An American Expat in China

This was the last week before our thanksgiving break and the accumulated stress among staff and students is palpable.  Everyone is ready for a vacation.   One of the dark sides of such high academic standards is the amount of strain it puts on students.  You can see bags under their eyes from a lack of sleep.  They have stress over their performance and are rarely happy with any score below a 93% because they all aspire to get into America's top 30 Universities or Colleges.  Their attitudes toward success leads to some unhealthy mindsets.  While I continue to praise the education system here as far superior to the idiot producing factory that is American education, it has it's flaws.  The cultural perspective on education is that every child should have a LOT of education.  They take additional classes after school and on the weekends.  What is most concerning is that they assess their self-worth in relation to their academic success....

It has been raining pretty much all week.  With that has come cooler weather.  The sidewalks get slick, the soil gets muddy, and giant invasive African land snails emerge and creep around. I had made plans with one of the women from last Saturday who I had shared contact info with.   Our plans were originally for today (Sunday 11/6).  She seemed really eager to hang out and contacted me on Tuesday and asked if I would be willing to go on our date early.  Which we did, but it did not really work out.  She showed up in sweat pants and a t-shirt and I got the impression she considered the encounter more casual than romantic.  We did not get together again today.  She is going to keep going to the hash, we will see what kind of signals I get from her going forward.  From the signals she was sending it might be she was more interested in hooking up than dating.  There will be more dates to come with other women and it did not hurt to try...

This past week practically flew by.  On Monday I was brought to the Civic Center to take care of some important stuff relating to my visa, residency, and work permit.  I had to submit my passport which I will get back soon.  I voted by mail from China.  It cost me about $57 to mail it through a courier service.  I hope it gets there because the next US midterm election is a big one.  What I love about teaching here is that I am able to experiment with many of the ideas I have had over the last four years.  I have already talked at length about the negative aspects of teaching in the US.  Those issues are far worse in urban settings.  It was rare that I had enough consistent attendees, or students who cared enough, in class to even execute what I had planned.  I am now in the fortunate position to use much of the plans that I have accumulated over the last four years.  This means that I never need to come up with anything on the spot...