Even while traveling you should stop to smell the flowers.

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Hello! Please feel free to explore my blog. Here I will talk about my job as a foreign language teacher as well as what it is like to live and travel in China. Read on to hear all about my adventures and my advice. I hope that it helps and that you enjoy! Feel free to leave questions and comments.

Sunday, February 8, 2009

Numbers versus Names

"Number 23, come get your food." Number 23 would then rise and get his food. Where are we? Are we in the army? Are we in prison? No, we are in my kindergarten classroom. All of my children have numbers, which are used just as often, if not more often, than their names. Many times, in my younger classes, where my students are two or three years old, my students still do not know their English names. When I ask them for their English names and they look at me as if I am crazy, I have to ask the Chinese teacher, "what is her English name?" The teacher will answer, "Ta shi san hao," (She is number three) so that I can read off my list of which student is which number - aah, number three, Rain.

The children answer just as readily to their numbers as they do to their names - more so if we are talking about the numbers versus their English names. It makes me wince; I think of giving children numbers as making them more like objects, or at least taking away their individuality. However, that is very much my culture versus this culture. In China, is it a bad thing to be the same? I don't think so. And I suppose it would be a great deal more difficult to keep track of eight kindergartens of 30 children if you didn't give them numbers.

Schools are not the only place where people are given numbers instead of names. When I first went to a restaurant in China, I looked at the name tags of the waiters to see the exotic characters that the names were made up of and I found that the name tags did not live up to their names. There were no exotic characters. Instead of providing names, they gave numbers. For example, my waitress tonight is named 107899 according to her name tag. From becoming her friend, though, I have learned that her name is Hu Man. Anywhere I go, I see numbers instead of names. I wonder if it has to do with the sheer number of people in the country. Or is it the same in other Asian countries? It is the same in Japan or Korea? I also wonder if the number you are given in school has any effect on your self concept. Would being number one throughout elementary school make you feel like you really are number one, and you are superior to everyone else? Would being number 30 make you feel low, and underneath everyone else - the last to do and to get everything? The last in the class? I wonder if there has ever been a study on that...

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