Lessons

It has been a long time since I updated, but life has been quite busy.  I just wanted to take a moment to reflect upon some of the lessons I have been learning here.

Mercy.

My relationships with my students here in China has taught me more about the need for mercy than anything else.  I have had some amazing, smart, hard working students who have screwed up.  They don’t deserve a second chance if you simply play it by the book.  But I have seen that because these students truly do care about their education and because they truly are trying, extending mercy to them teaches them more than only holding them to the rules.

Because of one smart, good student who made a mistake, I decided to create an extra credit opportunity. It will be an outside of class performance, which will be a lot of work for me.  But it means that this student has the chance to earn more than a C.  It also gives other students chances to raise their grades, too.

The student broke down in my office crying when I told her I was  creating an extra credit performance so she could have a second chance.  She told me she has learned about what it means to grow up.  She had accepted her fate already, that she was supposed to have a 0 on the first speech and would have not be able to earn an A in the class.  But seeing how touched she was by her reaction to being given a 2nd chance showed me that mercy and grace, things undeserved, truly are needed in life.

Kindness.

I have seen people get bitter because of problems with others or the culture.  What’s interesting is that even when I have problems (and yes, sometimes things are SO hard for me), I have been trying my best to remain kind.  I have been given so much favor and welcome by some people here — everything from being taken out to dinner/lunch with a student and her family from being given rare tea to being  told “I love you, teacher” that it is hard to let the frustration stay.  The people are warm and I like to show them how grateful I am for their kindness.

Patience.

China teaches you to be patient like no other place that I’ve been to.   I believe there are numerous reasons for this.  The Communication scholar in me recognizes that different cultures view time differently.  Americans view time as number oriented. We think in hours, minutes, and days, etc.   In China and other collective cultures, people view time as event oriented.  They don’t necessary have a constant awareness of the exact time, even if they are conscious of time passing.  Instead of thinking in numbers, a collective culture things in events.  So the event might be morning.  Or it might be work.  Or it might be dinner.   Phil can explain more to you if you don’t understand because, interestingly enough, he is event oriented.

Well, given that I am a typical American, being in a culture such as this has challenged me to relax.  I was frustrated at first when I was told something would be fixed tomorrow and when it would really be two days later.  Now I understand that they are not thinking of the days passing by the events of what needs to happen.  So my leaking bathroom is an event on the list that will happen when the previous event is over.

Beyond time, China is so different from my American experience that I HAVE to be patient to survive.  It’s hard to stay patient when only hearing Chinese because it makes communication slow down.  Needing to rely on pointing is hard and time consuming.  But it’s that or nothing.  I also have to have patience with the seemingly strange things that occur that I wouldn’t expect in America:  the heat not working when it should, getting paid late, not being able to order everything I would want to from a store at once — the list goes on and on an on.  I wish I could bring you all with me to China so you too could experience this firsthand, since it’s so hard to describe all of these differences.

The point really is that I have become more patient here than ever before.  I have to. If I am not patient, I can’t survive.

I’m hoping I can make another post soon since I am so sad that my updating has taken a while!

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