After a morning of maths and english at homeschool the girls were keen to get outside this afternoon. With orienteering on our minds these days I set up a small 10 control course around a compact area of the College grounds - pond, rose garden and the "spooky garden" (an area of bamboo, camphor and palm trees) outside the Twilight Zone. Lesley was on photography and road-crossing duties, taking a 20 minute break from the rigours of TDC work! Freda set off first, and after a hesitant start soon got into the swing of it and blasted round in 6 mins 58 seconds. Here she is control number 2 (a palm tree) looking slightly worried...

Here's Edie at control number 6 (another palm tree) working out her position (note hand movement!) and route round the English Department building to number 7 (a cypress tree) in the Rose Garden. (other controls were at path junctions, boulders or building features.) Edie's time was less than 2 minutes behind Freda, another impressive performance. Both girls are pretty confident and capable at orienteering now, especially now that they're familiar with the STC map. I wonder when we'll be back in Scotland and able to enjoy some orienteering in some beautiful Highland birch forest.......?

After a morning at the market, lunch at our favourite noodle restaurant and some crochet experiments, Nita and I made some books. I taught her several methods with a needle and thread as well as a folding book that students could make and use for writing or revising. With rain on and off all day it was lovely to sit inside and be creative, reminding me of wet autumn weekends in Scotland. We had a cosmopolitan meal in the evening with cousous, chilli con carne, pizza and cucumber salad followed by chocolate mousse. Nita has three days off as virtually all the teachers in her school have been sent away while the senior students sit their university entrance exams. This means she'll be here until Tuesday, when she will have to make the one-day bus trip back to her school, south-east of Kunming.

For those of you who haven't read about Nita before, she graduated from Simao Teachers' College with a diploma in English language teaching in 2007. She was an active, capable students, never afraid to think a little bit differently. She was assistant editor of Sunflower for over a year and was always keen to take part in extra-curricular activities. After leaving Simao she studied at university in Kunming, graduating with a Bachelor degree in 2009. Since then she has tried a number of jobs, finally ending up in a senior middle school, where she has been for nearly a year. The school leader is an idiot by most educational standards and, despite suicides, murder and various forms of death-by-ingorance in the school last year, he refuses to change anything about his draconian management methods. The students and teachers are in the classrooms from 7 am (having started morning excercise/reading at 6:30) until 11 pm with short breaks to eat - only eat. nothing more. The children have no sport and no free time. When they do 'escape' they go wild. Nine teachers left last year and Nita and her current colleagues are all on the look out for new jobs. I encouraged her not to leave until she finds one, knowing what it feels like to face imminent unemployment. What's more, I believe that Nita can make, and has already made, a positive difference in the lives of the students she has taught and mentored. She talks to them, listens to them and refuses to give up on them though I know this has been a struggle for her. What's more, Nita says herself that she has learned so much from this challenging job.

One of my jobs of late has been filming the TDC Teaching Methods workshops for Maths and Physics Department students. I enjoy it as it gets me away from the homeschool-children routine and it's a chance to get creative with the movie camera. The lesson pictured was co-taught by Lesley and Hou Wanxia, with a minimum of English, using methods-materials painstakingly translated into Chinese, backed up by subject-related content concocted by Lesley herself or provided by friends and College teachers. This area of work is something Lesley has wanted to do for some time now (especially as the English Department here are so useless and unwilling to cooperate), and is in fact one of the reasons we decided to stay on in Simao another year.

It was fantastic to watch Lesley and Wanxia working so well together - they each seem to know what the other is about to say or do. Lesley would be the first to admit her Chinese is far from perfect, but she seems to have a perfectly adequate command of classroom language to put over most of her points in Chinese - even cracking the odd joke! The students seemed to enjoy the workshops, even though they're so unused to the student-centred methods.

It's been a difficult and sometimes depressing time recently, so good to see Lesley on top form doing what shes loves. What has the problem been? Well, something to do with a string of job applications for teacher-training or straight ELT jobs around the globe all being rejected... Lesley has been so busy pushing forward education initiatives and training work here in Simao Prefecture that she's never got round to getting the all-important Diploma that many employers are asking for. Currently, obtaining this qualification is top priority. The only question is where. We have several irons (of varying temperatures) in the metaphorical fire...

We had a great turnout (well over 100 competitors, many of whom paired up) for this morning's orienteering event, the first of the term. It was mainly Grade 1 and 2 students, from the departments of English, Maths and PE, as well as a few Primary school children. We got up at 6:30 am to begin preparations and the course was marked by 8:30 for the first runners to start. The TDC workers, who were active orienteers last term, helped guide the newbies through the steps. Lesley was at the start/finish gate and Ali calculated times as competitors returned. These were then displayed on the tape behind. What was most rewarding for me was seeing the change in the students in such a short time - they turned up looking bewildered and apprehensive, though willing to give this unknown sport a shot. By the time they had completed a course they were excited, chattering, analysising their route choices and discussing various markers - the sign of being true orienteers. They were also sweating and panting over Ali as he calculated their times and checked control stamps. Only a handful of competitors were disqualified, mostly for running to any control they spotted around the campus, without actually reading the map!  The winners received VSO year planners, and all participants went away proudly sporting VSO wristbands.

Our photo-posting facility has returned, inspiring me to write a blog entry. That isn't, however, the inspiration I refer to in the title. I've been reflecting how miserable circumstances can lead to inspiration. At least, that is what I've taken from the last ten days. The first miserable experience was observing a Maths teacher deliver a model lesson at Simao No 4 Middle School. On the surface it wasn't a bad performance - the teacher was friendly, smiling, stepped off the podium now and again, had everything pre-prepared in a Powerpoint Presentation to the point that students didn't even have to turn a page in their books. A performance, however, is exactly what it was. Those who seemed to learn something, already knew the answers - They amounted to around a third of the class, at my estimate, although only a handful of those volunteered to answer any questions. The rest trailed along behind, joining in the teacher-student rhetoric. Even I could do that, though I didn't have a clue what was going on. Teacher: shi bu shi (is that right or not); Students: shi...and so on, as the teacher spoon-fed them the problems, the formulas and the results. No time to think, experiment, check; just passive, mundane, routine reading, nodding and copying.

So why is this inspiring? Well, once I had got over my stress-induced migraine (stress caused by seeing a problem that seems too vast to solve, particularly as the school leaders and teachers here all think the teaching is hunky-dory), I returned to our Teaching Practice preparation of Maths students with even greater determination. All the (student-centred) Maths lesson plans written by Paul were promptly translated, copied and distributed to Maths students and I started planning my own model lesson, which I delivered the following week.

Sadly some of the teachers, at the end of my lesson, said: "Well, these methods are only suitable because Lesley doesn't have to take exams." That's right, I took my exams some time ago, not to mention the ten years at university studying in similar ways. Do the teachers really believe that China is the only country where exam results count? It's not uncommon for me to get such feedback, but I found it particularly difficult to deal with this time. In the run-up to leaving these negative attitudes and insights into the on-going state of affairs are causing me even more distress than before. The inspiring news is, the students know better. What's more, they know that there's more to learning than repetition and other mind-numbing exercises that the teachers give them (like copying passages three times from the book, or translating the reading texts word-for-word into Chinese, so that the final passage doesn't even make sense). According to some insider feedback, they loved the lesson, actually learned some English for a change and want me to teach them again. That's the inspiring part - that there are actually some free-thinkers amidst the student body, who aren't afraid to open their minds to new ways.