Fuddland

In an un-deliberate scheme to mar my St. Patrick’s Day celebrations, I was asked to swap my usual Sunday off work for another day and give a short, early morning demo class to twenty primary school students; the first half was to be a general warm-up, the second based on a science textbook. This was all fine with me — I knew I could keep things relatively simple, play a few word games, and it’d be over pretty quickly.

What they failed to tell me — in what is fairly-typical Chinese boss style — was that the demo class wasn’t just for the twenty students. Thus I found myself, not in a classroom, but in the school hall, on stage, microphone in hand, performing The David Show for around a hundred parents and children. The twenty eleven- or twelve-year-olds specially selected to be my demo students were, thankfully, already of a good standard of English, but none had brought along paper or pens, so there was a frantic few minutes while — at my insistence — enough writing tools were located to enable them to do some of the work I’d planned for the “class”.

I decided to pretend the audience wasn’t there at all and treat things as a normal lesson — bar having to run over to each student when they stood up to answer a question so they could speak into the microphone — and it all went very smoothly. I must have done something right because, during the scheduled five-minute break between halves, my boss told me I didn’t need to bother carrying on with the second half. He pointed to the back of the hall and I saw most of the parents were already signing-up their children to be taught by our training centre. So I just sat on the edge of the stage and chatted with whichever little ‘un came up to me [usually at their mother’s urging, although I did teach a few of them last month; these kids were very happy to see me again and I was treated to plenty of hugs and stroking of my hair].

As I left the school I noticed a rather disturbing statue outside the main hall, which seemed to be a depiction of a rare sex education class: “That’s right, these are called ‘breasts’.”