Finals

It's finals time here, and it feels oddly similar to finals time at any US university. Tons of students are locked down in the library, I always see my students toting around some book for the next test they are taking (the learn through osmosis theory also has followers in China), and on whole everyone is stressed. Here are the highlights and/or interesting things about finals here:

First and foremost on my mind as a teacher is that kids are not allowed to fail their finals. This is a very strange concept to me, but I'll try to explain: If a kid fails a class (for whatever reason--bad attendance, never doing the homework, failing the final exam, or some combination of the above) they have to retake only the final exam at the beginning of the next semester. If they pass, they get credit for the whole class. If they fail again, they take the final again until they do. This is especially troubling for classes in which most of your grade is homework or participation. We had a drawn out argument/discussion with one of the office workers here about this. Their reasoning: the student has paid for the class, so they should get credit for it. This sort of makes sense in a very basic capitalist sort of way--you get what you pay for. It also raises something interesting about our US education system: you pay for the opportunity to get credit for classes, or maybe you pay to take a class, which doesn't necessarily mean getting credit or passing that class.

As a teacher, this changes things. I have decided that unless a student never comes to class, does not show up for the final or cheats, or is totally disruptive to the learning process of others, I will not fail them. If I do, it just means re-writing my final exam several times to accomodate their bad performance. Fortunately, I didn't have any of this type of students.

Second interesting thing: lots of people cheat on tests. I'll begin with my test. I had 4 classes of freshman english majors. I told them ahead of time that the test would be easy. I told them exactly what would be on the test. The average grade in my classes was above a 95%. I still caught students cheating on my test--from really quietly asking their neighbor to having copies of course material (like the study guide) underneath their test to passing whole pages of their exam to their neighbors. I was really surprised. If you can average a 95% on a test (and nobody got lower than an 80%) why would you ever risk failing the test by cheating? While discussing this with some of my chinese friends here, I was sometimes asked if I cheated on tests in school. My answer (I have never cheated on a test) is always met with surprise. I guess I've never been faced with the hard decision of cheat or fail, but it seems like not cheating should be the default assumption. Maybe not in China. On my midterm exam, people's cheating was more sophisticated: I deduced that students took photos of their multiple choice answer sheets and sent those pictures to their friends in other classrooms who have different teachers. This type of cheating is really hard to catch unless your teachers really work together. On the other hand, it's easy to tell that the student who can't say a sentence in english but who got a 97% on the difficult midterm somehow managed to cheat. If I know they did, but don't know how, what should I do as a teacher?

Third thing (and this one is more fun): I wrote down some pretty funny responses to some of the questions on my final exam. Here are the best:

Question: What group of people are responsible for the first Thanksgiving, and also appeared in our version of "Rudolf the Red Nosed Reindeer?"

Complete the song lyric:

"you'll go down in history! (like the _________)"

Correct answer: Pilgrims!

Students:

vampires

turkeys

indians (half credit)

satan chrasms

lightbulbs

plumps

poligrams

god

bulmbs

dogs!

Question: Who brings you gifts on christmas if you are good?

Answer: Santa Claus

Students:

Sutu Claws

Satan Clown

Christmas old man (literal translation of the chinese word for santa)

Santa Claus who is an old man

Santa but in fact it is your parents (NOOOOOOO!!!!)

Question: What animals pull Santa's sleigh?

Answer: Reindeer

Students:

pronghorn

turkeys

Question: What do you get in your stocking if you are bad?

Answer: Coal

Students:

pencil and notebook

book

stone, sank, and so on...

bad things

take a deep breath

regrets

An extra credit question was complete the following TV show (which we watched an episode of)title:

"Buffy the _________ Slayer"

Answer: Vampire

Students:

turkey

angel

reindeer

suspected

Another extra credit question: What's my favorite sport?

Answer: any of the sports I like.

Students:

fly dish

flossbean

skilling

skitting

skinning

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This is a fascinating article that I recently read about a very chinese way of raising children:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704111504576059713528698754.html

新年快乐，Happy New Year!

Well, my last post reveals that it has actually been 2 months since I wrote a blog post. The reason for this long lapse is not that nothing interesting has happened recently (quite the opposite in fact), not that I haven't had time to write blog posts (I have), but that I've fallen out of the habit of doing so. So, one of my new years resolutions is to try to update this blog at least twice a week. Just about every day I think of something interesting, and often I think "gosh, this would be a great blog post" and then I get home and it's time for tennis and then I run to the gym and then to dinner and I get home and decide to turn on the movie channel and Jurassic Park is playing (like it does several times a week I'm sure, given how often I've seen it randomly flicking on the TV) and Dr. Malcolm is saying, "That's an impact tremor" and then a T-Rex bursts out of the foliage and of course I'm hooked and then I fall asleep after studying some chinese characters for a few minutes once the movie ends. Well, my plan is to add writing about my interesting 3:00 pm idea before studying the characters (or perhaps instead of watching Jurassic Park for the 20th time this year, but probably not, or maybe doing both at the same time!) and even if its just a couple sentences I think it'll help me reflect on my time here and hopefully entertain whoever bothers to read this blog.

New Years Eve/Day:

On new years eve I went out with a few chinese friends to eat roast rabbit and fish, both of which were delicious. Then, we went to the grocery store to search for a bottle of whiskey to drink for new years, and our disappointment at not finding one quickly changed to excitement at finding a bottle of brandy for 25 yuan (!!!) which we purchased and drank while singing KTV (Karaoke) with a group of other teachers. Matt and I went to the roof of our apartment building to watch some fireworks and I came home and left tipsy phone messages on my mom, dad, and sister's cell phones. I woke up this morning and embarked on a quest for a hamburger in Chengdu. Success ensued, and now I'm back home downloading the movie 2012 which I can finally watch without it spoiling the rest of the year for me. My other new years resolutions include:

dunk a basketball (before Willie does--I think we bet something on this but I forget what)

independently study chinese for at least 3 hours each week

lesson plan at least one day ahead, and have a quiz each week to make sure that students remember what they learned last week

Happy 2012 from China,

Luke