Don't Compare

Well, I am back at my site and safely ensconced inside of the Zs spare bedroom, reflecting fondly on and already missing my brief taste of freedom. I feel like I do upon returning to Utah after visiting another state. Ah freedom! Well, it will return soon enough, in a little more than two weeks to be precise.

In the meantime, since getting back I've been running into some of the folks returning from their site visits and feel sort of cheated because I was the one who had to stay in town while other people ventured out. We have been told time and time again that a Chinese saying is to never compare, and to illustrate this the symbol for "compare" is something like two knives to remind you that to compare is like sticking knives into yourself, which it truly is. But the two questions that everyone seems to ask each other, the two points on which we probably all violate this precept, are living arrangements and teaching load. Someone I talk to has a brand new apartment, while mine looks like something out of the Honeymooners. But then there is someone who has their kitchen on a patio, which is nice in the summer (save the bugs), but not so nice in the winter. Someone else has a shower arrangement where the bathroom floor is in essence the shower, except that it doesn't drain so much as stand stagnant. As for teaching loads, as I mentioned I have a very strange load, with eight hours of British and American culture, when I know nothing about British culture, and eight hours of oral English, which meets every other week, and a two hour film course, which means that I will have 18 hours one week and 10 another, which averages out to fourteen. I hear that there are others who only have 8 hourse a week, while a lot of folks have 16. And of course the level of everyone's students vary incredibly. Some of us will have students who are quite proficient while others will have barely English literate students.

So really, I think this thing about not comparing is probably a pretty good idea. We are all worse off than some and better off than others in pretty much everything, not only teaching load and apartment size. But like all good advice, it is probably something that for the most part we ignore.