4 hour meeting

Today we had a curriculum meeting for our dept (early years: nursery thru kindergarten). It was from 1:00-5:00. You may be saying "ouch! that's a long meeting" well... yes. but i was really pumped about it!
see, the early years management team: jeanette, rebecca, stacy, and tasha (remember these names because they will come up later) have been meeting once a week for 5 months writing a curriculum and we are finally getting some input into it all. i like that stuff anyway, so i was thinking "wow-4 hours, we'll really be able to get a lot done and maybe next year we'll actually have some direction!"
well- that would be great, but it wouldn't be in keeping with the pyp (if you were an ssis teacher, that would have made you laugh).

it is a generally known fact (among the american teachers....) that nothing useful gets done at pyp meetings. i realized early on that this meeting was no exception. about 20 minutes in i started keeping a time log of what went on in the meeting. it's borderline hilarious (in a dry, "why oh why is this my life" kind of way). i will deffinitely be doing this for ALL future meetings.
here is what i spent my afternoon doing:

1:00-1:10 Jeanette (boss) rambles about how much we have to do and how we better get on with it
1:10-1:25 Each person reads 1 article and shares it with partner.
1:25-1:30 Jeanette talks to herself about whether we should discuss as a group what everyone thinks of the articles and then decides and agrees with herself that this is unneccesary.
1:30-1:45 Chit Chat
1:45-2:15 Kate writes "standards of understanding" statements for each of the major sections of the early years curriculum while rest of dept talks about various things, a small portion of which refers to curriculum. Jeanette tells kate "bravo, well done. if you could just type those up for me that'd be a big help."
2:15-2:45 Jeanette assigns each group of 3 a section of the cur. for which to identify skill standards (let me explain here what this actually entails: each section already has a list of these standards written. the assignment was to read them (about 1/3 of a page worth of writing) and identify which ones were appropriate for that section and which maybe belonged somewhere else. this could be done with a check mark.) staff works on this- 1 group does not finish.
2:45-3:20 chit chat
3:20-3:45 break
3:50-4:20 (jeanette is gone and rebecca is now leading meeting) some relatively productive cur. work is done.
4:20-4:25 jeanette returns and is caught up on what she missed
4:25-4:50 jeanette and stacy argue about the formation of the pre-k cur. and the pyp documents. *this is significant because if you'll remember, they have been meeting about this exact topic for 5 months.* 3 comments by other staff are made during this time, all of which are entirely ignored.
(4:30-4:32 student throwing rocks outside hits the window- chatter, jokes, re-enactments about this ensue)
this argument ends with the statement "we'll worry about that later, this isn't important right now."
4:50 meeting ajourns.

we did about an hours worth of work in 4 hours- and i have no doubt in my mind that many walked away from that meeting thinking we got a lot done. its sad to say, but this is a pretty accurate picture of most meetings at my school... you have to either laugh or cry- or be too stupid to notice how much time we waste! am happy to say today it made me laugh... today. :)

im just happy this morning- thought id tell you about it :)

Yesterday I shared a cab with a guy from work. he's really into the whole-food scene and is kind of a "new-age" health and fitness guy- really into yoga and working out every second of the day and only eats raw stuff. i don't know the guy well, but eveything I've heard about him is kinda hippy (refers to everything as energy "her negative energy just started affecting everything" "the fly energy in here is massive" etc). well-turns out he is a seriuos negative nancy! he went on for 20 minutes or so on all the things he doesn't like about being here and why he can't wait to go home. he had a pretty long list- and it was so nice to listen to because I realized how happy i really am to be here, how happy i'd be to be anywhere-
so, here's my list of things that I like about living here:

telling cab drivers where to go in chinese "wo qu auchaun, ren hou ta qu tali fu"
fresh fruit and young coconut water
my beautiful apt and my ayi who cleans it for $30 a month
TRAVELING- thailand in february, philippines in may, africa in july and all over china in between!
walking to work
power house gym
my students
knowing how to sing happy birthday in 5 languages
thinking in RMB
daydreaming about home
singing outloud in the streets because no one understands me anyway and is already staring
talking about whatever i want at restaurants because no one will "overhear" and get offended!
the "expat community"
sitting in my awesome bed watching it rain and wearing my new china sweatpants- so comfy, i'm never taking them off- and other homey activities

there is too much to tell all of it, but i think the biggest thing i love about being here is feeling like everything is so much more possible- i can go to africa this summer- i can move there in two years if i want. i can backpackthrough europe or spend next summer in new zealand. i can save tons money or give everything away to a chinese orphanage. i can do anything- everybody can do anything- but being over here, i really FEEL it.
its pretty powerful

What good is a happy childhood to you anyhow?

Today I went to a meet-the-author at the new bookstore in downtown Suzhou. He reminded me of that always reoccurring theme that true art comes only out of suffering. As if unhappiness gives birth to truth and ideas that a happy past simply cannot produce. I have heard it said that people who have not suffered have nothing to say worth saying- meaning not that the only things worth saying are the miserable, unhappy events of one’s life, but more that realizations, great epiphanies of thought and philosophy arise out of the state of mind suffering puts you into. I’ll admit, I find myself baffled by this theory.

On the one hand, I do tend to gravitate towards books that describe someone’s rise out of hardship- books that rip at your heart or your mind as you struggle with the characters to overcome whatever demons may be rummaging through their lives. Though now that I write it down, I realize that it is not the struggle I appreciate, but the achievement. It is the opportunity to share in the triumph of a character that makes me fall in love with a story. Even so, would these stories of personal victories be convincing if told from the mouth of a cheerful ex-volleyball team captain? A woman spawned from a successful marriage and raised in a home filled with snicker doodles and Christmas trees?
It is certainly depressing to think that a happy woman, however clever and creative, is simply incapable of producing the literature she enjoys most. Perhaps it is so depressing that if you thought on it long enough, you might just be able to squeeze some quality prose out of the experience.

Taking down the Taiwanese flag

So as yall know, the Taiwan/China issue is pretty sensitive here. Today i had to do my best to explain it to a bunch of kindergarteners...

a few weeks ago, a group of kids took it upon themselves to research and create flags from all the home countries of the class. they made sure to include everyone's home country and looked them all up so they could make the flags accurately... keep in mind we're talking about 5 and 6 year olds here.... i was VERY impressed. we hung the flags up and until today were displaying 9 flags: america, norway, finland, mexico, japan, singapore, korea, taiwan, and china.

we had a meeting in my classroom this morning and one of the other teachers said she was suprised no one had said anything about hanging up flags and she thought it was against school policy because of political issues. i thought this was silly but as i don't want to offend anyone, i decided to check it out with the head of dept. she said that hanging up flags is always an issue because the taiwanese students want to hang theirs but it can be offensive to the local staff. it's been up for a while and no one has said anything, but i thought we may as well take it down anyway- just in case. the taiwanese girls weren't happy but were fine about it, the rest of the class was a little confused but i did my best explain it and they mostly just accepted it as "the rules".

none of this is terribly exciting, but later in the afternoon, i was just so impressed with one little girl that i wanted to share the story: lauren, a little american girl, came up to me and said she really didn't understand why we had to take down the flag, that they had worked hard on it and it wasn't fair to jessica and venus (from taiwan). i told her that we couldn't hang it because taiwan is a part of china just like suzhou is. she said "yes, yes, I know all that, but conneticut is part of america and nobody gets upset about conneticut flags." (i thought this was pretty wow!) we talked a bit more and i told her that it might hurt people's feelings to see the taiwan flag up and she said "but no one is even from china here, except ayi and miss wu, but they don't mind. *shrug* i guess i understand why we can't hang it up, but i just think its a bad rule is all"
---I don't know if this story reads as impressive as it was- she just really blew my mind with how opinionated she was about it and how well she seemed to understand it all. if you spend much time with this age group, you know that strong opinions are extremely rare.
(example of a typical kindergarten conversation:
sara: I really like cupcakes
hilma: really, i don't like them very much, but i guess they're ok
sara: yeah, i only like them ok, not very much though )

well.... i was proud of her, that's all :)

Blogging

Hey guys, I've decided to start writing a blog :) Something really cool happened at work today and i wanted to tell someone, but my email doesn't work here and i thought this would be more fun anyway. I hate that I don't get to share all the little stories in my life with people- they're the kinda things you tell in the car or over dinner- not in a once a week (or less) phone call. I can't say how diligent I'm going to be about this, but I'm going to try to keep it up- that way, if you're interested, you can pop online and see what's going on with me :)
also, if any of yall have blogs you keep and haven't told me about, let me know- I hate missing all yall's small/daily stuff too!

XOXO-kate (international superwoman)
p.s. jane- be prepared to see a lot of poor punctuation and lowercase letters.... ;)