I am rounding out my 12th year of teaching. That’s approximately 24 parent teacher conferences and roughly 12 sleep away trips with other people’s children. I have seen some things. I have found myself involuntarily caught in the swirling winds created by parents helicoptering over their offspring. Special snowflakes whose brilliance or fragility these parents are convinced have gone undetected by all the other adults who are responsible for their children when they are not around.
Years ago, when an 8th grader’s auntie showed up to the hotel where we were staying in Washington, D.C. with a home cooked vegan meal to give to her niece because the niece’s mother had insisted we would not truly feed her child the most appetizing non-meat food for the three days she was away from New York City, my fellow chaperones and I laughed throughout the night. Who does that? The kid is 13 years old. She’ll be fine eating regular vegetarian food for 72 hours…geez.
I wish 5th Year Teacher Keturah could have caught a glimpse of 12th Year Teacher Keturah. If only New York City Teacher Keturah could see some of this shit that Shanghai Teacher Keturah witnesses on the regular.
Because as per usual, our Chinese brethren have even eclipsed us mediocre Americans in the precision of helicopter parenting.
My first field trip here in China was to a province a two-hour plane ride away from Shanghai. There were 30 students who would be visiting a Kung Fu school and exploring the town where the art form began. Although myself and two teachers from the school were chaperoning, an educational tour company had provided their own teachers and guides to lead the trip.
I noticed one of these “teachers” wasn’t doing anything. To be precise: all she was doing was taking copious amounts of photos. I watched the two younger guides as they explained the history of the places where we were and led the students through ice breaker games when there were lulls in the schedule. But, this lady just kept photographing everything. As the activities got more involved and the kids’ interest increased, she would record videos as well. I also noticed she seemed to be uploading the photos and videos instantly to wechat.
“Who is that lady,” I asked my co-worker who had done most of the coordinating of the trip with the tour company.
“Oh, she’s the photographer,” he answered nonchalantly. “The parents requested someone take as many pictures as possible and upload them in real time in this wechat group they started. So, the tour company had her come along.”
Wait…what? So, parents asked to have their kids’ middle school trip live streamed? And someone green lighted that request?
Seeing the look on my face, my co-worker explained that “Last year, they asked the teachers to do it and we tried to be nice, but by the second day they were asking us to send them personal shots of their kids in front of the sites and asking us why we hadn’t put their kid with his friend for a group activity. Obviously, we stopped doing it at all after that.”
So, pulling this woman, whose real job was in accounts, from her desk and throwing her into this 5-day long trip which involved her hiking for three hours up a mountain while orchestrating photo opps with smiling kids was the compromise?
I am about to ask my co-worker a question he has watched me grapple with for the entire 9 months we have sat in the same office, marking papers and trading stories about our adolescent students acting just like adolescents.
“Don’t stress yourself,” he cuts off my question before I can ask it. “The answer is the same as always: China.”
Hours after this co-worker had reminded me I needed to just accept China for what it was, I was still a bit surprised that this woman was live streaming our school trip.
As my parents and every man I have ever dated will confirm, I am rather hard headed. I don’t stop doing stuff just because people present me with sound reasoning to stop doing it. While sitting at dinner, I mention to the table of grownups how unique this is for me to see. “Wow, providing a photographer for the parents. What a very interesting idea. I’ve never known parents to ask for that.”
One of the younger guides who had been taking charge of the activities said she was relieved that her boss had turned a white-collar office worker into an outdoor adventure photographer. A British blonde who looked to be in her early 30s, this woman had come to China to work in outdoor education at the same time I had come to work in traditional classroom education. She said her first trip with this tour company was on some isolated island that involved the group catching a plane, a bus and a ferry to get to the site where they would spend a week hiking, camping and doing general low-level Survivor-type living.
“This place really was secluded,” she explained. “We had chosen it because it completely disconnected the teenagers from their normal lives and routines.” While the group was taking a break from one of its activities, the woman’s cell phone rang. It was the parent of one of the students; she was quite irate.
“One of the teachers has walked off and left the children. I think he may be drinking alcohol over on the beach while the children wait for him.”
The blonde was speechless. “Excuse me? How did you get my number? And more importantly, how do you know we are on a beach and where this teacher is?”
The woman’s question was answered by an army of parents with binoculars around their necks marching from around a collection of trees. These people had found a hostel in close enough proximity to the campsite and had been getting up early in the morning to spy on their children to make sure that…it is still unclear to me and the British blonde what exactly they were monitoring every day. Even after sitting the parents down and talking to them about boundaries, she still is not sure what they wanted to protect their children from. What danger lurked in their minds that caused them to catch a plane, a bus and a ferry and crawl up into trees just to watch their children for hours as they tried to pitch a tent and light a fire without a match?
Several paragraphs ago, I openly admitted to being hard headed. It should, therefore, come as no surprise that my reaction to this woman’s story was to blurt out: “The devil is a damn lie and so are you.”
“Oh, how I wish I had the creative mind to make up that kind of story,” she laughed. “It all happened just like I said. No exaggeration at all.”
My co-worker is giving me the I-keep-telling-you-these-people-are-special look when he reminds me of the last time he gave me the look. “Keturah, do we need to review why the SAT is no longer offered anywhere in China? Remember when you were confused about why all the Year 11s had to miss classes and go to Hong Kong just to take the SAT?”
I do remember him casually detailing how when the SAT people did offer the college entrance exam in the People’s Republic of China, they developed elaborate, complicated ways to prevent cheating. From what he told me, even though the system involved something close to strip searching high school students and only allowing them to sit for the exam if they were butt naked, their parents STILL found ways to send them the answers to the test via carrier pigeons and sky writing cliff notes in the air.
When I wrote China: Where People Do The Most On The Regular, some of y’all shared your own stories of spending time in China and bearing witness to the extra ratchetness among its billion citizens. Some of y’all thought I had outdone myself. “Girl, you wrote the hell out of this post” you said. You inaccurately attributed the post to my skills as a writer instead of the craft my Chinese brethren diligently put in to their heightened extraness.
I have accepted that the entire time I am here, I will walk around racking my brain, contorting my mind into complicated answer-seeking positions, trying my hardest to understand before just shrugging my shoulders and deciding: Cuz…China. Do. The. Damn. Most. And then some.
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Yet Another Single Gal 