Xindu, July 12, 1999

22:15

So today was our first day of teaching. It started with a series of short speeches. The Principal was not there but a Vice-Principal came. There was one man with a camera: he might have been from press and another man with a TV camera. All of the speeches were in Chinese, in fact in the local dialect, so I didn't understand almost anything and even Xian and Hoeteck had problems. When they motioned towards me I understood that I was supposed to say a few words. All I saw was blank faces. That was not a good sign. Our students did not seem to understand any English at all. Then the class started. It was a complete chaos. Getting everybody to open the www.mit.edu web site took a very long time. Everybody was talking and they were all doing different things: some were starring blankly at the screens in front of them and other were already downloading software for measuring connection speeds and asking why connections to various sites differed. After that we spend three quarters of an hour making them reconfigure their Intern et Explorfers to connect through a proxy and then setting up hotmail accounts took two more hours. I was utterly exhausted by the end of the session. Hoeteck and Xian were doing most all of the teaching and I was helping individual students. While doing so I discovered that some of them spoke some English and we could even communicate but only within narrow limits.

During the second session (after lunch) things went a little bit more smoothly. It also seems that the communication between me and some of the students is improving. Hence I am feeling somewhat more optimistic about the whole thing now.

For clarity, we teach twice a day: first from around 9a.m. till 11:30 and then from 3 to 5. Also when I say "students" I mean people that attend our course. This time it means less than a dozen of teachers and about forty pupils. Together, according to the attendance list, 52 people. That's a really huge class. It is almost impossible for us to have everybody's attention for more than a few seconds. Also when we show them how to do something and ask them to follow, it takes ages before all of them are with us. By the time the last ones do what we asked them to do, the other ones have already wondered away. Ultimate frustration!

* * *

Yesterday we discovered that there is a set of traffic lights a few blocks away from our school. They seem to be off most of the time and they turn on spontaneously for short periods of time. What really surprised me the most was the fact that this otherwise unruly and chaotic traffic seemed to obey the lights! Those who were supposed to stop stopped. That, of course, did not mean that pedestrians had it any easier. There was a lot of turning traffic and it really didn't care about people trying to cross the streets.