Read my latest story, "A Tale of Two Birthdays", at 52|250.

Over the past two weeks, my film classes have been watching The Graduate. I’ve tried to use the movie to help my students gain an understanding of the 1960s in the US and as an introduction to existentialism. (Admittedly, the latter goal was really only in reach of my more advanced students, but I think it’s important to provide discussion topics at varied levels when faced with classes that contain students with disparate skills.) It took a lot more work than I expected to guide my students in the direction of the first goal, however.

In retrospect, I should have anticipated that students who are working towards a middle-class existence would have a difficult time seeing characters who have been given such material comfort as having something to be unhappy about. I had to use specific lines of questioning that focused on looking beyond wealth and possessions. Discussions of particular characters’ motivations, however, were often derailed by arguments about their lack of morality. Of course, confusing analysis and judgment is hardly a uniquely Chinese problem.

One difficult in interpretation that did seem particularly Chinese, on the other hand, came up a few times when discussing the Braddocks’ various parties. A number of my students interpreted them solely as efforts to introduce Benjamin to potential employers.

Today three of my students turned in nearly identical papers.  One of them only included about a third of what the other students’ did and was handed to me several minutes into class by another one of the students.  If the handwriting hadn’t been different on every copy, I would suspect the student who handed it to me of going so far as to transcribe each copy.  This student, incidentally, is one of those who thinks that using “big words” makes him an advanced student, even though he fails to use them accurately or to use the simplest grammatical structures correctly.

Unfortunately, since other students don’t know these terms, they believe that he’s more advanced than they are.  It seems likely that the other two students believed that his work was better than anything that they could produce.  In fact, this tripled paper is the only one of those I’ve read so far to completely miss the point of the assignment.  I asked for a synopsis; they gave me a character description.

To be honest, I found this whole thing a bit insulting.  Did they honestly believe that I wouldn’t notice?  Perhaps they suspect that foreign teachers don’t actually read their assignments.

It’s strange to think that it’s Sunday night.  Afterall, I taught three classes today and two yesterday.  Because the National Day holiday that begins tomorrow only lasts three days officially, the college has us teach our Thursday and Friday courses the weekend before our seven-straight free days.  Given that each class meets once  a week, however, the result is that those classes that meet on Thursday and Friday end up getting ahead of the others– which is irritating when you teach multiple sections of the same course.  And, of course, a seven-day week is long for students and teachers alike.

So I didn’t teach real lessons this weekend.  I showed my movie classes a silly movie with little discussion (though I did tell them to pay attention to the slang), and I gave my senior functional composition classes a quick-and-dirty creative writing workshop.  I was surprised to find that they lost interest in the fiction-writing portion after the pre-writing steps, though my demonstration of an earthquake as an inciting force startled them to attention.

With the poetry, they were intimidated at first (which I expected), but by the end, some of the less-skilled students wrote passable cinquains (and volunteered to share them).  The procedure I followed to  achieve this result was remarkably simple.  First, I had them brainstorm nouns, verbs, and adjectives related to a topic.  Then, I introduced the syllabic form by writing out the first three lines and then illustrating how a word list could be used to generate the conclusion.

Anyway, I’m off to Shanghai in the morning, so don’t be surprised if posts are minimal to nonexistent until Sunday night or Monday morning.