Last week week was duty week for me. In sprang up on me unexpectedly. Monday morning, one of the teachers came up to me and said "You're on duty this week." Huh? I thought I wasn't on duty until November. She brought me over to the schedule posted in the office and sure enough, I was on duty. he schedule had also just been revised a few days before. The school decided that it was too much for only six teachers to do, so they rearranged the schedule to have eight teachers a week.
One of the benefits of this new arrangement is that not all of us had to sleep in the student dorms. My duties involved supervising their lining up for meals--breakfast, lunch, dinner, and evening snack--as well as their getting ready for naptime and bedtime.
Line forming is not part of Chinese culture. This is one reason Chinese tourists abroad are often seen as rude. Lines are enforced in schools, though, mostly by teachers yelling at anyone who disobeys. The problem, though, is that there is also no concept of personal space. There are just too many people. But line forming without the idea of personal space doesn't work very well. You pull one student off the platform in front of the food window--because he's supposed to wait behind until the first student is done--only to have to push the whole line back because they've piled up on top of each other.
The other problem is that while the teachers are trying to enforce good queuing behavior, the cafeteria staff are all yelling a the kids to hurry up. For lunch and dinner the students have to go through a rice line first, and then the line for meat and vegetables. Each set of windows has one rice lice and two meat/vegetables lines. When the rice line finishes, however, it becomes an extra meat/vegetable line. Which means that two lines of students (which usually are sill long enough to go out the cafeteria doors) has to become three lines. Chaos ensues until the duty teacher at hand turns the massive blob back into lines.
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| Groups of students squatting and eating in the cafeteria during the evening snack time after everyone's gotten their food. |
As the local teachers like to say, duty is "辛苦" (xīnkǔ, hard and exhausting). It's not so much the time spent itself--although line enforcing is really remarkably draining--but more the fracturing of the day into useless chunks. There's not quite enough time to take my own nap. There's not quite enough time to do laundry. There's only just enough time to prepare for class. And since it involves getting up an hour earlier than I usually do, I crashed into bed at about 9 PM every day last week, absolutely exhausted. (The blog posts that I managed to post last week only happened because I had prepared them ahead of time!)
That being said, there are things I enjoyed about it. For one thing, I saw all the students as they filed through the cafeteria. I smiled and said hello or good morning to many of the students. Some of them even replied, especially my own students. Some of them just giggled in response. I also have a better understanding of the students daily routine and life, from their dorms to the food they eat. Duty teachers eat the same food as the students for duty week (for free, as opposed to the meals in the teacher's cafeteria) . Some of the cafeteria ladies were very sweet and started noticing which kind of noodles I wanted for breakfast or giving me the "best" snack in the evening.
It's also been a good opportunity to talk a little bit more to some of the local teachers. Many of them have commiserated with me on how tiring duty week is. The vice principal commented on how some students never really get the idea of line-forming, and I explained the English saying "In one ear out the other". Apparently there's a similar Chinese saying "In the right ear, out the left", but he claimed that with some students not even the right ear notices!
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