Eggs and Scrambled Bacon: A Different World?

Carol Griffiths, China

Carol Griffiths has many years experience as a teacher of English for speakers of other languages (ESOL) and as a teacher educator. She is especially interested in the factors which contribute to successful language learning, such as strategies which is the subject of her PhD thesis. Carol is currently working as a teacher educator at Min Zu Da Xue (Central University of Nationalities) in Beijing, China. E-mail: carolgriffiths5@gmail.com

In the course of a long teaching career, I have lost count of the teacher training courses of one kind or another, of shorter or longer duration I have attended or conducted. I have learnt and taught how to PPP, to design TBL using a CLT approach and a host of other acronymous (Is that a word? My computer doesn’t seem to think so!) solutions to all a teacher’s problems.

Of course, these various techniques have their place, and can help provide especially new teachers with some basic tools to survive in the glasshouse environment which is located between the front row of students and the blackboard/whiteboard. Nevertheless, a notable omission from almost all of the courses I have attended has been any real consideration of the students, of their identities and behaviour, of their situations and their goals. Most such courses fail to take into account the nature of the human interaction which is the foundation of, and essential to, the success of the teaching/learning experience, as we are poignantly reminded in Taylor’s story “Broken Wings” (HLT Year 9; Issue 4; July 2007).

In the book “Lessons from Good Language Learners”, Griffiths (2008) examines some of the multiple factors which contribute to the identities of the students that we teach. These include motivation, aptitude, beliefs, style, personality, age, culture and gender. All of these characteristics interact to produce unique individuals with distinctive behaviours. Students may, for instance, behave more or less strategically, metacognitively or autonomously. If we also add the student’s learning context (which may vary according to methodology and error correction practices) as well as the varying demands of their individual learning targets, we have a situation of infinite complexity which, nevertheless, represents the reality with which teachers must deal on a day-by-day basis.

Of course, not all teaching/learning situations are in classrooms. Increasingly, the teaching/learning interface is a computer. In China, it is often one-to-one in a café.

This is now my fourth semester in China. It has involved some fairly steep learning curves on several levels: personal, practical, professional and linguistic. In so many ways, China is a different world from what I am used to. Out of interest and in order to show good faith, I felt I needed to make some effort to learn at least a little Chinese. It is difficult!! For those of us who spend our lives teaching our own language, it is humbling to be so inadequate, so powerless, so dependent on more knowledgeable others, so childishly grateful for the slightest scrap of praise.

Sometimes the teaching/learning situation is just at the point where lives intersect briefly but leave a lingering impression. One such encounter occurred recently when I decided to go to Guilin for a long weekend.

Guilin is the place famous for its distinctive and innumerable peaks left as the rain has eroded the limestone deposits between them over millions of years. As I settle in to my hotel room, with a view of some of the famous peaks from the window, my phone rings. It is my tour guide to tell me to be sure to be downstairs for my Li River cruise by 8 a.m. tomorrow morning. If we are late, the boat will leave without us, and then we will be “between the rocks and the hard places”. This seems like rather an unfortunate metaphor given the context, even if he had got it right, but it makes its point, and I head for bed as soon as possible to make sure I am not responsible for this rather damp and uncomfortable eventuality.

About six thirty the following morning I head down to the hotel restaurant for breakfast. There are two women waiting there. The older and presumably superior one immediately draws back on seeing me come in, leaving the younger woman, with, presumably, a better knowledge of English, to lead me unsmilingly to my seat and hand me the menu.

“Could I have a cup of black tea, please,” I ask her. “Hong cha”.

My English heritage remains in the form of an inability to face the day before I have had a “proper” cup of tea: it is essential to my peace of mind. But when she comes back with it, it is cold.

“Ah, too cold,” I complain. “Tai leng”.

She takes it away and comes back after some time with a hot one. But as she puts it down rather awkwardly in front of me she spills some of it into the saucer. She looks at me anxiously, not sure what to do. “Can I have a serviette, please?” I ask.

I don’t know the Chinese for this, and she doesn’t know the English, but I point to a pile of them on a nearby cabinet. “Ah, serviette,” she repeats to herself as she fetches one for me.

She points to the menu, which lists bacon with scrambled or boiled eggs. I really like fried eggs for breakfast, but, given how long it has taken me to get an acceptable cup of tea, and with the rocks and hard places firmly on my mind, I decide it isn’t worth the time it is likely to take given my waitress’s obviously limited English and my equally limited Chinese.

“Scrambled eggs and bacon,” I tell her, pointing to the appropriate line which has both English and Chinese characters. Again, she repeats the English. She is trying.

While I am waiting for my bacon and eggs I sip my tea and nibble the dry toast my waitress has brought and watch her moving among the other tables, occasionally assisted by her boss. She has long, black, wavy hair tied back, and is rather darker skinned than the typical Han Chinese. She probably belongs to one of the ethnic minorities of the area. Judging by others that I know, I would guess she is probably in her late twenties, which, probably means she is married, with one child or more, since rural Chinese do not always keep to the one-child policy the way urban Chinese do. Since it is still early morning, the child or children are probably being cared for by a grandmother or other member of the extended family, who probably all live together.

In order for my waitress to learn enough English to qualify for a job in the tourist industry, the family has probably contributed a large proportion of a meager income for expensive lessons in the hope that the extra money she can earn will pay dividends in terms of an ultimately better lifestyle. Maybe they will even be able to emigrate to some place of golden opportunity far away. I don’t know what she earns, but it is quite possible that it is less in a week than I have spend on my river cruise, and with that she has to support a possibly quite large family.

After breakfast, we make it to the boat before the unmentionable happens and board our allotted vessel. The Li River boat winds among the characteristic peaks of Guilin providing a good view of its unique scenery. Local boatsmen row out to the tourist boats with their wares, including “real jade” ornaments or jewellery at rock bottom prices. They offer to be photographed with the cormorants they use for fishing, or, for twice as much, they will photograph you with their cormorants. The trip includes a nice lunch and drops you some way downstream whence you return to Guilin by bus.

The following morning I do not have to get up so early, and the same waitress meets me and leads me to the same seat. Without being asked, she brings me a hot cup of tea, a plate of toast and the menu. I look over it, but there is nothing I prefer to yesterday’s breakfast.

“The same as yesterday, please,” I say. “Yiyang zuotian.”

“Ah, yes, I remember,” she says brightly. “Eggs and scrambled bacon.”

The teacher in me leaps into corrective feedback mode. I look up at her, and she smiles at me for the first time. She is pleased with herself, and she hopes I will be pleased with her too, not to mention her boss, hovering constantly in the background, on whom her job and probably her family’s income depends.

If I correct her, she will lose face. If I don’t, she may never realise the error of her ways, and carry on scrambling the bacon forever, oblivious to her own hopeless state of fossilization, a fate not to be taken lightly!! What am I to do?

There is actually quite a lot at stake in this ordinary moment: two human beings suspended in a situation divorced from the basic realities of either of our lives, each with our own needs and hopes and expectations. Although our homes are at opposite ends of the world, at this point in time where our lives briefly intersect, we are not really so different, she and I.

I fold the menu and hand it back to her. “That’s fine, thank you,” I say, in a voice loud enough to be heard by her boss. “Hao le. Xie xie.”

I will probably never see her again, but as one human being to another, I wish her well. However, the teacher in me can’t help hoping that she has by now either realized or been told by somebody else out of her boss’s earshot that it is the eggs that get scrambled!

References

Griffiths, C. (2008). Lessons from Good Language Learners. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Taylor, T. (2007). Broken Wings. old.hltmag.co.uk

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