Teaching
A Portrait of the Teacher by a Young StudentA student from my underground literature class wrote an article about her experience with my teaching method. I had been helping the student develop her writing skills so that she could perform well on the GREs as her dream is to go graduate school on edge of the prairie in Garrison Keillor Country...
Teaching Nineteen Eighty-Four in Mao Country
Every Wednesday evening six Chinese girls came to my apartment. By the middle of the Spring 2010 term at Xiangnan University in the home province of Uncle Mao and General Tso, I had come to depend on them to keep me happy. They were junior English majors and picked English names like Tina, Victoria,...
A Day in the Life of a Fake Teacher in the Real China
One day I found myself squealing like a pig in front of children. I pushed my nose up, grunted, and oinked. We were playing a simplified version of charades. It was a Sunday afternoon in the bleak of January. And this being China, it was bleaker than bleak. The dean of my university had loaned...
Goodbye Year of the Ox
Since I only teach three days a week, and spend most of my time studying, reading, blogging and sheltering from the cold, wintry rain it is easy to forget where I am. A quick jaunt about the campus quickly reminds me that I’m not in Pennsylvania anymore. Just beyond the dingy metropolis, my university...
It’s Gettin’ Hot in Here (So Hot)
“Wow, you ah sooo stro-ooong.” The tone of his voice turned each of the last two words into something bisyllabic. The student had been scoping me out. This is what it feels like to be a zoo animal or a celebrity in America, and just an ordinary foreigner in Chenzhou, China. My job...
Teaching British Romanticism in China
I’ve been procrastinating. A recent trip to Montana left me in a swoon. Now it was just a Movable Feast. But I needed to get back on track and prepare a lecture on American Romanticism & New England Transcendentalism. As I wrote this students were reading excerpts from The Scarlet Letter,...
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Traveling
Indochina Expedition 2010: Eve of Departure
My first semester in China as an English teacher was over. I would leave at dawn for Vietnam on Monday, January 25, 2010. Now it was time to go and see if I had what it takes to travel for real. This would be the first time traveling alone in the developing world without a gun or a posse. I not...
Happiness is a Vampire
Every day I discover other worlds so unlike the one I once called home. The possibilities seem boundless. I even fantasize about coming to America to become a Wal Mart door greeter or an assistant manager at McDonald’s. If I work hard for a couple years and save money, then I could return...
Perspectives on China
November was nearly over here in the heartland of China. The days alternated between short manic bursts of sunny, blue skies and longer periods of sunless, chilly days full of drizzle and melancholy. It was weather most conducive to studying Mandarin, writing for my own site, and reading other...
Bear Fighting in Cyberspace
Some have wondered if I will one day practice medicine in China. During an interview at Rocky Mountain College, home of the Battlin’ Bears, the director had even suggested that I could do a clinical rotation here. The thought had occurred to me many times. Many friends and fellow Bull Dogs...
A Journey to Hengshan Mountain
We took the midnight express back to Chenzhou from Hengshan late Saturday night. This meant getting dirty. I once spent four years as a grunt. Digging foxholes and wading through marshes was dirty work too. I look back at this previous incarnation with nostalgia as I board a crowded train in...
36 Hours in Billings, MT
While all of China took to the road and celebrated its 60th anniversary with a week long celebration I ducked out of the country for a quick trip to Billings, Montana. The Rocky Mountain College Physician Assistant program had invited me for interview. Though I was already missing teaching English...
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Prologue
Matt Muller — Smethport’s China Connection
Smethport resident Matt Muller is off to teach English at a university in Hunan province in south central China. The province is famous for its spicy cuisine and the birthplace of Chinese Communist revolutionary Mao Zedong. The major city there is Chenzhou, home to about 4.5 million people, most of whom live in the surrounding countryside. After learning that he would have to wait at least a year before enrolling in a master’s level physician assistant program, Matt decided to go on yet another international adventure, having already visited many countries in Europe, Africa and South America.... [Read more of this review]
How It’s All Gonna Be
They call it the Middle Kingdom. Right now, I wait for paperwork. It is the only thing holding me back. I expect that everything will be in order by the middle of August, Year of the Ox. Until then I dream. Though not in China yet, anticipation, planning, and great expectations are all just as important to me as the actual experience of being there. Right now, I think about the students I will teach at a university in Hunan province. The university says that I will teach literature. They welcome me create my own curriculum and to supplement their text book with from my own library. ... [Read more of this review]
Grandiose Visions of a Migrant Worker
Born in the Year of the Dragon, the day Viking I landed on Mars, and about one year before the original Star Wars film hit the big screens, it is only natural that I would be forever restless, dreaming, and yearning to ramble beyond the borders of my country. I am just another migrant worker dreaming of a better life. Just as one of my teachers had dreamed of a better life. He went into the woods outside of Concord, Massachusetts. He found something useful there. Something inspirational. His experiment at Walden Pond taught us how to advance confidently in the direction of our dreams. ... [Read more of this review]
Confessions of a Hyperbole Abuser
I have this condition. Something within compels me to wander with mournful tread. Everything once strange in life becomes familiar, ritual becomes routine, and life the antithesis of zen marks the time when you are but a bell toll away from the walking dead. Beyond these dust clouds kicked up by the masses of men there lies man’s greatest pleasure galloping ahead beneath azure skies. So when another gap year loomed ahead I plotted my escape. Playing the waiting game in a stately Victorian on West Main Street in Smethport, Pennsylvania—the home of the ghost of Ralph Crossmire,... [Read more of this review]
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