How do you say "Bueller? Bueller?" in Mandarin?

I've been looking at the programs in which American yayloos like me go to China and teach English again. (That is, I have again been looking, not that I would be notionally teaching English again. Maybe I shouldn't be trusted with this language after all.)

Anyway, I found this one, Worldwide Language Study, which has an awfully sunny and green image on its website. On the plus side, it's in Beijing and one of the programs they mention is an "orphanage school." On the minus side, it's a volunteer program that puts you up in one-room accomodations, with which My Complaisant Spouse might take issue, given that we're a family of five plus an older one who drops by for dinner and coffee every so often.

And then Violet Eclipse always made the teaching in China sound like so much fun.

But sometimes I wonder if I've got the heart for it. Check out this story from China Daily on how Chinese students have all homework and no play.... Oh, man. Nine hour workdays. Plus weekend classes. Maybe an hour a day on weekends for unwinding with the toys and the games.

"She will have plenty of time to play after she enters university," said Zhuzhu's 42 year-old mum An Hui, a department manager of a PR company in Beijing.

I suppose they haven't read the studies about how increased homework loads don't really improve learning and might actually lower standardized test scores (although unsurprisingly, it does improve how well you do in school and, ahem, can inspire "creative solutions" to the problem of too much work). Although maybe I just pay attention because I don't like homework either (as the parent of a callow 13-year-old).

(And maybe I just have these teaching-in-China daydreams because I haven't actually started taking Daughter to Mandarin lessons, even though she's four now.)


I'm sure the word will spread to China eventually, though, along every other product of Western culture, where it'll get digested, processed and transformed. And, no doubt, do a little transforming of its own. Similar bits of cultural digestion have already taken place in Japan, where the ever-more Westernized diet is leading to some (ahem) different fashions. I'm sure slacking on homework can't be far behind.