frisbee party), but we grabbed our fake cameras and began taping a party with a bunch of fake reality TV shows going on. Unfortunately security was fooled by our fake cameras, and they were taken away from us. Our attempt to fake-interview a security guard was apparently not very funny. A walk and a ferry ride later I fell into my sleeping bag, only to be awoken 4 hours later to go play Frisbee.

Upon waking up, I think I would have described myself at “about 30% health.” Lack of sleep 3 nights in a row, a hard day of 4 games of ultimate, general dehydration, and the few beers I had the night before all caught up to me, and as a result I felt little more than a zombie for the trip back to the fields. A boat ride and a warm up helped refresh me for a couple tough games against the eventual champions and 2^nd place team. We fought hard but lost both games by a few. I had a couple good tall-man plays (it’s really fun to be the tallest guy at the tournament) and a couple easy throw aways, but now I feel really ready to get back into good ultimate shape. Not sure what the next tournament is for me, but I’m already excited. Lots of basketball practice and weight room for the next couple months.

We stayed around and watched games for most of the day before heading to the ferry and then back to the beach. A very silly Amelia (a Colombian girl on our team) sang into the cab radio for most of the ride back to the ferry (I’m pretty surprised we didn’t get kicked out of the cab actually) and we had a totally delicious bacon cheeseburger at the dock waiting for our boat. We spent the rest of the time in HK swimming in the ocean and hanging out on the beach. Just before leaving we ran into an old friend from college who is working at the kids camp that we were using. Chalk another one up to random Whitman connections around the world. That evening I was back at Jinjiang College teaching my sophomore art majors new vocabulary words. A hurricane of a trip, but a great one. Next up—review of my national holiday from a couple weeks ago.