Change is in the Wind

As in most international travel, but it seems especially in China, everything is subject to change. It seems the brand new minister of education in Hangzhou did not think the students were well enough prepared to take their year-end exams, so she unilaterally extended the school year by two weeks. Those two weeks were supposed to be the first two weeks of the camp. She told Eva we would have to move the camp to August. At this point, we teachers had already had our plane tickets, paid for at our own expense, for a month. The minister relented slightly, and everyone on the Chinese end of things scrambled frantically to try to reorganize the dates of camp and tour. The new plan was for us to have the tour of China at the beginning of our stay, followed by a week of being "hosted," whatever that meant, at some other schools, then teach two weeks of camp and leave the third week to the Chinese teachers who were going to be assisting us as "shadows" during our stay.

That is where our schedule stood last week. Yesterday, though, at the next-to-last group meeting before we board planes to head East, Pat told us that everything had changed once again. The minister of education had gone back to insisting that we come in August, which is flatly impossible, so Eva told her we'd love to see her next summer, but it certainly wasn't happening now. No more will we be teaching elementary and middle school kids. We are back to the old 3-week camp schedule, followed by a tour, only this time our students will be university non-English majors, and we will be teaching at Zhejiang Media College, where the conference is going to be held. We have all been given titles of "Expert Foreign Instructors," and we will be housed in the faculty guest housing.

Since all of our previous lesson planning had been oriented toward teaching children, many of the teachers were justifiably dismayed at the change. Eva assured us that the plans we had sent her were perfect, since the language level of the university students is actually in many ways lower than the children's would have been. Our arts and crafts specialist remains unconvinced that young adults will be quite so enthusiastic at making little people out of wooden beads and yarn, though.

There is little doubt, in any case, that the five weeks in China will be interesting. We can hope that they will be interesting in a good way, but after all this confusion, one begins to be reminded that "May you live in interesting times" is said to be quite the potent curse.