.

"Ni hui jiao women yingyu ma?" means "can you teach us English" and it's what a few of the older kids who hung around asked me one day.

These kids are aware by now that an ability to speak English is more than helpful in the new Chinese economy. But there are no native English speakers in this region and the only teacher anywhere nearby who would occasionally teach English could barely speak English himself. So it seems that the odds of them ever being able to speak fluently are pretty slim and I think these older kids are not too many years away from realizing this and also realizing how limited their chances are in this new ecomony. All this made their eagerness to learn that much more heartbreaking and made my eagerness to teach them Something in the short time I was there that much more urgent. But China is changing so rapidly now so who knows.

I do know that I loved teaching these kids.



This is a picture of Liu Dan, one of the kids who first asked me to teach them English. There's a nice story to go along with this picture which you can read about further down.

On one night at the high point of my impromptu English lessons I had about 20 students. Mostly older kids, but also a few younger ones from Teacher Zhang's class that we were teaching in the morning for the documentary. That night I even had a couple 18-year-old punks show up (and I mean punks in a judgment-free Ramones-punk kinda way, not a 'you lousy punk ya' kinda way). They probably only came around just to see what was going on and goof off a little bit but I did what I could to teach them. It had gotten around that a Westerner was giving free English lessons. Some of the parents were pretty excited about it, I think, and most of the students showed up ready to work hard and really learn, the few who could afford it even showing up with small notepads. And Teacher Zhang would always seem to stop in at just the right time with another piece of the precious and carefully hoarded chalk.

A couple times during the life of this great little run of impromptu classes I had to kick out kids who were goofing off too much and ruining it for kids who really wanted to learn. The rowdy ones were mostly boys (the punks only showed up once) and I felt bad because one of the boys seemed to be a good student, but he ran with his crowd.

And here's at least one picture of some of the boys who were finally not too shy to come around and stand still for a photo. The second boy from the right is the one I felt bad about kicking out.



One of the girls I tried to kick out (she kept coming back) was one of the kids who visited us regularly. She was a nice kid but would quickly get annoyed if she wasn't being given the amount of attention she felt she deserved. One of the other kids asked me one day if I knew that this girl would sometimes swear at me with a smile on her face and then get a kick out of me smiling right back at her without a clue. So that's why she was laughing all the time... Oh, well. I haven't spent much time learning Chinese swear words. Maybe it's time to learn. Maybe I should have asked her to teach me.

After I kicked out the rowdies, the students who remained were even more devoted. I think that's because they saw that I was devoted to them.

Later on I passed the punks in their tie-dyed hair and cheap but earnest funkster clothes perched on a hill and watching over the cows. We smiled and waved to each other as I jogged by.