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We had 22 kids to teach, ranging in age from 3 to 8. All taught together in the same classroom. Quite a challenge. As it was explained to me, the nut of this doc was supposed to be about examining the differences between Western-style teaching and Chinese-style teaching. I was recruited to represent Western-style teaching but the simple fact that I’d been taught in the West was my only qualification. Many of the people in the village had never met a Westerner before.



As for Chinese-style teaching, it’s more like stuffing a duck, as my Chinese teaching partner described it to me none too fondly. Lots of rote memorization and lots of spitting it back on tests. And at the very end of it all in the last few days of the lives of every high-school kid across the country there's The Test -- the all-important and all-painful test that will determine the very course of the rest of your entire life right then and there because it will precisely determine which university you can go to. Maybe I'm exaggerating a bit but it's not too far off. There's no such thing as a 'personal statement' on college applications in China, that's for sure. Just The Score. This test rules a kid’s every waking moment for the three years preceding it. There is so much pressure that everything else that could be part of a kid’s life is ruled out. There is no room for imagination or innovation, and no encouragement to do anything imaginative with all that information that's been stuffed in -- just spit it back as well as you can on The Test. The Chinese government has recognized for years that this is a problem -- unimaginative teaching creates unimaginative workers and any country that wants to prosper in this era must have imaginative and innovative workers -- but they lack the resources to deal with it effectively or maybe they lack the imagination to break the hold that this mythic test has on every Chinese parent. Or, more likely, maybe they know that you can't have innovative thinking without free thinking and a repressive one-party government can't survive with a lot of free thinking running around.

All this worked right into my plan, which was to teach these kids how to tell stories and then to act them out dramatically. Or if not ‘teach’ them exactly, then explore that process with them and guide them to discovering the fun of telling stories, while keeping to myself how important that is. Because it is important for kids to be able to tell stories about their own lives. I actually said something quite eloquent on camera, I think, believe it or not, about why I feel this is so important... something like "without imagination you can’t keep hope alive" in a remarkably off-the-cuff moment that felt like it hit... but I can’t remember now exactly what I said so you're stuck with this clunky little phrase.





I wanted to have these kids taking one of those stories that they made up and putting on a big production of it in the back of this classroom by the end of the month. My old girlfriend, Andrea Dishy, used to do this sort of thing in public schools throughout New York City with an organization called Creative Arts Team. Andrea has an MA in Educational Theatre from NYU and is a recipient of the Paul A. Kaplan Fellowship for excellence in the field of Theatre-in-Education. This teaching plan that I wanted to try was inspired from having watched her at work. She spent a couple of very long international phone calls with me holding my hand and giving me some guidance before I left for this adventure. What I did was but a pale imitation of the great work that she did but what I did was pretty wonderful and I couldn't have done it without her. Thanks, Andrea!

Speaking of challenges, it was almost impossible to get these kids to raise their hands at first much less use their imaginations to be elephants or wolves or trees (there's a Chinese saying: "the nail that sticks up gets pounded down"). They were very used to the Chinese method of teaching and really quick and responsive when presented with that but very uncomfortable or confused when confronted with any different sort of approach. I was also slowed toward my goal because Teacher Zhang thought that what I was doing was a waste of time and he didn't understand why I wasn't drilling the kids in English vocabulary. So, to keep the peace, I started pretending I was teaching English, but it was really just another way to get into the storytelling. I would give the kids a new English word or two and ask them to come up with a story using those words, or I would teach them the English version of a couple good words from a story they'd just made up (and Tianshu was always standing close by, ready to help me when I stumbled with my Chinese, which was pretty much all the time, but it worked).

Luckily, we happily had them doing all that I'd hoped for by the end of our time there. All this came together in the very last class with Tianshu and I up the night before getting ready for the big final production really wondering if it would happen at all. The story the kids came up with was so good and hit on so many things about their lives, it really made me happy. We had every little kid in that class involved and laughing and loving it, playing elephants, wolves, bulls, fairies, trees, markets... Unfortunately, though that incredible burst of imagination and freedom from all the kids was filmed, I have no pictures of it. Just know that it was wonderful to see these kids doing this, especially after the struggles of the first few weeks.

That’s Teacher Zhang in the classroom. He lived right across the schoolyard. We had all our meals with him and his family. This is one of the shots I fired off very quickly when I started to realize that just because this stuff was getting shot for the doc didn't mean I was going to have any record of it. For instance, I don't have a picture of me banging on the bell above the door to call the kids to class. If you need a little spur to imagine me doing this, you could watch a movie called "Not One Less", by Zhang Yimou. A nice movie. The people and the place and the teaching going on in that movie are very much like what and where we were, though our setting was much more lush and beautiful than what you see in the movie.




So, I basically slept on a board for a month. Here's the board. With a wider reverse angle looking out the door of my bedroom. I, along with Tianshu, had the luxury accommodations (the crew had to sleep two to a 'bed' in one big room). The classroom was right next door to my bedroom. By the way, that picture of the classroom was taken during "reading time". It seems that you must shout when you're learning Chinese in some parts of China (Teacher Zhang was always telling me to speak louder whenever he saw me studying Chinese). And since these kids of all different ages were all at different reading levels they would all read on their own. At the same time. Out loud. Very loud.






Below we have the obligatory photo of the outhouse... better known as squatting-on-boards-over-an-open-pit. It was at least a week into our stay there before we started to confess to problems with 'splashback'. As the days wore on, we enjoyed sharing our own private solutions to the problem and how we'd arrived at them and the fine-tuning of same as time passed. Everybody came up with slightly different solutions and we actually had a little argument one night about whose was the best.