San-Zhong high school

APRIL 18, 2007: WARNING - ANGRY RANT IMMINENT. Been teaching at this insane high school for the last week or two. Photos

Insane because i have over 1000 students, so i can barely learn any faces, let alone names. Insane because every class has 60-70 of them. Insane because these kids are there 6 days a week from 6am to 9pm, no shit. Insane because 50% of the school building is infused, i mean really infused, with the stench of the toilets, which are pissed, shat, spat and vomited into by 4500 piss, shit, spit and vomit machines for 15 hours every day. (Think test match at the WACA ground, 37C, inside those sea containers they bring in as temporary dunnies. Now imagine a test match lasts 150 days and you are there on the 150th. Those sea containers do not get cleaned.) And insane because the students know so little English - even after supposedly learning it for at least 4 years - that a native-tongue English speaker is next to useless unless they know fluent Chinese in order to explain shit.

I think we're pretty much "token white guys" (well, Boxxy's not quite the definition of "white", and in fact gets treated accordingly, though that's a different, though urgently hilarious story).

So the job is fuct. Don't read on unless you want to hear a frustrated rant about why.



Boxxy's throat is killing her cos she has to shout for 4 hours a day. (The idea is to get them to practice speaking, not talk for the whole lesson but we spend most of the lessons trying in vain to explain shit to them.)

And achieving domination over 70 cunts in a classroom who barely speak a word of English is about as likely as the Fuyu county government being invited back to rule their half of Songyuan.

It shouldn't be like this, though, i should be loving it...Machiavelli has clearly shown the way to go, making myself loved and feared. But it's the existing fear in the classroom that makes my job so fucken difficult. They don't talk for fear of fucking up in front of an English speaker.

It's also extremely boring when they do talk because they all say the same things; their vocabulary seems limited to "basketball", "football", "table tennis", "kola" (koala), "good" and "very good".

That's a bit harsh but they really know an astonishingly small amount of English given they've learned it for four years. They lapped up the first lesson, an introduction about myself. But since then it's been the textbook i'm supposed to teach and it's pretty shit, and most of them have gone out and bought it so i can't shun it.

What's more, they get tested in every subject except the one i'm teaching. While they're mostly keen on the idea of knowing English, most of them can't seem to really be fucked learning it. They're just so fucken shy. I do my best to use my broken Chinese whenever i can, in order to demonstrate that it's ok to speak badly because that's how to learn.

Still most of them don't have a word to say. One of the oil bosses told me in Chinese culture you actually should ask questions, but that it's also a part of Chinese culture that you don't question your superiors.


Admittedly, there are classes of comparative guns, who will at least speak when you ask them a question, but that's about 4 classes out of 16. The rest are really fucken fuct. And even once you get them to speak, they all give the same answers, e.g. "I was born in Songyuan, grew up Songyuan, i like playing basketball".

Give me back the oil honchos.

- Whinge ends -