Cold Classrooms

I may have mentioned it in a previous post, honestly with more then 80 posts now it sometimes hard to remember what I've already talked about and even harder to go back and check all the posts, but the classrooms here are not heated in the winter. Now at first blush that doesn't seem to be such a big problem since it never gets what I'd call Wisconsin cold here, but once I had been teaching for a while I realized that even though it never got as cold as in Wisconsin I can't get in out of the cold. It's one thing to be freezing on a walk to class and another to be cold the whole damn class. It means I can never really take off my jacket, especially for those frigid 8 am classes, and that sometimes I want to wear a hat also.

I asked Teddy how come all the students don't freeze to death whenever it gets down to like 1 or 2 degrees Celsius and he pointed out that that was one advantage of packing them 8 to a room. It seems funny when the school provides me this huge heated room with hardwood floors and the students are packed 8 to a room about the size of a closet without heating. I guess it just shows again how much the school likes having foreign teachers, and maybe they realize that if I had to live like the students I wouldn't have made it through a week here. It looks like me, Ken, and Dave are going to Nanjing this weekend for two or three days. I ordered the train tickets over the phone with the help of one of my students and like an hour and a half later a guy shows up at my door with all three tickets at a really nominal fee, plus in China you don't have to tip anyone.