John Gordon’s English Weblog

I’ve spent the last five days on the road doing promotional lectures for New Channel. We usually speak to university students, hoping that they will come to Beijing and take IELTS or TOEFL classes during the summer break, but last night in Changsha we spoke to 800 elementary school students.

They were fourth, fifth and sixth grade students at the LuShan International school, with whom we are holding an English summer camp starting in July. I didn’t know that we were going to be speaking to elementary school students until I arrived in Changsha from Shenyang.

The lecture hall was quite a scene. When we first walked in only one of the classes had arrived, but their running, screaming and laughing was enough to make the place seem full. One of the kids challenged me to arm wrestle. I let him win, and he was followed by twenty new challengers who each defeated me over the next minute.

After all of the students had arrived, a teacher had the difficult task of quieting them down–at least enough so that the lecture could start. The students had each been given bookmarks, and some were inspecting them and waving them around. The teacher pinpointed the bookmarks as a cause of the rowdiness: “The bookmarks are interesting, but the lecture will be even more interesting!”

I was the first to speak, and I rattled on for about twenty minutes telling stories and offering English-learning tips. The kids were a lot of fun, but I don’t think I ever had more than several hundred paying attention at one time. I’m pretty good at speaking to groups of university students, but I think I need to work on my elementary school lecture skills.

After the lecture I was mobbed by students asking me to sign their bookmarks.

Barack Obama spoke at Wesleyan’s commencement! He spoke about his what service has meant to him and what service can do for a country. I found it pretty inspiring, and it was also exciting to see him standing at the familiar podium out in front of Olin Library. The speech made me think about how I want to include service in my life.

He was filling in for Ted Kennedy, who was recently diagnosed with brain cancer, and included a moving tribute to Senator Kennedy in his speech.

This is the kind of story that has been told over and over during the last few days here in China. The link is to the story of a couple that clung together for over a day while waiting to be rescued from the rubble of a building, but there are so many more, and countless remain untold.

Today marks the start of a three-day period of national mourning for the victims of the quake (over 30,000 at this point), and this afternoon at 2:28–exactly one week after the quake struck–there was a three-minute period of national mourning. I was alone in my hotel room in Shenyang. As exactly 2:28 cars outside started honking, and didn’t stop for three minutes. Here are some pictures from around the country.

Wow! I’m so proud of and happy for Lin-Manuel Miranda, whose musical In the Heights just received the most Tony Award nominations of any production this year!

Lin wrote and performed the original version of In the Heights during our sophomore year at Wesleyan. He spent a few years after graduation retooling the show, and it was hugely successful off broadway before moving to broadway this year. I’ll never forget opening up the NYTimes webpage a couple of years ago and seeing Lin’s face smiling back at me; I clicked on his face and it led me to a great review of the off-braodway production. If you’re in NY, here are Lin’s suggestions on where to eat.

It’s so much fun to see so many Wesleyan names associated with the show. Thomas Kail, who directs the show, was assistant director of a show that I was in my freshman year. He was a senior at the time, and had discovered in his junior year that he wanted to do theater work. I’m so excited to see him following his dream. Bill Sherman, also in our class, was somehow able to become something of a big band leader on a small liberal arts campus in New England.

I hope I have a chance to see the show when I’m back in the US.

This slideshow, based on an interview with James Fallows, is a good primer for people wondering about the Chinese Internet.

Like so many other people, I’ve been thinking a lot about the earthquake that happened on Monday in Chengdu, and feeling somewhat helpless.

Well, I guess one way to help is to donate money to the rescue and aid efforts, and information about doing so can be found here.

It may seem crass to comment on the media coverage of a disaster, but the media coverage here has been fascinating. This NYTimes article pretty well sums up what’s been going on. It’s heartening to see the media rallying people together to support the rescue efforts, and nice to see the coverage being relatively open. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with the coverage focusing almost exclusively on rescue and aid efforts (as the Chinese media is doing) rather than the carnage (as I fear the US media would probably do).

I saw someone wearing a t-shirt (picture) today that read, in English, “Tibet in China, Torch in Heart”. The Chinese, however, read “振兴中华，反对分裂”, which means something like “Revitalize China, Oppose Separatism”.

The Chinese was not presented as a translation of the English, but it’s interesting to think about how the designer of the t-shirt (or the originator of the slogan) thought about how to present the message in different ways to English-speaking and Chinese-speaking audiences. The English message is certainly “fluffier”.

I’m sure there are many examples of similar situations, but the only one that comes to mind right now is one of the Olympic slogans that has been plastered over Beijing for the last few years: New Beijing, Great Olympics. The Chinese version of the slogan (the Chinese and English often appear together) is “新北京，新奥运”, which means “New Beijing, New Olympics”. I’ve always wondered if BOCOG tried and failed to get “New Olympics” approved by the IOC as an English slogan, and whether the IOC approved using “New Olympics” in Chinese. I’m sure there’s an interesting backstory there, but I’ve never seen it written up.

(Update: Apparently, “New Beijing, Great Olympics” is not a slogan but a strategic concept.)

(Feel free to make fun of me for this post.)

It’s a well-known fact that YouTube is awesome.

One of the most fun–although maybe not legal(?)–pleasures of YouTube is watching videos of live performances.

For instance, if you’re an Elton John fan like me, you can watch an entire concert of performances over several decades just by using the “Related Videos” feature.

Or, you can watch the evolution of a song like “Your Song”, Elton’s first big hit, over five decades.

The Sixties

This is a demo recording of Your Song from 1969 (there’s actually no video). The melody and vocals are actually quite different from the studio version released in 1970.

The Seventies

This is a live performance from 1970. It’s pretty similar to the studio release.

The Eighties

This is a live recording from a concert in Australia with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra. You can tell that he’s sung the song thousands and thousands of times, and he gets pretty creative with certain parts of it. His voice is a bit hoarse, I think because he had throat polyps. The album of this concert is one of my favorite live albums.

The Nineties

This is after surgery to correct the throat polyps, and he’s lost a good portion of the lower range of his voice.

The First Decade of the Twenty-First Century (We still don’t have an accepted name for this decade, do we? When will we decide on one? Probably in 2010.)

This is from his 60th birthday party at Madison Square Garden.