Miscellany

Before I post on some of our more recent events, I wanted to give a quick update on what we've been up to the last month or so. 

New Class

For the last 3 weeks I have been teaching a new class because one of the other foreign teachers had a "disagreement" with his class. The class is an oral class and I guess all the previous teacher did was have one student per class give an oral presentation and then a few students would ask questions. The students had complained that they were only getting to practice their oral English one time in the semester, and the rest of the time they spent sitting and listening. Also, the class has a textbook the students had to pay for, but the teacher refused to use it.

After many complaints from students and many requests by the administration to change his teaching practices, the teacher still refused to make any changes. So, the class was given to me. It kind of bums me out that a foreign teacher can be so stubborn and the school can't really do anything about it. The teacher is still getting paid as much as he was before, and he has one less class. His stubbornness and refusal to cooperate actually benefitted him. Unfortunately I see many foreign teachers taking advantage of their "foreigness" in this way. Oftentimes the school will do anything to please the foreigners, even if we're being total jerks.

The students are undergraduate English majors which is quite a contrast to my post-graduate students from various majors. The English majors are significantly better at English and much more enthusiastic. It makes teaching the class a ton of fun and also much easier than my post-grad students. With the post-grad students I feel like I have to struggle to get any sort of response from them, but the English majors happily volunteer answers to questions. I'm hoping next semester I'll be able to teach some more English majors. 

CUBA Game

Since it's founding in 1998, all major Chinese universities have competed in the Chinese University Basketball Association (CUBA). The CUBA is the equivalent the NCAA, but only for basketball, and Shandong University of Science and Technology is the CUBA equivalent of Kansas or Duke. Our school won a CUBA National Championship in either 2001, 2002, or 2004.  When I've asked various students or other teachers I have heard all three answers.  I've even had the opportunity to see the CUBA National Championship trophy, which is an awesome golden backboard and rim (think slightly larger Nerf hoop, but pure gold), but it doesn't even say the year on it.  The CUBA wikipedia site says 2002, for what it's worth.

Regardless of what year they've won, SUST has won one national title (out of only 10 so far) and nearly every year they make it to at least the Elite 8 of the CUBA Tournament, usually the Final Four. They are a powerhouse. I have told my students that if they ever know of a game that I could watch they should let me know.

One evening I received an email that SUST would be playing Hunan Normal University at our school's gymnasium the following afternoon at 2:30 pm.  He said that finding tickets would be difficult but he wanted to let me know anyway.  Fortunately, Megan and I were able to land tickets from our well connected friends Kerstan and Karen, and we headed to the game. When we arrived, we learned from some other spectators that this game was the Quarterfinals for the national tournament, so SUST was in the Elite 8.

The gym was packed with students when we arrived and we found our seats which were in the very front row behind the visiting team's bench. Apparently the tournament is set up in a home and home format, where a game is played at each team's campus and the team with the highest aggregate score continues to the next round.

The game was a blast. The pregame and halftime festivities were half of the show. There were "Basketball Babies" (what they call cheerleaders here), mascots (a panda, a pig, and an inflated basketball-headed creature), drum and singing performances, giant flags, and traditional dancers. Also, the student section was arranged to spell "CUBA" with the colors of their shirts. While the students clearly cheered for our school to win, everything official was completely unbiased. The cheerleaders did not openly support one team or the other, the student section was comprised of students wearing both schools' colors and spelled "CUBA" rather than "SUST" and each team had an equally large flag.

The actual game was a blowout. SUST dominated the game from start to finish, winning 99-71. This was the first leg of the match, so aggregate score counted, and they had incentive to run up the score. The level of play was pretty high. The players rivaled NCAA Division 3 athletes in both physicality and skill, but the coaching left a lot to be desired. With the exception of a few inbounds plays, the game was basically unorganized streetball. There were times that some players did not even pretend to get back on defense, but their coaches did not seem to care. A well coached Division 3 team like Calvin would probably run all over these teams.

Since the game they have had the second game of the match at the other school's campus and SUST is successfully into the Final Four, so there will be another game on campus so I hope to watch it too.

Here are some photos of the game:

Cameraman for CCTV 5 (China's ESPN). This dude was texting on his cellphone before he saw me about to take a picture and pretended to be filming.

Karen, Kerstan, and Megan in our seats before the game.

The student section spelling out "CUBA"

The players from the teams threw some mini-basketballs into the crowd and I caught one!

Halftime drummers.

The inflated basketball-headed mascot with a guy inside it walking around.

Halftime dancers.

Game action from our seats. Our seats were right behind the opponent's bench.

Most of the gym.

Final score: SUST 99 - Hunan Normal University 71

Basketball Team Dinner

My weekend basketball team, Team Bangbang, recently had a team dinner after one of our games a week or so ago. We ate at an outdoor barbeque restaurant in Huangdao and it was great chance to do something social with both the American and Chinese members of the team. Almost every player on the team has a wife or girlfriend too, so all in all our group was about 12 or 14 people. 

The conversation was held half in English and half in Mandarin, with the bilingual among us translating for the less lingually inclined. Those of us who knew very little English or Mandarin tried our best to keep up and pitch in with a few words of our own. Many toasts were attempted in toaster's foreign language with laughter usually following. My Mandarin toast was the embarssingly simple "我们是朋友!” (Women shi pengyou!/We are friends!).

These truly cross-cultural moments are some of my favorites in China, and make me extremely thankful that Megan and I decided to come here.

Here are a few photos:

Our table outdoors at the barbeque. A great evening.

Good food and drink.

Three of our Chinese teammates showing their strength: Jack, Li, and Gao.

An interesting insight into male/female relationships in China: Jack (left) ran home after our game to change and told us not to tell his wife that he was playing basketball because she doesn't want him to play so much. There are things that I do or don't do at Megan's request, but something healthy like basketball isn't one of them.

Team Bangbang: (top L-R) Gao, Hunter, Roland, Li (bottom L-R) Jack, Me, Kyle, Kerstan

The wives and girlfriends.