In September, I heard the first whispers about something called "the Talent Show," and how it was going to happen in December but I had no idea about what it would entail or its scope. Details started to emerge a few weeks ago. Basically, every class from grade 1 to 11 would participate and each class would present a song, a dance and a dramatic performance. The Talent Show would take place over 2 6 hour days at a local theatre across the street from school.
It's supposed to be a fun venture (but is shockingly serious) and for two weeks before the show, the kids practised almost every day after school, and on the weekends. All the windows of the classrooms' were covered over so other classes couldn't get a glimpse of the preparations going on in the rooms. During this week, the final run up to the Show, all educational goals were shelved for the sake of the Show. Out of the 12 double lessons I had scheduled this week, I taught 4 as the students were sequestered by their homeroom teacher to practise their routines. I would show up for class, ready and willing to go, and, if the class was nice about it, one of them would make an appearance and "ask" for permission to practise. Other times, I would go to my room and find it locked or full of another class. Eventually, I just stopped going to class. When I did have class, students were too tired to focus and were distracted to the point of being unable to do any work. A student in a grade 8 class confessed that they'd been working on the talent show every day and then were at school all weekend! Insanity.
(At this point, you might be like, "oh boo hoo, you didn't have to do any work this week." That's basically correct but, as I've described previously, being at school with no teaching related work to do is damn boring, and a soul crushing waste of time.)
I didn't get to see any of the primary school talent show (I'm told I didn't miss much) but I did watch a fair bit of the secondary Show today. First, the sheer length of it (7+ hours today with one break) was impressive and oppressive. The performances themselves were mostly short but seemingly never ending due to their profusion. Despite the "one song, one dance, one play" format, it seemed like every class instead fit 3 or 4 songs and dances into their "set" so that it was difficult to tell when one ended and another performance began. There were the somber songs about the necessity of water, the John Denver cover (!!!), the somber monologues in Mongolian, the en masse dancing to dubstep, the overly dramatic skits about life on the steppe/Chinggis Khan/both, the Adele cover (played by a bunch of grade 8s learning how to play their instruments), the songs on traditional instruments, the modern interpretative solo dance pieces, the bboy routines and so on and so forth. (And that was just the kids in grades 6 to 8!)
In an Australian or a Canadian school, I think such a show would be a voluntary, extra curricular pursuit (if anything at all), instead of at the centre of the school's priorities. In a way, and I have no evidence for this whatsoever, it seemed like a holdover from the days of Communism, with its emphasis on the collective performing completely irrelevant pursuits for the benefit of the whole (at the expense of the larger, more important goals). I'm paraphrasing here (and leaving out some profanity), but one foreign teacher asked, "if that was it, that wasn't worth all the lost time." He is, of course, dead right but perhaps there's more since the students who won were pretty happy. The losing classes though were devastated. I tried to say hello to one of my most boisterous students afterwards and he couldn't respond to me at all, utterly heartbroken at his class' failure. Perhaps that's the lesson of the Talent Show (and much of Mongolia): there are winners and then, son, there are losers.
3 sights on the way to school today:
- I passed by a manhole that I know is home to a few dudes. Those unfortunate souls without even ger space live in the sewers, huddled next to the heat bearing pipes for warmth. Usually, it's closed but this morning, for some reason, it was open. I peeked in and saw 2 fellows hunched together in the space of a phone booth, in a completely dark, dank and filthy sewer. Running straight through their space, and serving as a divide between the two, was the heating pipe, spewing out steam and whatever else.
- Further on, one of UB's ubiquitous feral dogs was hobbling along, shivering in the cold morning air, in the parking lot outside a hotel. It spotted a dark , now frozen pool of (human) vomit. Starving, cold and probably on its last legs, it stopped and ate the vomit.
- For a Buddhist country, there sure are a lot of Christmas related decorations around. Every major building has a massive fake tree outside of it now (the biggest is in Sukhbaatar Square outside the parliament, naturally). But, the one display that got my attention is above. Central Tower has gone above and beyond by setting up a giant, Coke sponsored Santa Claus, which somewhat oddly is glancing ominously towards a statue of Marco Polo, as if to say, "what the fuck are we doing here?"
