the first day of school

When I was a kid, I remember being so excited for the first day of school that I would lay my school clothes out on the ground ready to be thrown on in an instant's notice, as if school might start any minute and I didn't want to be left behind (I remember one time when I actually wore my clothes to bed). This childhood excitement slowly wore off as toys started to disappear and nap-time became book-report-presentation time. Then when finals starting rearing it's ugly head into the curriculum, I knew for sure academia wasn't for me. Don't get me wrong, I did tough it out and get a college degree, barely, but it was a struggle. All this to say that I've been on a 5 year classroom-free streak and it's been bliss.

Well, yesterday was the first day of our Mandarin class, and as you can tell by the introduction above, I wasn't very excited about being in a class room for three hours a day. Well, my worries were in vain because there has been some fortunate game changing events that have made language learning a completely enjoyable experience!

We are at a teacher's college in town that houses 4,000 Chinese students and about a dozen foreign students. There are 4 Chinese teachers that help the foreign students learn Mandarin at whatever level one is at. The traditional way of learning Mandarin at this college is the typical textbook style, chapter-by-chapter, scolded when mis-pronouncing tones style of learning. You can imagine how excited I felt. No foreigner studying here truly enjoyed this traditional method because it took forever to get through material and you learned more about the Beijing opera than you did about items in the market.

So, some of our foreigner friends at the school suggested to the faculty a new way of learning Mandarin that Laura and I have never heard of. It's called the "Growing Participator's Approach" or GPA. It's designed to help the student learn more like a child and to take a more hand's on approach to learning. For example, the first 4 weeks of class you don't do any speaking, only listening. After the first phase (150 hours) we will have over 500 words in our iceberg. GPA chucks the traditional way of memorizing vocab to perfection and insists on recording the lǎoshī speaking the vocab and listening to it over and over out of class to get it in the "iceberg" as they call it. The tip of the iceberg being words you have mastered and the lower part of the iceberg being words that are stored away and will eventually surface. To paraphrase, GPA says that one would spend a great deal of time and energy mastering 300 words only to find out that 200 remain at the tip. Whereas, somebody else might expend the same deal of energy putting 1,000 words into the lower part of the iceberg (the goal being to understand them when they are again heard in context) to discover that 200 or more have already risen to the tip of the iceberg. It's a really cool way to learn and study. The faculty has agreed to take on this curriculum with excitement.

We spend 2 hours a day, mon-thurs with our lǎoshī (teacher) learning a new set of vocab and action words. Today we learned kitchen and household items. We combined this with vocab from yesterday and we were able to understand and point to a picture describing an action our lǎoshī would choose. For example, "the man put the apple on the table." We already knew man, table and apple and we just learned "to put" because of the context of the picture. But remember, no speaking until week 5. This is very difficult for me as I want to practice everything I learn out in the market or with our neighbors. Class has become a real joy as our lǎoshī gives us an action word and we physically have to act it out (jump, or sit, or leave or come back). And since class consists of only Laura and I we can get all the attention we need to understand the material.

Trust me, I've never been this excited about school since I used to wear my school clothes to bed. It takes a great deal of work (2 hours of class in the morning and 2-3 hours of review in the afternoon), but it's been so great to see such progress after day 2! I am excited to learn Mandarin, and though we've been warned that there will be times of great despair (yes, tears and all) I am enjoying it now. It's actually funny, Laura and I have been telling each other to remember these times of excitement, because they won't last forever.