Yet another face story

Recently I was faced with a situation where the issue of face and my own sanity were at odds.

Last term, I managed to sit through hours of lessons, which I found less than useful. My Chinese teacher has a habit of talking through the text of every lesson in the book, which in practise means that he goes through every sentence in the text and explains the background and culture and whatever pops into his mind. Sometimes this could take very long, when his mind went of on sidetracks. Needless to say, that left us with not so much time for learning actual language points and at the end of the term we hadn't even gotten through half of the book we were supposed to do.

This term, the texts in the new book are much longer and more complicated than before. I was dreading the lessons of 'talking trough the text'. And sure enough, reading the text was followed for hour after hour of endless monologue, while we were still wondering what this or that word ever means.

By the sixth hour of monologue I was grinding my teeth to a powder, and came to the decision that I have to ask the teacher to change his methods. Otherwise this term do very little for our Chinese learning, but would fill our heads with little trivial details. Not to mention my low tolerance for boredom and inefficiency.

So, after consulting with one of my classmates, whose eyes had been rolling more than usual during the past lessons, I approached the teacher after the class. I had a fully prepared little speech, which was suggesting in the most polite of ways that because the texts are so long, we'd skip the explanation bit, and instead concentrate more on the language points, and maybe give us more chance to practise ourselves. If needed, we could ask him for clarification of the parts we didn't understand. But I didn't get very far with my speech before the teachers experession turned to stone. It was as if I had spat on him, he just said "ok, ok" and walked straight out.

I was left in the classroom, feeling like a complete fool. In Chinese culture, teachers are very respected and stand well above their students in power position. Although I had try to use the most polite expressions possible, and in all possible ways avoid it sounding like a criticism of his methods, obviusly the result was not so good.

Face was lost.

I was dreading going to class the next monday, wondering if had just made an enemy. But instead, the teacher was even nicer than usual, coming over to chat about this and that.

Later, I found out, he had found the perfect solution, one that would save his face, but at the same time give us what we wanted. This was it: He announced in class that he had been thinking, and came to the conclusion that because the structure of the new book was so different, and the texts much longer, he would no longer be 'talking through the texts'. Instead, we could ask him about the bits we didn't understand, and we would have more time to concentrate on grammar and exercises.

As he was speaking, I kept nodding my head in accordance. All in all, I thought his new suggestions we not bad at all.