Exam time...

For my last update before I go home for the break, the only thing I can think of writing about is the university and school system in China – since classes and exams have been all that has happened in my life lately. Sorry, no exotic pictures this time, but that should hopefully start again when I come back here in February.

Some of you may know that China is famous for having one of the toughest school systems in the world. In high school, students have little to no life outside school, at least during the week. From what Alice told me about her high school time, her day would start at 7am, and typically end around midnight. All that time would mainly be spent studying frantically, with only small breaks during the day (usually just enough to eat and shower.)

 High school students then need to pass the « gao kao », the final exam that will be their entry ticket to university. The better the grades, the better the universities they can apply for will be. According to one of my friends here, if someone fails the compulsory math exam, it will close them the door to most reputable universities and just leave them with the lower class options, that will most likely not be enough to land a good job. (Thankfully I’m not Chinese. ;))

In China, high school students are subject to intense pressure, mainly from their parents – whether they voice it or not – to succeed, go to university and get a decent job. Many parents will often sacrifice very much for their child’s, or sometimes children’s education, and their dreams of a better future, or a more comfortable life, lie in their offspring’s success. If their child obtains a well paid job, he or she will be able to care for his/her parents much more comfortably than if they were a street vendor.

 However the children are often in a similar same state of mind, and many are very grateful to their parents for their sacrifices, allowing them to go so far in their education and build a decent future. The sheer pressure is often outweighed by a sincere will to reach that place in life that will enable them to buy their parents a house, or give them a comfortable life once they retire.

However, with more and more families being now part of the booming Chinese middle-class, many children have led their life in a comfortable -sometimes spoiled- environment, with one or both parents already having a well paid job, and therefore they do not feel the same kind of pressure. Or at least, not for the same reasons.

The strict university selection seems to be the last major hurdle of their education, though. As soon as a student finally managed to enter a university, the pressure drops. Unlike in Europe or in the United States, Chinese university life is far from being as stressful as high school times.

From what my friends have told me, the hardest part is to get in – the rest is a piece of cake.
 My university ranks number 10 in the official Chinese university ranking, but so far I have not seen many pressure-burdened students working day and night to pass their exams. Actually, the exams themselves are far from being as bad as they could be – in one subject, the final exam was a 200 word essay.

So maybe it is just the laid back Southern spirit, but it definitely isn’t half as bad as I made it out to be.

The teacher– student relationship is also somewhat different from what I was used to in France, and closer to what I had in America. Dialogue is actually permitted, and as twisted as it may seem, if you ever attend class at a French university, you  will see that a casual relationship with a teacher is most of the time as improbable as me chatting it up with George Bush. Here, it isn’t rare to go out for lunch with a teacher, or have a casual chat after class. And sometimes, the much-stereotyped hysterical Chinese girl surfaces, and begs the professor to please pose for a picture with her, amid a cacophony of high pitched, over–enthusiastic squeaks.

My university is famed for being the « power point university », meaning that all the teaching, and a great deal of student work and exams are in the form of power point presentations. Everyone here is an expert in power point making techniques, so my attempts at creating a decent one have seemed rather poor next to my Chinese classmates. In the end however, I finally mastered the art of getting the text to pop up in numerous, exciting fashions. (This is when you clap.)

As for my English speaking class, it has taught me how to properly condut a well rounded speech, without the usual anxiety attacks and miraculously, without notes.
 
Next semester I’m in for 6 hours of Japanese a week, in Chinese please – extensive preparation of the manual is already on the way. The funny thing is that my borrowed Japanese dictionary is Japanese– Chinese, not Japanese– English.
So in order to understand the Japanese in the book, I first need to translate it into Chinese, assimilate it, and then retranslate it into English. And then the manual is obviously entirely written in Chinese and Japanese. Conclusion:  my desk resembles a paper war zone at the moment.

A few pictures that are totally irrelevant...;)

Emeline (my French roommate) and I gave this dog to my other roommate, Yunshu, for her birthday. She decided to wash it and after debating whether it was safe for machine-wash (we decided it wasn't), she was faced with the issue of how to dry it.  So I used my legendary cunningness (you are allowed to point and snigger) to find a solution, and that's what it looked like. It eventually hung for a few days along with the rest of the clothes, although the poor dog looked more like a clumsy paraglider.

A birthday tradition here is to paint the birthday "child"'s face with cake...What a waste, yes, yes. But to be honest, the cakes here are so gigantic that it is hard to have more than one serving - yes, even for me. Actually, what's even more common is to throw the whole cake in the person's face - but that would really be a waste. So we didn't do it.

On Christmas Eve, all of us French people went  to buy  hge amounts of food for our Christmas party. We decided it was the perfect occasion to wear santa hats,  and the whole procession was not without a certain  Snow white and the 7 dwarves feel to it.
And lucky for us, we even had our own living Christmas tree. :)


To finish this entry on an amusing anecdote, you will be delighted to know that my blog can be found by googling « therapeutic importance of camel meat ». (according to my blog statistics.)

I have an odd feeling the person who googled that didn’t find what they were looking for here, since my mention of camel meat was all but in depth. My apologies.