Tony's Roommate Trouble; Vaccine for Expats; Company Testing; Saturday Morning Class: Students Scared of Foreign teacher?; Tony Classmate Trouble

My 13 year old son Tony, at the time of this typing, is going to move dorm rooms at the international school that he is attending this year. He and a roommate, who moved into Tony's room after the winter break, aren't getting along. The roommate is making Tony's evening phone calls with his parents torturous because they make it hard for Tony and his parents to hear each other. On a Tuesday evening, the kid even took to swearing as Tony was trying to talk to Jenny. Tony has sworn at the kid, even calling him a "prick." (How he learned that word, I had to ask, and he told me he got it from a movie or a YouTube video.)

Tony says the roommate is racist to him. Being a self-declared, anti -anti-racist, I hate to hear my son declaring himself to be a victim of it. The roommate is rude to Tony because of cultural differences. Be that as it may, Tony has a hard situation to deal with. He does feel like he is one against the world. I try to tell him he is not, but at his age it is not much solace. I try to tell him to be strong, but that is much not solace. So, I will try to get family and sympathetic types to help him.

(Tony's first night in his new room seemed fine. I hope that he can get off on the right foot with these new guys and that no animosities develop down the road.)

One of my students has gotten the vaccine. She first told me that she was informed that she must take the vaccine. Just say I was told to take the vaccine, I corrected her. She was in lineup for over two hours to get the jab with a bunch of other seniors to get the jab. I have since be declaring her to be suffering side-effects for it.

James Delingpole, who has been a saint on the Covid overreaction, says if one must take the vaccine, one might as well take the Russian or Chinese ones for they are real vaccines unlike the western ones.

Apparently, there is some plan afoot for expatriates to get the vaccine in China.

I went to a company to do some testing of their oral English. On the drive out there, Wuxi looked dreary. The sky was gray and I saw nothing but concrete apartment blocks and freeways. It made my office seem like a paradise.

I had a class at 8:20 on a Saturday morning. It was nice to get up early and beat the morning rush to get to school. However, as soon as I got to school, I had a premonition that the students would show up late, if they didn't show up at all. This class was a IELTS speaking class. The students attend these classes because their parents make them, and so most of them don't want to be there. It is hard for teachers, foreign or Chinese, to get them to even pay attention. And for the foreign classes, the students even more don't want to be there. Why I am not sure. I suspect they are scared of having to speak in English or they find foreigners much more boring than their Chinese teachers.

This Saturday morning, one student came half an hour late. When he saw that he was the only one to attend. He sighed and looked to me like he felt that he was the schmuck who showed up. For me, it could have been worse. Students like these are better individually than as a group. If they are constantly busy, they will not look at their smart phones. So this student was forced to talk to me and he did have some things to say like how his school, Meicun High School was a horrible school to attend.

Just as it seemed that Tony's roommate troubles were at an end, and we could deal with improving his academic performance and baseball skills among other things, Tony had to have an incident with some classmates. There was shoving, kicking of shins and swearing. The way Tony told it to my wife Jenny & I was that he was set up by these kids who had been picking on him; what a teacher told me, the next morning, was that people witnessing the incident reported that Tony overreacted to some kid bumping into him and that the incident flared from there.

That he has a quick temper, I can believe because his mother has one and I have one too. I have gotten in trouble because of my temper, and the teacher intimated that Tony could too. This phase of Tony's life will pass, but I am going to have to be much more strict with him about the behavior of his that I have witnessed. A big problem is that Tony's mother is spitting fire about the incident and taking Tony's side to the maximum. Tony is behaving badly because he thinks that he is a victim. He has to realize that his situation is hard because of things beyond his control; however he has to learn to rise above the situation, not feel sorry for himself and not be angry at the world.