Submitted by jenny on Sun, 05/06/2012 - 06:03
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Local bookstore has nothing. All right. So you are teaching “out there”, somewhere in the hill-country of Sichuan, and your local bookstore has more office staff than new books. What do you do? First: develop some rapport with the bookselling staff there. Buy their products—books, magazines, stationary goods—as much as you can. If you are a frequent customer, they will come to know you better. Second: use this store to order and procure certain items several months in advance. Even if their service is slow, if you plan your needs in advance carefully, you will get what you want, when you want. Just don’t expect “the world, tomorrow”—plan for it a few months later, that’s all. Third: write down the order numbers/ISBN numbers of the books you most like to order, so you can give them to the office staff, who will in turn order them from the head bookstore in the provincial capital. Fourth: you can set up your own, informal “underground” system of delivery. When you are in the provincial capital, go and visit your favorite bookstore. Buy the books you want in bulk, or show a friend or classmate who lives nearby how to buy the books you need. These books can be thrown onto some bus or public minivan traveling to your village’s small bus station. (I have seen everything, from cages of chickens, to small generators, to heavy truck axles, engine blocks and other lumps of machinery travel out to the remote countryside like this.) The office clerk in your local bus station can call you when some package comes in. Don’t forget to set up an easy credit or money-line with your friend who is buying for you. Guard and maintain this network carefully. Fifth: if you have a friend or classmate in Beijing or Shanghai who is willing to buy books for you and send them to you by parcel post, then you are very lucky. This way, you can get most of what you want. Sixth: if your friend has a cell phone, you can tell them what to get as they are walking up and down the bookshelves.
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Bookstore is too far away. Maybe your school is five or ten miles away from the bookstore. You can develop a system whereby you call in book requests to the clerk in the bookstore, your store account is billed, and the parcel is sent to a place near your school by the local minibus. To do this, you need to develop a good network with the bookstore clerk, the bus driver, and the owner of some small business near the bus route where your parcel is dropped off.
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Lack of materials. Maybe your school does not have much in the way of materials. Once every one or two months, someone goes to the provincial capital. Give them a shopping list of books/materials to buy. Try to keep such a list simple, so as not to drive the “shopper” crazy! Arrange a system with your work colleagues that, when anyone goes out, they must tell the others. For students, they can use this system too for simple things like books or textbooks. Someone is always going out!
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Not enough money. Again, you must decide what is more important—standard of living, or standard of English—and act accordingly. It is a matter of priorities. For a school, the students’ brains must come first. As for you and your own books/materials needs, where there is less financial power, here are some suggestions. First: agree with other, similar-minded people who are learning English to buy different books. When you have finished reading the books you bought, you can swap them with someone else. Second: through the Internet, you can arrange to have your school receive old or used books from the big cities. Perhaps you can do the same for yourself. Third: if you are in Beijing or Shanghai, you can visit the used bookstores and buy a whole bunch of books—hopefully at cheaper prices. Fourth: you can “cut” one dinner party from your social activities budget each month, and spend the money on books. Fifth: it is hoped that some kind of “internet clearing house” will be established, whereby book needs in the remote areas can be matched with supply from the cities. Perhaps certain groups of city people (e.g., a college class, members of an apartment block) could “adopt” a rural school or district, and send it books from time to time. However, a “self-motivated” model might be better than a “charity” model.
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Local materials are out of date. There are two ways to look at this. First: you can use what materials you have; many grammar-learning exercises do not need modern, flashy materials to teach their relevant (grammar) point. A case in point is some of the old Latin or French grammar books I used back in the 1970’s—their content was (and is now more) quaint and old-fashioned. However, their effectiveness was total. So, do not always look down on something because it is “old”—it can be adapted in many ways, according to your creativity. Some ideas: oral reading, summary work/paraphrasing, “free talk” topics, grammar review, and even pronunciation work! Remember, since your stated aim is “working English ability”, you are not dependent on those new, flashy, “time-sensitive” materials, the way others are! They want to pass “the latest TOEFL” or go to another country, but you can learn from any reasonable source. Second: If you really do want or need more up-to-date materials, then you must get access to new books from the big cities. You know the routes: order over the Internet, have a friend get books for you and mail them to you, or go out once a year to the big city, and buy in force. If you and five others agree to pool your cash, choose a variety of topics you all like, and agree to share and circulate what you have bought, you can greatly improve your savings and your range of choice. Be creative! Third: with the inevitable proliferation of the internet in China, “public domain” materials will become more common and available; you can use these, too. However, please, please, please do not print out documents indiscriminately! It puts an unfair burden on the Chinese environment, and creates (yet) another form of “white pollution” in the form of printouts. Be kind! (The computer revolution was meant to make this world a better place, not a more polluted one, right?)
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Local materials are too controlled by the librarian. Once again, you can’t blame the librarian; she must protect what she has. Chances are, she is not at liberty to make any big changes in the system. So, what can you do? First: help her to get more books! If you are a teacher, encourage your students to pick up any books they can when they are traveling outside their neighborhood or school (good books, of course). They can give it to the librarian to put into the library, or put into a “free, take it” pile. You can make it known to communities in larger, “richer” areas that you would like their old books. You can ask the local government to set aside more money for the town or school library. Second: help yourself! That is, use your own way to get the books you need, without waiting for the librarian—or anybody else—to solve your problems for you. As one saying goes, “If you want it done right, do it yourself.”
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Materials passed to students “disappear”, or are hoarded, or are not circulated. This has been a problem for me (and other teachers?) for a long time. If you give students books, they will hold onto them. On one occasion I gave a class a variety of books and materials, hoping they would circulate these things, but they didn’t. So, what should one do? If you like giving out materials (rather than lending), considering giving every student the same book (or at least every dormitory room one book). You may think this a waste of resources, but when it comes to “self-policing” the students are unwilling to confront each other, it seems. Obviously, such a book must be educationally valuable, light, and cheap. Hemingway’s The Old Man And The Sea is a good example of a book you can issue to all of your students or dormitory rooms, as it can be used in many different contexts. What else can you do? With money from your school, you can flood your classroom with cheap books, such as the “Shu Chong” (Book Worm) series. Who cares if they “disappear”? Next, arrange for your school leaders to build one of those “public newspaper reading glass cabinets” which the Chinese use to display Ren Min Ri Bao and other newspapers publicly on the streets；install one along the entire length of a long corridor in your school. Take two copies of the book you want to display, cut it free from its bindings with a razor blade, and post up the pages so everyone in the school can read it. This way, all the students can read the book, and only two copies of the book are purchased. Afterwards, give one or two pages to each student for grammar analysis, literary criticism, summarizing, paraphrasing, or some other exercise. They might even do a rough “English to Chinese translation” of the whole book – one student, one page – and this new, Chinese manuscript can be displayed in the same glass cabinet. Or, if the national or provincial education authorities so choose, various books can be “assigned” to various schools, the translations collected, and then each school’s “product” (i.e., one paper text; one computer disk) sent to a central library or internet database: Of course, copyright issues need to be addressed and observed! So, in summary: students are probably not able to self-circulate materials you give them, but their great energy and curiosity can be harnessed in other ways.
