Back to school

The vacation has finally ended. It took a few nights in the library, but I have posted all the highlights from my eight weeks of vacation. It was a blast and was pretty cool to go from -25°C in Haerbin to 30°C on the beaches of Vietnam. I have been back in Changzhou for two weeks now and am teaching my new classes. The weather has been pretty miserable, cold and rainy, but it has been a joy to meet my new students and catch up with friends from the previous semester. One thing that reminded me of high school back home is all the new clothes the students got over Spring Festival. I have really impressed some students by complimenting their new jackets. They can't believe how I can know it's new, and I don't tell them that it's just a lucky guess.

If you have been reading this blog much, you well know that my work here is pretty easy, and incredibly small in amount. This semester is almost laughable. I have ten (yes ten) hours of class each week. Once again it's a three day work week, with Wednesday and Friday off. At TU, most professors had between 12-18 hours of class per week. But, they also had five or six hours of required office hours, and had to be spending a fair amount of time on research or some type of project related to their field. They also had to prepare pretty legitimate lessons for class (as they had at least some demanding, inquisitive students). I think this is probably average for most colleges across the US and the rest of the Western World. The Chinese professors here teach maybe 15-20 or maybe 25 hours a week at our university. They are expected to do some 'research', but according to the professors, this can be fudged or plagiarized, as is the modus operandi in China. Yet, they get paid 1/2 or 2/3 as much as we do. They are not provided with free apartments. I rehash this information to show how laughable (or luxurious) my work situation is. I genuinely feel a bit of guilt about this. I have told both Teddy, my advisor, and Connie, the language department correspondent, that I am willing to teach more. I know that some of the English majors would like to have an oral English class this semester (not all of them have it). There is not a shortage of classrooms on the campus. So, the only reason why we work so little seems to be because that's how it was done last year (and the year before, and so on).

As for the specifics of my 'work', I teach three oral English classes to freshmen and an economics course. The oral English classes have gone wonderfully so far. The students are obedient, eager, cheery, and some are quite funny. In just the second week of class, one of my students, Rabbit (don't worry, she sits next to Sheep) assertively called me over to tell me that one of the other students had spoken in Chinese, and thus broken my only rule: English only, only English. I told her that although I was happy that she was concerned for the educational welfare of the class, I have to hear the student speak in Chinese for his name to appear on the board. Now, Rabbit had earlier been the victim of my active ears, and her name was on the board already. So, I used the incident as an opportunity to teach the class the word snitch. Rabbit unenthusiastically recognized that she was telling on the other student to get another name on the board more so than out of concern for the learning environment.

I did a personality treasure hunt activity with the class and part of the reason was to learn more about them. One of the thing which astonishes me about the students here is their homogeneity. Jiangsu province is officially 99.6% ethnically homogenous, although it is really lower because of the many migrant workers, who are often not Han Chinese, but don't get counted in the census. Additionally, the students also seem to have had incredibly similar life experiences. There is a pretty wide margin in income between many students' families, but this doesn't seem to have significantly affected their lives. The treasure hunt game allowed me to find out a few things. Of the 105 or so students in the three classes, none have been outside of China. This is due mostly to the little discretionary income of most Chinese, and due to the fact it's not really easy for them to get visas (but not hard either). Additionally, like America, China is so big that domestic travel offers a lot on its own. I don't really see this as a problem, many of them want to go abroad and probably will as China becomes richer and richer (well some of China). Of the same 105 students, only four were born outside of Jiangsu province. Two in bordering Anhui, one in Jiangxi, and one in Hunan. Two of the students have since moved with their families to Jiangsu. So, 2 of the students are from outside the province. This geographical homogeneity is very different from what I experienced at TU, where just over half of the students were from out of state, and over 10% of them were international. Along with this, all of the students scored within a very close range on the college entrance exam (and were thus 'assigned' to this school), they have all been taught with the similar Chinese Communist Party approved books, and the vast majority are only children to married parents. I am well aware that the States are well known for being such a melting pot (or salad bowl) of cultures and ethnicities. But it, even after six months here, is still shocking to see the incredible homogeneity which my students exhibit. It is just one of the many things which makes living here so interesting and valuable.

Another very interesting thing is that by majoring in finance, I am somehow qualified to teach economics at the college level in China. Now, apparently the fact that economics is a social science and finance is a business college subject isn't a real problem here. Although you may doubt it, the word economics was all the information I was given before the first day of class. I teach this class twice a week, and it's very small, so I have already gotten to know the students pretty well. There are less than ten students in the class. All of the students have their bachelor's degree, and will be going to Coventry University in England this coming fall, to get a Master's in a business field. They currently attend a year long preparatory program, with almost full time classes getting ready to go abroad. Now the word economics could warrant four years of college courses or a five minute discussion. But I have become pretty used to the total lack of direction that the department gives us, so I am taking a quick walk through the history of major economists, and then will see if the students can apply some basic theories to modern situations. So, that's a pretty good summary of what I will be doing this semester. I have found a few things to occupy my extra time, although I still chuckle to myself every time I look at my schedule. My decision to come here was kind of a shot in the dark, but with a comfortable salary, free housing, and a pretty intriguing ten hours of work every week, I am quite happy with how it's turned out.