Basic Education, Basic Training

One of the most frustrating things of being a teacher here is trying to encourage my students to be imaginative. Class discussions can be quite painful, and usually one must call on specific students to get any sort of response. As we all know from experience, this makes the students only more nervous about speaking and generally results in them using only the safest grammatical structures and ideas that they can quickly produce. Even playing charades is a challenge. Of my five classes, only one embraced the idea; the others fought it tooth and nail. Most of the words I assigned were words I thought they might know but had not used recently, such as "astronaut" and "firefighter". To start off, however, I wanted to do a few easy words, so that they could get an idea of how the game worked (to my surprise, they had never even played the game in Chinese). One of these easy words was "tree". Of my four resistant classes, only one interpreted the actor's gestures correctly. This was because the rest of the actors for this particular word just stood with their hands on their hips and said they didn't know what to do. Come on!! It's a tree!! Stick your arms out and stand up straight, and ninety percent of people will guess "tree". This idea either never entered their minds, or they were too embarrassed to act in front of their peers. Whatever the case, it was highly frustrating, and I had to hold back by impatience when the last class of the week reacted this way. It shouldn't be too much of a surprise, though, when considering the context. There are 1.3 billion people in China. Keeping people in check is one of the primary aims of the government. Standing out, in opinion or in class, can bring one great trouble, so the goal becomes to fade as quietly into the background as possible. While I can't openly criticize policies here, I do see a primary component of my job as encouraging my students to think independently, perhaps for the first time in their lives.

Below, required military training for the 3,000 first-year university students. Students spend 8 hours a day for two weeks standing and marching in the hot sun. I have not checked my facts, but I was told that this practice was implemented after the Tianenmen Square incident.







Below, a juxtaposition of young and old, experience and naivety. The officer does not want me to take his picture, but the young students and soldiers wave and offer peace symbols. They represent a new generation, one not fully unaware of its coutnry's intricacies; the officer is a bit more seasoned.