Caroline's Road Home

Classes started back up last week. I'm happy to report that the first week went relatively smoothly and I was actually happy to get back into a schedule and a routine after being on vacation for so long. I'm teaching two freshmen speaking classes which are both basically just a continuation of the class we had last semester. Thankfully, the school actually followed a suggestion that Katie and I made and reduced the class sizes down from nearly 50 to 15 -20. It's so much easier to teach a speaking class to a smaller group and it helps me get to know the students more quickly. I also have two sections of junior writing. The class is called "Practical Writing" and the students are supposed to learn how to write things like business letters, resumes, cover letters, and how to fill out applications. I'm hoping it really can be a useful class for the students since it does seem like Chinese students struggle with writing. The thing I'm worried about though is that between the two sections of writing, I have about 65 students--that's a lot of grading. Any time I give them an assignment, I have 65 things to read and check. But, my schedule is pretty light so having to put a little more time into grading won't kill me.

For the first writing class, I passed out a bunch of blank postcards that I'd accumulated from dozens of different cities that I'd traveled to. I told the students to either write something about the picture on the front of the postcard (if they were familiar with the place) or else write something about their winter holiday, as if I were a friend they hadn't talk to for a long time. My purpose in this was, first, to give them some kind of writing warm-up exercise and, second, to give me some idea of their writing levels and common mistakes they all made so that we could work on correcting them in the future.

One of the postcards, written by a girl named Caroline, really struck me so I want to share it. Here's what she decided to share about her winter holiday:

Dear Kim,
I'm very happy this winter holiday, because the road to our village was repaired. We had to walk more than one hour when we went home before. The car and truck can't go to my village. Now we can go home by bus, though the road isn't good like here, I'm very happy in heart. Yours, Caroline Shen

Wow. The event from her winter vacation that she wanted to write about was that she finally has a road to her village and doesn't have to walk an hour (and I'm sure to get to the point where you have to walk an hour, she would have had to take a bus for many hours already). Reading Caroline's postcard made me stop and think. First, I definitely take roads for granted. I've never had to walk an hour (with my luggage) just to go home because the road home is impassible to vehicles. And second, these are the students I get to teach--kids from villages so poor that there isn't even a road to get there. I feel a renewed motivation to be as much help to these kids as I can be--for them to even be in a college is quite the accomplishment. Another one of my students, Matthew, told us that he thinks he's the first person from his village ever to go to college. I visited Matthew's village back in November and it was nearly impossible to get there in a four-wheel-drive jeep. Students like Caroline and Matthew sound like they should be characters from someone else's memoir (makes me think of the students Peter Hessler would write about in River Town) but, instead, they're sitting in my class. Maybe through my classes, I can try to give Caroline something as meaningful to her as a road to her village.