No Rest for the Weary

Here is some school-related crap that has kept me busy in the past two months or so:

1. BWYA Basketball Tournament

Mr. Clem, the basketball coach at my school, organized this tournament on the eighth of October. It was held on a gusty, sunny day on our school’s courts and was attended by St. Paul American High School and some French school. I went to watch but was invited to referee each of the four games that took place throughout the course of the afternoon. St. Paul American won, B-Dubs got second, and the French school came in eighth or ninth. I liked how this latter team played the most, though; they avoided contact at all costs, so I had few to no fouls to call. It was a good time; there were a handful of students and some teachers who came out to cheer on the crew. I would love to ref again next year and am already accepting bribes; coaches, e-mail me.


2. Sports Day

The school - both student body and staff - was divided up into four houses (Earth, Air, Fire, Water)(I was on the Earth team, and our color was green, and we talked a lot of smack) and got together on Saturday, October 15, to do battle in a number of sporting events. There was rope jumping, race running, obstacle course maneuvering, war tugging, cheering, and trash talking. Ultimately Earth lost to Air (first place) and Fire (second place) but not to Water (in your faces). But, despite both the third place finish and the fact that the event was held on a Saturday morning at 8:30, Sports Day was a fun time and I really enjoyed it, perhaps due in part to the intensity and enthusiasm from the teachers on Team Green. The trophy is ours next year.


3. A Midsummer Night’s Dream

On Friday, October 21, fifty or sixty of our students and a handful of teachers went to the TNT Theater to see Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” I am an English teacher and should like all of Shakespeare’s works, but this one seems to be destined for me, or I for it. It is the only play I really remember caring about from my Shakespeare class with Mark Bruce at Bethel; I went to see it performed super well at the Guthrie. Then it turned out to be what was in the curriculum at CCS for the senior class, so I taught it twice there. Then I happened to visit Mr. Jordan Williams at TCIS in Daejeon and he happened to be showing a video version in class. And now, here in Beijing, it reared its ugly donkey head again. So we went, and it was good, and then we went home. My review of this rendition of the play (entitled “Whoooooooooooo Cares?”): it was very long, the funniest parts were the extreme liberties that the performing group took, and there were only six actors to do all the parts. Boom. Below is the advertisement that floated around my school for about a month leading up to the play. It is sort of a weird ad, which maybe explains why not everyone from my school went.


4. United Nations Day

This day was allegedly Monday, October 24, or so the authorities at our school said. BWYA celebrated it on Friday, October 28, but I have a sneaking suspicion that the entire event may have been concocted so that no one would wear their Halloween costumes during the school day but would instead save them for the Halloween party that evening. Anyway, most students were sporting the colors of their respective home countries. There were lots of flags, traditional costumes, and national colors all over the place. There were also plenty of kids just wearing whatever they felt like. I tried to bring together as much red, white, and blue as possible, which included blue slippers, white long-johns, blue KU shorts, a red sweater, a white tie, a “Twins: Get To Know ‘Em” pin from 2001, an Iowa flag worn as a cape, and a Santa hat. I also went out and got completely sloshed the night before, so when I showed up at school my eyes were super red. Just kidding. I felt stupid most of the day, especially walking to school and going out for Chuan Friday. But the celebration was a success. Also, some kid took a picture of me with all that crap on, but I haven't been able to track it down, so here is a picture of my brother, Dirks, me, and Clayton wearing some American garb at the Metrodome in 2008. Hope it will suffice.


5. Students vs. Teachers Basketball Game

I was walking down a hallway one day a couple weeks ago, minding my own business, when a senior at our school said, “We’re going to kill you, Mr. Haggar!” Startled at such a violent threat, I said, “Then you’ll get expelled!” After the conversation continued, I was enlightened about the annual students vs. teachers basketball game. I’d heard rumors and, after the trash talker found me, I enlisted myself on the teacher roster. The game was on Friday, the 28th of October, which, if the reader is keeping careful notes, was the same day as the national color hullabaloo and the Halloween party. So it was pretty full one. Anyway, the teachers – Mr. Clem, basketball coach; Mr. Vinge, PR guy; Mr. O., computer teacher/soccer worshipper; Dyson, IT master, Lei Buo, PE affiliate; me, English teacher – stepped up to the challenge against a crew of young dudes who were literally chomping at the bit to beat us. Below is a brief recap of the game that was published in the school newsletter, and a picture of Mr. O. showing off the scoreboard to Mr. Gaspar, who does not actually always look like a freak but was merely decorated for the H-Party that was held an hour and a half after the beatdown.



6. Halloween Party

The basketball game ended at 5:30 and the Halloween party started at 7 p.m., and I didn’t even have the largest part of my costume. But I made it. The party itself was alright. There were snacks, a costume contest, a haunted house, a dance room, and maybe some other stuff that I missed. But mostly I floated around and tried to figure out who was who and gasped for air through my costume. The quality of the costumes at the party ranged from awesome (two girls had intestines and gore spilling out of their slashed chests)(perhaps this doesn’t sound like it should be in Category Awesome, but they were well done, at least) to mediocre (like just wearing the “scary old man” mask with normal everyday clothes) to no costume at all (like, some students didn’t wear any costume at all). The snacks were good but the Oreos ran out very quickly. Overall, it was pretty solid for a school Halloween party; however, it cannot hold a candle to the legendary Lissner 403 September, February, and May Halloween dance parties of 2006-2007.


7. Baseball Club(s)

In earlier posts I mentioned the middle school baseball club I am running, with the help of Mr. Robert Wang. This continues to be a good time, especially now that a package from my father and Coach Pytleski of Central Lyon in Rock Rapids has arrived. Its contents include four gloves, a batting helmet, a handful of baseball bats, and many, many baseballs, the hard kind, the sort that grow hair on your chest and put you in the hospital if used wrong. A couple weeks ago we moved away from drills and practice to scrimmaging, which requires less planning and less yelling at kids to quit being morons. With the cold weather, however, we will have to see what happens. Additionally, at some point early in the year, a high school student approached me and asked if I would play some ball after school (the middle school club is during a class period on Wednesday) with some of the high schoolers who were interested. We have only played a couple times, and the numbers are quite few (6-10 students) and transient, but since everyone who comes is genuinely interested in playing, and everyone gets more playing time since there’s only three or four people per time (as opposed to fifteen in the middle school club), the engagement level is much higher. In general, it’s way more like playing with a bunch of friends. The smack talk level is higher, as well.


8. Forensix

Also known as speech and debate. On Mondays B-Dubs offers clubs that are more “academic” in nature, as opposed to Wednesday’s clubs, which are more extracurricular. Yes. Anyway speech and debate started a long time ago, but now we have one meet under our belt (Friday, Nov. 11). There are five vectors we have been focusing on: original oratory (writing your own speech and presenting it!), oral interpretation (dramatic readings of poems and prose, baby!), impromptu (creating a three-to-five minute speech in ninety seconds!), duo interpretation (memorizing and acting out some two-person dramatic piece), and debate (arguing with rules and regulations). I am in charge of original oratory and debate. On the 11th of November, Miss April, Mr. O'Day, and I took two debate teams, two duet acts, a poetry reader, and two impromptu speakers to the ritziest international school in the city. It was stressful and overwhelming, but once we got in and got settled, one of the debate teams won two of their three debates, everyone had a good time, and we all had a crazy good international lunch. All in all, a success! On Tuesday, Nov. 22, we do battle again at a different school under different circumstances. It's on. Here is a photo of our brainstorming board on "Research Night 2011: The Night We Got Yelled at for Having Pizza in the Computer Lab."


9. Beijing No. 94 High School

My school, Beijing World Youth Academy, shares one of its buildings with a local public middle school, which in turn works with a local public high school in the area. At some point a deal – one that I hope was made in a dark basement room over a smoky game of drunken poker – was made, a deal in which BWYA promised to service its partner high school, Beijing No. 94 High School, with a native English speaker for one class a week. The class period is on Tuesday from 2:45 to 3:45. Three English teachers at our school have that time off. Feel free to make your own judgments about my school, but I was the only one asked to teach this one class because a) one of the two other English teachers is head of the English department and is very busy b) the other of the two other English teachers is not technically a native English speaker, though she is quite fluent c) I am white, blond, and energetic. At any rate, now I go there every Tuesday afternoon and yell at two different classes – one of fifty or so, one of twenty-something – of fifteen- and sixteen-year-olds for an hour. Ms. Du, my contact there, says that they’d just like to have some contact with a native English speaker; all they’ve gotten so far is Chinese teachers teaching them English out of textbooks, a fact that is made abundantly clear when I walk into the room and shout, “Hey, ya’ll, how you doin’?” And every person in the room says, “Fine.” I basically have free reign to teach them whatever I want. I will probably just teach them about a slough of random topics, but if you have any bright ideas, let me know. And, I don't have a picture from No. 94 yet, but some of them have pictures of me, since after class they came and stood four feet from me and took photographs. Anyway, instead, here is a picture on a Thursday morning - a truly hopeless day on which I get no rest - of the sun rising over the Chinese flag in front of my school. I will do better with pictures in the future, I swear.


10. Chinese Class

There is not much to say about this, except that the class consists of about six or seven teachers gathering after school every Monday and Thursday for an hour and getting taught pronunciation and vocab by one of the Chinese teachers at B-Dubs. There are varying levels of proficiency in the class; some of the “students” have been in Beijing for ten years and are pretty dang good, while others (ahem) don’t know jack and find it difficult to study consistently, given how much life is going on. But try we must. It’s a good time. Here is a picture of me studying how to talk about shengri and wearing my eighteen-day-old beard.


So! A lot has been going on, and this is basically not including any standard school stuff, like teaching, or any standard living stuff, like hanging out. Nonetheless, most of the items listed in the post have been fun, so they are not chores but enjoyable activities. Thus, let them continue, I guess.