The Little Adventures of Daily Life

This week has been a long yet good week. It was mostly the culmination of several small things with cultural blunders interspersed throughout.

First of all, we announced the spring play as The Princess Bride, and we held auditions. I’m so excited for the show, and we have a great cast to fill the roles. As with the fall play, I will be producing it (making posters, advertising, designing t-shirts, etc.). However, this time I know what I am doing, so it won’t be as stressful.

Second, I feel like I had some of the best-prepared lessons that I have ever had. In all my classes, we prepared for the WrAP, which is a standardized writing test that all the students will be taking next week. With the 9^th grade, I introduced a research paper, and the 11^th graders studied “To Build a Fire.” I have a ton of grading to do this weekend, so I doubt that this coming week’s lessons will go as smoothly as last week’s, but I don’t have to plan for Monday or Tuesday because of the WrAP.

It seems like every year (and by every year I mean this year and last year) I begin the year a little unsure and unconfident mixed with maybe a pinch scatterbrained-ness.  However, once I come back from Christmas break, I finally feel like I know what I’m doing. I also finally feel like I’m breaking down the barriers between the students and me. I scolded a student and gave him a present in the same week. (There was no correlation between the scolding and the present; this is just to illustrate that I am building good relationships with students).

In other exciting news, a group from Qingdao came to TIS for a reading competition, so I got to catch up with former students and with one of my friends.

This week was also rather draining. I had to stay at school until 7 PM two nights in a row. I also had a couple of nights that I didn’t sleep so well. This morning I awoke at 8 o’clock to the sound of construction going on above my head. However, I was able to get about 10 hours of sleep last night, so that makes this past week seem a little less exhausting.

During the busy-ness of this week, I realized something about Chinese culture. I had been told this, but I have seen it played out in my life this week. First of all, I ask too many questions. Maybe, I’m too curious. Maybe I just want to make sure that I get everything absolutely right. Maybe, it’s an American thing. I don’t know, but Americans are direct. We ask a direct question; we expect a direct answer. However, when you ask a Chinese person a direct question, they do not give a direct answer; they would rather you draw you own conclusion from the information that they give you. I, in my American-ness, took this to mean that my question was not understood, so I reworded the question. By the third question and answer routine, I realized that I committed a cultural blunder. They had indeed answered my question; I just needed to read between the lines. However, this frustrated me because I had asked a direct question and I wanted a direct answer. Now I am realizing that I need to be satisfied with the ambiguities in conversations because that is what cross-cultural communication is all about.