David's Big Adventure in China

This time I am going to write mostly about how schools here work. From elementary school through college, kids are put in a class and that group of students does most everything together. My students are all freshmen and when they arrived here they were assigned a class number from 1 to 12 (there are 12 classes of 40 freshmen each). They are assigned to classes in a manner to ensure that the average college entrance exam test scores are about the same for each class and that each class has some students with high scores and some students with low scores. I teach Writing to classes 3 and 4 and I teach Listening & Speaking to class 3 so class 3 is my primary class. Another teacher teaches Reading to both class 3 and 4 and teaches Listening & Speaking to class 4. The students have almost all their classes together as a group and they also form sports teams from their class for intramural competition. Doing almost everything together facilitates them forming a strong bond that will last a lifetime and reinforces the group culture here. I know people here in their 40’s who still often get together with their high school and college classmates. These former classmates become part of their guanxi (network of contacts) that acts as an “old boys network” would in the west.

I learn a lot from reading my students journals that are part of their Writing class. One thing I learned about is a meeting that the class held to assess the previous semester. Some of the group felt that they were not unified enough as a class so they talked at length about how to become more unified. Shortly after the meeting there was a basketball game between my class and another class (1st and 3rd quarters were played by the girls and the 2nd and 4th quarters were played by the boys). Most of the class members who were not playing attended the game (as I did) to cheer on their classmates. They were playing a team that had more talent but because of their strong efforts, they were leading near the end of the game. The other team made a strong effort to tie the game and we went into overtime. During overtime, the kids in my class just ran out of gas and were overpowered and lost. Even though we lost, the entire class felt proud and unified because they had really pulled together and fought hard.

The school requires the kids to do some “society practice” such as spending some time teaching at an elementary school or something similar. Some of the kids went to a school for the blind to do some teaching. China is not handicapped friendly as very few places are handicapped accessible. It was nice to learn that there are some special schools for the handicapped. The kids are also required to do some work on campus such as lawn work. They don’t really have typical lawn care tools that would make the work easy so they make up for it by using a lot of manpower (the students). They do get some college credit for this work “class”.

A few weeks ago I saw the students having some sort of meeting outside one of the buildings. When I asked them what was it about I was told that it was a meeting to recruit them to join “the party”. I was told that most of them signed up to join. Being part of the party will help them down the road with their career and will also increase their guanxi (network). Many of them will probably not stick with it long term as most people I know are not active members of the party. The ones that join will be required to attend a lot of meetings to learn about the party and keep up with new developments in the party.

The last thing I will write about is the anniversary of the earthquake in Sichuan Province that occurred on May 12, 2008. There were over 85,000 people killed and millions that were made homeless. I don’t know how many are still living in temporary shelter but I know that they are building like crazy to try and get them in homes. I read about one town where 50% of the population of 10,000 were killed. Some of the worst hit towns have been fenced and made off-limits and they are building a new town nearby. Here is a link to reports provided by NPR (National Public Radio). NPR reporters happened to be in Sichuan last year when the quake occurred and they returned to report 1 year later. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=90430135

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 13th, 2009 at 7:57 am and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.