Days 269-270: School Day, Inside Day

Wednesday was a pretty typical Wednesday in the sense that it was tiring. 5:30 wakeup, Kerry fixed me breakfast, into a cab by about 6:40. Used my transportation card to pay this time. On the bus, I practiced writing Chinese characters to pass the time, in the "Teeny Baby" book (for kids, I guess) that we bought at the bookstore. Once I got to school, I picked up a couple print-out vouchers that Kerry and I will need for Tongli on Monday.

I had three lectures in a row today. The first was my regular class, where I lectured on postmodernism and Maus and then we had some discussion on Maus I. In my second (make-up) class--which, incidentally, all the students attended even though they didn't have to--I talked about visuals in Maus, and then we had some brief discussion linking the visuals to literary variables. This was an abbreviated class because the people using the room before us went a bit over time; besides, many students were noshing on their lunch, and I was as well. So we got a bit of a late start. After the second class, I stayed in the same room and gave a salon on getting into graduate school in the USA: the same one I gave at NNU. I timed myself: it went for 1:13.  I took questions for about 13 minutes, and then I had to go catch the 3:00 pm bus back to Hongkou.

I also wanted to note that, before my first class, I meet up with Tony, my student who paid for the lunch for everyone last week. I thanked him profusely and offered him 100 RMB. He refused. "There is a Chinese tradition: the man pays for the meal," he replied. Still, I did accept 10 RMB from me, finally. I will offer him more next week. He also promised to do better on his response papers, which have been subpar. "My work has been shit," he said. It is difficult for me to imagine an American student ever saying this to an instructor about their own work.

The bus was quite crowded, but still, fortuantely, no one sat next to me. Eventually, perhaps because of this, I fell asleep. For some reason, I don't sleep on the ride to school, but I sleep on the way back. Navin and Samira were both on this bus; we chatted waiting for the 745 (which was a long time) and then we saw Grace as well, who looked quite pregnant!  I hadn't seen her in quite some time. When I got home, I wanted to eat, so Kerry and I had an early dinner--and then I went to bed around 7 pm. Yes, 7 pm.

Thursday morning I woke up about 2:30 am--couldn't sleep--so I ate the rest of the salad from dinner and one of my beloved apple-pears. Today was mostly a work day: worked on my blog, my sabbatical portfolio, wrote comments on student presentations, finished Maus II, etc. Kerry went grocery shopping. Pork chops for dinner. Nothing too exciting for Thursday; Deborah had to cancel her Chinese lesson because her daughter is sick.  Tomorrow should be more interesting, what with the faculty event and the Indian dinner going on.

Some pics:

Photo after my second salon. Lily is in the black, Aleks is to my right.

I took this one a few days ago--these are the wonderful apple-pears.

Songjiang campus, from the roof of the School of English Studies.