A student of mine (let’s call her Geneviève) is from a country where the workers go on strike a lot. At my level, as a teacher for over 30 years, I also get more resistance from students from that country than I do from students from other cultures.
Back in the first half of the 1990s, one of them, Eva, when told by the co-ordinator that I’d be relieving their regular teacher for the following week’s lesson, immediately went to her office to ask if she couldn’t get someone else. The co-ordinator told her I was a very good teacher. Eva said, “Yes, I know, I was taught by her last year in the beginner’s class, but she and my Latin temperament don’t get on.” (She used to sit at the back of the class and talk to the boy next to her, and would resent being asked to pay attention and to stop disrupting the boy’s own participation.) (NB: My evening class students were all mature students — no student under 18 accepted. I guess we’d call them Adult Education classes in another country, e.g., Singapore.)
Geneviève is a very kind, considerate, caring and unselfish person. She’s in her mid-70s, and her ways and values are of the old school: always polite and respectful — she even made her nephew, who was staying with her at the time, come out of his room to greet me when I arrived for our lesson and bid me goodbye when I was leaving after the lesson.
Geneviève and I get on well. I even cook Chinese food for her after our lessons, teaching her how to cook rice and do stir-fry along the way. We then eat the food, and talk about life: our lives, the Chinese culture, her culture, etc.
During the lesson, however, her cultural genes will come to the fore.
We were doing a Listening Comprehension exercise from the textbook: a dialogue between a Chinese girl and an Italian girl who is in China to learn Chinese. The piece is for practising the Chinese comparative structure (X-is-greater-than-Y kind of thing), comparing the weather in Beijing with the weather in Shanghai.
We got to the sentence, “Beijing is colder than Shanghai,” and immediately Geneviève said, “I don’t agree.” I asked, “Why?” She said she didn’t think Beijing was colder than Shanghai. I said, “This is for listening practice. It doesn’t matter if it’s right or not. All you need to do is get the original right: if the speaker says it’s X, you translate it as X — never mind the facts.”
We moved on. A few sentences down the piece, another reference to Beijing being colder than Shanghai: “I don’t agree.” I said, “But it’s the girl’s personal opinion. Who are you to disagree? This piece is not for you to check the facts, it’s for you to translate correctly what’s being said.” (BTW, this exchange between us was all amicable.)
We returned to the piece a few weeks later, as revision. (The majority of students find listening the hardest, so I tend to run over old pieces more for listening than I do for reading. They already know the story, so it helps them the second time round, which boosts their confidence.)
Got to the bit about Beijing being colder than Shanghai. Yes, like Pavlov’s dog, up popped: “I don’t agree.”
I said to her, “How many times have you been to China?” Two or three times. How long each time? About three weeks. How long in Beijing and how long in Shanghai each time? A few days. (She also went to the other famous destinations like Xi’an for the terracotta army and Guilin for the spectacular karst landscape.) Which season? Summer. “So, how do you know that Beijing is not colder than Shanghai? And anyway, this is the girl’s own opinion, and it’s a listening exercise, so you just need to accurately render X as X and not as Y.” She subsided.
Thereafter, however, I’d still get the odd resistance along similar lines — not resistance to me, mind, but to what was in the piece we were using.
The pièce de résistance (haha, can’t resist the pun!), however, has to be the latest offering from her in her homework, only last week.
One of the sentences for her to translate from English into Chinese says, “Which train would you like to catch? I don’t mind; either the 7.30 or the 8.15 will do.” For “I don’t mind”, she produced “我反对” (wǒ fǎnduì / I object). Rebellious to the core! It’s so instinctive, ingrained, and entrenched that even in her erroneous translation (“not minding” is not “objecting to”; besides, there’s nothing to object to, anyway), she’d chosen the rebellious version for her translation. Still makes me smile as I’m writing this.
PS: In an effort — for fairness’ sake — to see if she might have a point in her disagreeing with Beijing being colder than Shanghai, I searched on google, and found the following:
QUOTE
While Beijing in December will be colder than Shanghai, it'll be a dry, bracing cold, while the damp cold of Shanghai will just seep into your bones.14 Aug 2011
UNQUOTE
So, she might be justified, after all, in refusing to accept that “Beijing is colder than Shanghai”…
(London, 1993 and 2012–2020)
No comments:
Post a Comment