MEGA BOOTH: One Round Table and a Microphone...

I’m at work on a Friday again to make up for the “extra” days off I received over the Chinese New Year. I hope it will be the last time I have to work on my weekend for a while. The DOS isn’t in today so with few exceptions, I’ve been here at my desk reading, e-mailing, and blogging (see, getting better at it J ). My only real professional responsibility today has been to man the “mega booth” down by the front entrance of the mall for two half-hour blocks.

Mega booth is an advertising tool designed to attract new customers by allowing them to talk with a real live lao wai (foreigner) and participate in a “demo class” (talking with a foreigner in front of a white board). I stand around looking native Englishy while mall-goers talk with our sales representatives, sometimes to inquire about studying English, but usually just to ask for directions.

Like much of my day at the office, my time in the mega booth was not particularly eventful, though I did have a few interesting conversations. The first was with a pair middle-school students on their way to lunch at KFC, and the second with a new hire, a older woman named Helen who is training to be a center manager for our company. My first conversation was not noteworthy for content. However, it was striking because these two 15-year-old girls were actually capable of having a simple, functional conversation with me in a language other that their mother tongue. I don’t think these two were exceptional in this regard either. What was most exceptional is that many Chinese middle-schoolers could have performed comparably in a similar situation.

English is a mandatory part of children’s education in China. Some students start studying as early as Kindergarten, and then continue from primary school through high school. From what I’ve gathered, students must pass an English proficiency exam in order to attend university (you’ll have to excuse me, no one outside of the U.S. uses “college” to describe their institute of higher learning, so I’ve adopted the more cosmopolitan and more annoying “university”). Then if they’re English majors, or if they want to pursue post graduate studies, they have to take another proficiency exam. I picked this up from my conversation with Helen, where we discussed the personality of the typical Chinese English student.

Not that this state education produces a crop of competent English speakers at the disposal of the Chinese economic machine, but I think it embodies a good idea in principle. In a globalized world, language builds bridges and puts up walls. Generally speaking, if a person can speak a foreign language, it creates more opportunities for that person to improve their life and the lives of those around them; if you don’t speak any foreign languages, it does not condemn you to a life of poverty or unhappiness, it simply means that you will have fewer opportunities to improve your lot (not few, just fewer).

In a world long-dominated economically, politically, and culturally by the West, exposing a society to the most powerful language in the world makes good clean business sense. In a world soon-to-be-dominated, if not by the Eastern giants of China and India then at least by a globalized economy, does it not also make sense to do the same in Western countries?

If American students had to reach a certain level of proficiency in a foreign language in order to graduate from “university” it could do wonders for preparing America’s work force to compete in a global economy, and perhaps temper the country’s comparative economic decline. That’s not to say that America can imitate the Chinese model (a politically and culturally impossible task), or that students be forced into studying a foreign language in school. I’m just thinking that there should be a shift in educational focus nation-wide to acknowledge the shifting demands placed on the American economy in a globalized world.

To accompany a change in national attitude, universities (and colleges), both private and state-funded, could adopt or expand their foreign language proficiency requirements not universally per se, but certainly in relevant majors and programs. Students could then make their choice of school and major with these requirements in mind, so nobody would feel coerced into anything.

I’m sure plenty of schools have foreign language requirements, and I don’t have any statistics. I’m just suggesting that things need to be kicked up a notch…

Anyhow, I’ve rambled on for a little longer than I’d hoped, but this topic ties into one other point from my conversation with Helen. She and I were talking about the personalities of my students. Chinese students don’t exactly come out of high school sounding like Henry Higgins, and Helen asked me if I thought my students’ language ability suffered from shyness in the class room. She offered a number of possible explanations for this: maybe it’s a result of Confucian culture, or their “teacher talk-student listen” education, or perhaps the product of a tumultuous political past where sharing your opinion got you sent off to labor camp for some reeducating (I’ll go for the safe “all of the above”).

I think that while shyness may play a factor, and it certainly would inhibit language learning, it’s not the biggest impediment on a student’s progress. You can throw material in a student’s face all day, if they don’t have the motivation or the passion to grab that material by the Charlie Browns and know it, and use it, they’re not going to get very far…

Anyhow my train of thought has derailed and I’ve drifted too far from my original point…whatever that was, perhaps a tirade against the laziness of some demographic or another, but I’ll spare you the sermon.

Here are a few random musings:

I will never cut my hair during football season again, and I will not shave my face during a playoff run. My “playoff beard” theory proved correct as my GGGGGGGGGGGG-Men pulled off the upset of the century and defeated the now 18-1 New England Patriots in Super Bowl XLII! (Not sure about the quotations there, I could just as easily have put “beard” in quotations because whatever sprouts from my face after a few razor-less days does not meet conventional definitions of the word) Thrilled for my team, thrilled for the veterans, and pumped up for next season…

I think the wheat bread here is actually white bread dyed brown.

Teaching a current events class about Sir Edmund Hillary, the first man to climb Everest, produced repeated, hilarious mispronunciations of the country name Nepal. (I’ll let you use your imagination)

Olympic gold medalist and New Rochelle High School alumnus Christina Teuscher works for my company…at least according to a poster of her near the reception desk at the office. She’s teaching swimming lessons to students and apparently is a “program manager” for EF.

I’ve concluded that musically inclined people have an easier time with Chinese pronunciation…

Speaking of music, for my first music club, I put together a class on the Temptations’ “My Girl.” It seems Smokey Robinson’s writing not only leads to success on the charts but also in the classroom. The students liked the theme (luuuuuuv) and the simple brilliance of the lyrics. Getting to rock out to a good tune in the middle of the day also always lifts my spirits J.

Speaking of which, it’s been a bit of a shock getting back into the work rhythm after the New Year’s holiday. I’m not really sure where the whole week went…but I’ll save that for the next post in the interest of getting something up. I will have some videos and such from my week off to lend some visual and audio aid to the ol’ blog. It won’t be too long before the next post.

‘Til then…