We're Just Following Orders

Well, I see by my dashboard notifier that it's been eighteen days since I last posted . . . we'll shoot for perfect attendance next term. Things get a little hairy at the end of the semester, as you can imagine. As I write this, I'm sitting in the living room of our friends the Snyder's house in Detroit. We'll be down in Greenville between about the 4th and the 11th of February. In case you were wondering.

One of the cool things that we got to do this last week was to help out some of our 3rd-year students with a big speech competition that they had been entered in. We've done a few of these extra assignments so far, and while they're interesting, and we're glad to help, they can be a little confusing sometimes. What usually happens is that one of our superiors strides into the office and says something like "Our school has been chosen by the government to give a speech at the UN / to abolish poverty / to take the One Ring to Mount Doom and cast it into the fire / etc and we want you and Desiree to help these two students with that. It's very important. OK?" "Yeah," we reply, "Are we doing it next month?" "We will do it tomorrow." This doesn't really give us much time for planning or even thinking of excuses to get us off the hook, so we just say "Sure! No problem!" and try to squelch our panic.

We've discovered in our few short months here that instructions given for such activities tend to be rather general and (what's worse) fluid. I try to ask very specific questions about what's expected ("So all we need to do is help the students prove the existence of tachyons, right?"), to which we receive a typically Chinese reply ("Yes! YesyesyesyesyesyesyesyesofcourseOK?"). These instructions, however, are commonly amended at a later date ("Right, but of course the students need to demonstrate using the tachyons in faster-than-light-travel. I mean, why would we want to see just tachyons?! Haha!").

Even so, it's always nice to spend some quality time with our nervous pupils. I think our presence has a calming effect on them, which is useful, since they're generally as confused as we are and a lot more worried. As we were flying out yesterday morning, our girls Helen and Nora were diligently sweating it out over the pronunciation of the word "privileged" and the outline of the speech on the relationship between the Chinese and Australian culture. I hope they did well on their speech . . . and that we'll have our excuses ready for next time.

Dave