I’m sorry for the lack of timely posts on this trip. A combination of very little free time and very poor internet connection have made it difficult. Today, though, I’m rained out in Suzhou, a tourist town of canals and gardens, which means I have time to read and write some things. The internet connection is still terrible, so it’ll be a while before I post them, but it’ll get done.

I’ll start at the beginning, the weekend after my arrival. Most of that time is just jet lag and lesson plans. There’s a William Gibson book that expresses the idea that jet lag is caused by the fact that a soul can’t travel as fast as a body. If you go too fast, you need to go without it while it catches up. It’s not a bad description.

I asked Yang Ni, who I can only describe as my handler at the university, if I could go see the classroom on that weekend, before class, to get everything properly set up. The answer was a shifty no, an answer that gave me a feeling that the question I had asked was somehow stupid, and that I was being spared the embarrassment of an explanation of how. I would, in time, get used to getting these answers. I should note at this point that I don’t aim to cast Ni in a negative light, because she was enormously helpful almost all the time that I was at the school and a very pleasant person to be around. She seemed quite confident that everything would be fine for the first day, and was a generally comforting person, so I ended up feeling okay about it. It was just as well, because by that weekend, it was much too late to solve my problems.

Monday, March 3rd was my first day of teaching. That morning, I was feeling pretty good about it. I was nervous, but in a shy new kid kind of way, not a “not at all prepared” kind of way. Most of the time, I’m not much of a planner. Make a plan, and God laughs, right? Ask my father, though, and he’ll tell you I spent an awful lot of time planning for this class. In retrospect I think it was more of a way to suppress anxiety than anything else, but I had lesson plans done for the first two weeks, my first few in especially deep detail. There were a few things I had been told to expect, which these plans were based on:

• Students with good English skills. I “might sometimes” need an interpreter, for especially complex concepts.
• Two textbooks, supplied to me by Holland College and described as the course texts.
• A computer lab, with a computer for each student. On this one, I will admit that looking back, I made an assumption about what the capabilities of those computers would be, but I didn’t think I was expecting much.
• Human students. I include this as a way of looking at the bright side, in that at least one thing I expected did turn out to be true.

I walked in to the classroom about 15 minutes early, which to my surprise did turn out to be enough time to get set up. The WiFi astounded me by working completely fine, and the projector was fine as well. As the class got started, I introduced myself and told the students a little about me. I noticed they were somewhat unresponsive, seeming to look through me a little and not eager to answer questions or follow directions. Students, I figured. The first thing I had planned was to have a little discussion about class rules. An instructor at Holland College had shown me a website he used to do polls in class, which seemed like a great idea to me. So, I thought, let’s have a few polls about what our rules should be.

When asked about my teaching in those days, I invariably used the phrase “shit show”. The students did not, in fact, speak English very well at all, and especially not the technical terms that make up roughly 25% of any discussion of programming. Some phrases they didn’t understand until at least four rephrasings and repetitions: “You have an assignment to do”, “Click here”, “Syntax error”, and so on. The textbooks supplied to me by Holland College bore no relationship whatsoever to the textbooks actually present at the school in Chengdu, other than, I suppose, being from the same general field of study. When I tried to do my online polls, the bottom really fell out. None of the students had internet connections. This was an entire computer lab full of offline computers. For the first time, I wanted to go home and eat a Tim Horton’s chocolate chip muffin. This would become another recurring motif.

On Friday, Joanne and Jolene from Holland College arrived and Mr. Xiang, one of my fellow instructors in Chengdu, gave a lesson so that they could see how it was done there. It turned out that there was actually an internal network that I could use for sharing material with the students. No one had bothered to tell me about it.

Thinking about this even now makes me want a muffin more than anything in the world.