Summer Camp
So it has been ages since I last sat down and wrote anything. I feel derelict, and in my vague defense I have been exceedingly busy. I can't even muster up an amusing anecdote from Summer Camp, which we are in the midst of teaching at the moment.
Erica and I are whisked off to camp each morning in the oldish, blackish VW Santana, the most common vehicle in China. The driver is maniacal, swerving in and out of traffic, narrowly averting numerous accidents on each 15-minute trip. It is not comforting.
We travel with Michelle, our new office assistant, who is nice and usually helpful. We hold our classes at the "Green School," so called because it is in the countryside (mostly), near the mountains, and has on-site orchards, fish ponds, and preserved-egg making facilities and so forth. The kids spend four hours a day with us and a few hours doing green activities like "loach-grabbing," "picking of the fruitage," and paper cutting.
Camp really deserves its own book. We planned our lessons along the themes given by our principals. Erica is teaching Magic and Wizardry, which is in line with the Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings themes that the advertising offered. I teach Nature and Science, where we go out and catch bugs and pick weeds and then talk about them. For better or for worse, some shrubs right outside our classrooms are infested with bright green fuzzy caterpillars, which look really neat and have been stuck into jars. Unfortunately, these caterpillars sting (a new vocabulary word for the session), and leave painful welts if you brush their colorful 'fur'.
Erica's room is big, covered in camouflage paint, and the inside is full of graphic photos and diagrams about how to survive a chemical weapon attack. Baffling. There are lessons on hands, people fleeing disaster, and visual aids: gas masks, scary vials of white powder, and disassembled minibombs. We managed to remove most of them before the classes started.
Oh, and classes. So they have been good at times and painful at times. The students are alternatively cute and horrendous. We live in the age of cell phones, and a half-dozen students carry them, with one particularly homesick student calling home every break.
There is the child who writes DEATH on his owl mailbox, the ADD child who is either bouncing off the walls or incredibly focused on something, and of course the kids who bounce off the walls. These kids are surprisingly destructive, breaking, flooding, scratching, and gluing more things than I would have imagined. We are unsuccessfully trying to grow beans to learn about the parts of the plant, our problems due in part to the above activities.
We've worked nine straight days at this camp and are ready to tear our hair out. We've got six more. And it is hot out. mid 90s and humid every day. I've never praised AC much before, but here I'd die without it.
Tony
