Middle School Life In Nanchang

I’ve been tutoring a 3rd year middle school student (equivalent to a 9th grader in the U.S.) for a couple months down here in Nanchang, and it’s been great. He’s a very bright kid who has a very bright future ahead of him. His English is quite good, and he is set to start at a prep school in Maryland this summer. I’ve been further introducing him to American culture and upping his academic vocabulary so he’ll be more prepared when starting his American high school career. And the money is quite nice of course too.

We were having a light conversation about his day at school on Wednesday, and he said how much fun he had playing cards in computer class. I giggled, then asked if he had been screwing around on solitaire or hearts on the computer, but the response was, “no, we hardly even turn on the computers during computer class, we were playing with a deck of cards.” Apparently, the computers are so bad that they rarely use them. They tend to just do whatever they want in this class, including ducking out of it to play basketball outside. I further inquired about any other useless wastes of time he experiences on an average day of school, and what I found was shocking.

Music class: the teacher allows a student to bring a USB flash drive with popular music and they just sit there and listen to it until the class is over, quietly.

Politics class: the teacher lectures about certain Chinese policies like the One-Child Policy and so on, while they listen or space out and aren’t allowed to participate in any discussion of it. And when time comes for the examination, they are allowed to use their textbooks, and most of their exam consists of underlining important sentences. My student also complained that when he listened to the teacher and studied, he got a 60% on the exam, but another time when he didn’t listen to the teacher or study, he got an 80%.

Chemistry class: an incompetent teacher reads aloud from the textbook material that they have already studied and know quite well. And when said teacher is in a bad mood, he writes these passages on the chalkboard and has the students copy it. They never use the laboratory either, even though they have one.

Physical Education class: the instructor takes the students outside and let’s them go off and play basketball or soccer amongst themselves with no sort of instruction or drills to help learn technique and improve their skills. Oh, and not to mention that it’s only the boys who go off and play sports amongst themselves. The girls, apparently, all go eat snacks and hang out during this class. Yes, a P.E. class that has neither physical activity for girls, or education. They may learn how to put on some pounds, feel ashamed, and develop an eating disorder though. And finally, despite the fact that they have an indoor gymnasium, when it rains, they just sit around in the classroom and do nothing, much like computer class, music class, chemistry class, and politics class.

The thing that makes this even more messed up is that I hear how busy and stressed out young students are in China. They have to study their asses off to test into the better high schools, then study their asses off even further to get into the better universities. All that seems to matter is these entrance examinations, for which they are supposedly cramming for everyday until 11 or 12 at night. I’m no expert on these entrance exams, but I’ve asked around a lot about them. It seems they have the typical math and science, which is universal. Then they have the language, literature, and history bits, which seems to be a bunch of memorization. Not that memorization doesn’t have its value, and I’m not just talking the memorization of names, dates, and events; I’m talking the memorization of poems and essays, which can be more than a page long. I can see how this is good in terms of preserving China’s history and culture, but seriously, we have books and references for that sort of thing.

My student is the busiest youth I’ve ever encountered, basically having classes seven days a week from 8am to 9pm. He, of course, is going to America and doesn’t have to worry about these silly entrance exams, but is still being pushed to learn his English. I think he’ll be pleasantly surprised at his new school in Maryland. It’s prestigious and expensive, so he’ll get good teachers and facilities that actually work. He may even learn a new sport and get to play on a proper team, and maybe even learn some music. And best of all, he’ll have time to relax in the evenings before bed.

Thank you god for making me American and not having to put up with this kind of crap at school. What a serious waste of time. I’m sure things will change in China’s future, and to be fair, Nanchang isn’t the most developed of Chinese cities, but it’s a more fair representation of China since most of the country isn’t that developed as a whole. What a serious shame this is that students here have to work and study so hard for these exams, and while at school, instead of prepping them for it, they spend a lot of the time goofing off in classrooms because they can’t offer them something more stimulating and useful. And I used to wonder why a lot of my university students have issues with problem solving.