ie (my co-instructors) for two weeks now. Though it was a bit of an awkward entry, joining a group that had already been together through two weeks of adventure, I'm finding my groove and trying to spend time with each student to build individual relationships. The students are good- they are here for reasons that vary from parental pressure, to love of Chinese language, to the wish to turn their world upside-down. They are working through culture shock, they are discovering that there is no "normal" way of doing or being in the world, and they are figuring out how to call each other out when they feel someone is shirking a role or responsibility as a group member. They are learning. So am I.I am trying to be conscious and not to hold these students to a higher set of expectations based on where the last group left off. I've heard a lot of the teacher mentors in my life talk about how difficult it is to spend the months of a school-term gradually building a strong group dynamic and individual relationships with students, to help students build a foundation of knowledge and a comfort to express themselves and to challenge me, and then the term ends and another begins and you find yourself back at square one. It feels a bit Sisyphean, except for I get to make it to the top of the hill and my boulder rolls down to the foot of another.
The next boulder roll will take us to Nanyao and the Naxi. Naxi people are descendants of Tibetan Qiang tribes, are matrilineal and matrilocal, and are the authors of a 1,0
00 year-old pictographic script (the only hieroglyphic script still in use). Though technically not a matriarchal culture as the village rulers were traditionally male, matriarchal influences are apparent in the Naxi language. Nouns are augmented or diminished through the addition of masculine and feminine suffixes- the resulting change is different of than the ways in which we gender language in English and the Romance languages. In the Naxi language you take a word like "stone,"add a feminine suffix and the word becomes "boulder," add a masculine suffix and you get the word "pebble." In English, mainly through words adopted from the romance languages, a different change of meaning takes place when you have a word that changes from a masculine to a feminine meaning by adding a diminutive suffix, for example, "bachelor" to "bachelorette." I am far from a linguist and can not put names or technical links to these constructions. Interesting. I can learn so much about my own cultural structure and hierarchy from being exposed to the ways in which other societies and cultures are organized and expressed. My hope for this week is to help the students discover this kind of learning too.
