| Subject: Quiet around the house |
Author:
Wes
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Date Posted: 13:21:00 08/25/09 Tue
I just put this column up on my paper's website and thought I might as well post it here, too.
It's sure been quiet around the house the last few days. There's not much going on, and when I get home there's only the cats to greet me -- and they're obviously lonely, too.
Last week I stood in the airport next to my wife and watched my daughter and her English boyfriend head back to China. It still seems a little surreal to this doting dad that his daughter would spend two years in China, and even more surreal that she would be heading back there. But it happened, and more power to them.
For two years, my daughter mostly was teaching English as a foreign language to Chinese students. According to her, this is both interesting and frustrating. Most educated Chinese -- at least the ones that reach the university level -- have had several years instruction in English. Most read it reasonably well, but they may never have had the chance to have heard it spoken directly by a native speaker of English, or have had the chance to practice the spoken version. Nor, often enough, have their teachers had the chance to practice their spoken English. Therefore, many students at the university level aren't confident enough with the language to be able to speak it and make themselves understood.
It seems to me that when we westerners learn a language, we tend to learn it as a spoken language first, then translate that into a written language. This is certainly true in the case of languages like Japanese and Chinese, where the symbols are confusing to those of us that use alphabets. It turns out the opposite is true in China -- people learn English as a written language first, and then graduate to speaking it -- thus the need for native speakers to practice on and correct their mistakes.
Dan, my daughter's boyfriend, is English, and has been in China for several years, the first part of that time doing the same thing as my daughter. In England, the concept or tradition or whatever of a "gap year" between high school and college is much more firm than it is here; according to him the majority of students take a year off between high school and college to work, do volunteer stuff, goof off, load up their backpacks and travel, or whatever. Like a lot of kids that age, Dan was bored with classrooms and eager to take a gap year, although he had no particular idea of what he was going to do. He wound up signing up for a volunteer program, and much to his surprise found himself in China, teaching English.
Now come on, those of you parents with kids about to graduate from high school. It's hard enough to concieve of them going away to college, oh, somewhere a couple hundred miles away next year, isn't it? Well, consider sending them to China next year! Scary to think about, right? But it could be done . . . I mean, been there and done that, although the kid was a little bit older.
I might as well tell the rest of Dan's story. He liked what he was doing and where he was living so much that he stayed there teaching English for three years, rather than one, then decided to take a degree in Chinese. That's what you call an alternative college strategy, and I have visions of him going into an interview somewhere and laying a copy of his transcript down on the interviewer's desk -- in Chinese. But if you're supposed to learn something in college and explore diversity, then he's doing it in spades.
I have from time to time deplored the passing of the days when at least a few kids used to take their backpacks and do Europe in the summer or for however long. The decline of the dollar had something to do with that. But it turns out that the tradition is alive as well -- there's a pretty active expatriate community in China.
It's all pretty foreign, and maybe a little hard to imagine, but when the kids get tired of Chinese food they can head down to an exotic ethnic restaurant like Subway, KFC, McDonalds, Pizza Hut or Hooters -- which reportedly makes the best burgers in Chengdu.
It's all an adventure and I'm glad they're having it, and taking advantage of it while they can.
-- Wes
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