This year is off to a crazy start...

Yes, I know there is not 25 characters shown. It's more of a representation. If my comics were an exact reproduction of TIP life, than none of us would have hair, pants or necks. Just work with me. Click on any picture to make it bigger.



Now in February we are not going to have a normal session due to the Spring Festival and Chinese New Years, so we committed to doing two other things. The first being a Mandarin version of our program for foreign workers to improve their spoken Mandarin Chinese. The details and the planning for this took about a third of our facilitators for this January session. The second thing we will be doing is planning a children's camp in another province, because the children will have off school for nearly the whole month. So this took another part of our facilitators.



And then one of our biggest partners, Chaoyang District, dropped a pretty big bomb on us. Since they send the lion's share of our students, they feel they have a pretty big say in how we run things. There is a lot more sticky Chinese politics and other games going on at the same time, but that's the long and the short of it. Normally what they say is either slightly annoying or mundane, like more speech practice time, or less students to a dorm room please, but now they have asked that we remove all native Chinese and Asian Americans from the classroom because
they feel that they're not real Americans and thus, cannot teach English properly as someone who is a native White American. Obviously this sort of blind ignorance has caused major problems. Our Chinese staff is upset and our Asian American facilitators who were scheduled for the session are basically forced to sit on their hands. This is quite upsetting for all of us because this sort of ignorance is severely handicapping us and because in the year 2010, there are people who would not only subscribe to this ignorance, but enforce it as well. I can understand to an extent how they would rather have native English speakers in the classroom rather than our native Chinese, whose own English by the way, is quite excellent. But to look at an Asian who was born and raised in America and speaks English as their first language, just like any white person, that I do not comprehend.