Fishing, or Cut the Bait

Since I only have 10 hours of class a week this semester I thought I'd try out working for one of the private language tutoring places in Changzhou just to see what it was like. A place called Supper called David to ask him to teach a class for two hours on Monday and Wednesday night. He could do Monday but not Wednesday so I volunteered to take the other day. This was apparently OK with them, I say apparently because before I showed up to teach the first class I never had any contact with anyone from the company. Ken and Dave have taken to calling the company Terrible instead of Super do to their various oddities and seeming inability to run a company, but honestly that doesn't seem all that different from anything else in China. I have a list in my head of things that demonstrate why China grows so fast, people working 14 hours a day 7 days a week, and thing that make me wonder how the country functions at all, not being able to buy train tickets more than seven days in advance and even then only from a city you are physically in. We're having some sort of English festival at the school now which involves various English competitions and speeches, I'll get to my speech in a post pretty soon, but the school constantly confuses the room or changes the day things are on without telling us. A huge number of the students never knew there were speeches by the English teachers.

But back to Super for the moment I show up about 20 minutes early on the first day, in case their are forms they wanted me to fill out or they wanted to talk to me only to have them stunned that I showed up so early. Super is in the downtown area of Changzhou in a nice looking office with a etched glass sign with the companies logo, "Fishing, or cut the bait." Not only is this grammatically incorrect, I think "fish or cut the bait" would be better, but it doesn't actually mean anything. As I have gathered it this is close to come Chinese saying which I think means about the same as "Shit or get off the pot." Now this isn't just put up on some little sign it's etched into the fancy glass behind the main receptionist, at a place that supposed to teach English. The school has this same sort of problem. For the English festival there is a big sign reading, "Happy English, I'm Lovin' It," a combination of a phrase that doesn't make any sense and a McDonalds add. Even my first year students can correct this. How exactly does this happen then? I think it has something to do with the hierarchical nature of society in China and peoples unwillingness to question authority. If your boss comes up with a slogan you just go with it even if its terrible, you just can't really question him. No one thinks to get someone to proofread the giant banner before it's made. Decisions are made at the top with little or no input even if they're wrong.

The class at Super is OK but the levels are radically different. A few of the students are decent but many have basically no real English, way lower than my freshmen. I asked a lot of them on the first day why they wanted to learn English. A few had no response, one tried to see me sand paper by the truck load, and one had the dream of moving to Australia to be a barber. I think Australia is China idea of the beach resort get away, even though Sydney is about as far from Beijing as LA is. I mostly just do the same things I've done in my freshmen classes. I have a book too but I find it mostly pretty boring. One of the Super employees a guy names Jack sits in with me on the classes and helps translate things where there's just no real way I can communicate some directions to people with limited English.