Shangke

So I woke up at 5 this morning, but forced myself to stay in bed for another hour. I was excited for class. 4 hours of Chinese and then two hours of econ, who wouldn’t be excited. 6am finally rolled around and I got up and went to take a shower. I met my ayi in the bathroom and she explained how to use the shower (it looks a lot like a shower you might be familiar with except it is in the shape of a 6ft tall telephone booth, works the same as any shower, but is very small and too short to get water on my head without bending down considerably. Shower over, I sat down to another breakfast of strange small cakes/buns/biscuts and hard boiled eggs soaked in soya sauce. Breakfast over; I sat down for a good solid hour of review before my 8am class.

7:45 I roll up in the language class hall to find a schedule posted on the wall informing me that I am in class 332-c. Is that a room number? No. That is my medium class group designation, not to be confused with my small group class designation which I am currently unsure of because it was listed as 132-2, but that was a typo. So next I make my way up and down the hall looking for which room my 8am class is in, I go up and down diligently searching, not once, not twice, but three times. No luck I can find where my 9, 10, and 11 o’clock class is but no 8am class. Turns out they forgot to put some signs up.

Class begins. We get a little tingxie (teacher says stuff in Chinese and you write down what she says using only characters) and then break into some grammar instruction. There was a bit of confusion on the tingxie after class because it was not explained and turns out in previous Chinese classes people have not all done the same thing. Some have written the pinyin(Romanized Chinese), some have translated to English, and others have written characters…so who knows what was right. The grammar instruction was similar to before and there were actually no new structures introduced. Xiake(end of class). We all go into the hall and discuss a bit before finding our next room. In the next room I find the same five classmates but a different teacher. But wait, the teacher is writing the same grammar structures on the board that the last teacher wrote, odd. Shangke( class begins) and is identical to the last class minus the tingxie and with a slightly older teacher. Xiake. That was odd. Goto to the next class, in yet a third room with the same five classmates, but wait the teacher from the first class is back and what is she doing? Writing the same grammar structures on the board that we all seeing for a third time. Shangke, small as the last two classes. Xiake. That was weird again. 11 o’clock class yet another room, but with the same teacher from the first and 3^rd class. Shangke. Same grammar structures except for this time instead of repeat after her and adopt, she asks canned questions(the same question to each of us one at time) and we give her responses using the grammar structure she points at. Xiake. Great I have just had the same class 3.5times in a row. I don’t understand.

Econ was not promising. The teacher gave a poor summary of the assigned reading and possibly made things up. I went to talk to the admin about switching right after class. They told me to wait until after class next week when I will have a better perspective on how the class will be.