Internet Tomorrow

The internet providers will come to my house sometime tomorrow to open the internet for me, and after that things will be much more convenient. I am excited. Once I have my own internet I can experiment with proxies and find ways to get to facebook, blogspot, and upload pictures.

To confront Phillip's difficulties the kindergarten had our contact David invite Maggie to come observe and help him prepare for his classes. Maggie has 11 years of teaching ESL experience in various countries around the world, and she certainly is good, but I don't think anyone predicted the result that would come from having her visit. She stepped on pretty much every persons toes and did everything the way we are not supposed to. The office provides us with materials on request, and she decided to circumvent this and go purchase her own supplies. This is fine, though a bit impolite to the woman in charge of finding and maintaining supplies for us.

The next issue exploded into a giant fight. Phillip had previously asked for a list of names of the children in the class. The names are posted on the walls outside the class, but he requested that one of our coworkers get the list for him. Note: coworker, not assistant. She obliged, and while Maggie was reviewing the name noticed that 8 of the children did not have English names written down. She also made the comment that "Two character names are girl names, and 3 character names are tricky because they can be boys or girls". I'm not sure where she decided on this from, but it is so hilariously untrue and unfounded that I just didn't care to help her. She was already annoying me by reinforcing every negative American stereotype I try to work against, and the confidence with which she stated her insanely stupid comment caused me to simply stare at my paper to avoid the rush of various emotions that threatened to make me yell or laugh or both.

She first confronted her saying, "This name is two characters, yes? Well then why is her name Max? Max is a boys name." My coworker was confused and simply responded that yes he was a boy. Maggie then responded with, "You know Max is a boy's name? Well then why don't you have her change her name to a girl's name, you shouldn't call her Max." My coworker was more confused, and tried to explain that the child name Max was indeed a boy. Maggie finally decided to believe that this was the one exception to her made up "two character names are girls" rule and move on to her next grievance - the missing 8 names.

Our coworker informed her that the names had recently been decided upon after changes from the parents and not entered into the computers yet, and that if she would like the names Phillip should go ask the teachers in each class for them. Maggie began to berate my coworker and speak to her like a child, insisting that she was Phillip's assistant and needed to do her job by going and asking the teachers for her. She is not Phillip's assistant. She became angry, and when our other coworker turned to ask her in Chinese what was wrong, she responded in Chinese simply explaining and stating that Maggie was telling her to do things she didn't need to. This caused Maggie to yell, "Don't talk in Chinese because you know I can't understand, don't talk behind my back, speak English." Things simply elevated from there, with Maggie storming to the headmaster's office to seek justice and our coworker following behind to not let Maggie soil her name. The biggest loser in this is Phillip, who sat there embarassed and said nothing. Daisy, the coworker that was yelled at, is his partner teacher (not assistant) and shares the upper 3 classrooms with him. Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays foreigners take the younger children and the two Chinese English teachers take the older children, then on Tuesday and Thursday it switches. Phillip needs to be able to work with her and coordinate curriculum, and now not only is she not excited to work with him but most of the teachers in his class witnessed Maggie's tirading through the halls yelling at Daisy and making a scene as she made her way to the headmaster's office.

All in all, the event really annoyed me. Maggie, seemingly not knowing the situation of the school and how things work (I hope) despite my impression that Phillip had explained it to her, came in and proceeded to offend and anger as many people as possible.

Aside from that, I can't stop losing weight. I was around 215 when I came to China, and I am now down to 198 with no signs of my weight stopping. I'm not sure what I'm losing since I feel like I look the exact same, so I'm rather confused at the moment. Oh well.