Ahhh, the end of the school year is here.
The last week has been an interesting one.
The weather has turned this once warm, tropical like area into a frigid tundra which really isn't a tundra at all, but the Southern end of China doesn't really know how to heat their homes very well, so the cold circulates and settles in without much to prevent it. A subzero temperature in America is the equalivant to freezing here because of the lack of proper insulation and heating. The days are often covered in low level fog, much like Seattle for most of the winter, but a little colder. The days where the sky is clear and beautiful, the blueness of the atmosphere radiates like the sun in September here. I long for those days where the airconditioner was at its coldest, the mosquitoes having everything from a mid night snack to the full course meal Tim Hogg style and my nights full of nightmares of catching malaria or typhoid.
Now, I lay in bed for hours more than I should, afraid to get out of the bed and face the inevitable chill the morning without much sun brings.
These days my patience has been tried several times as well as the kids that are my students have met their day of reckoning, the day where it shows what kind of students they really are. With the weakest ones, I try to have mercy on them, knowing their plight--knowing that they are smart, just like me, but they don't care for all this that doesn't seem to really matter--this that really bares not much significance on them or what they are going to end up doing once the fantasy of college is behind them.
I try to have mercy on them, either because they remind me of a younger me or because I feel pity for them in their time, their life in China.
There are some basic rules about the students in China that fit into the following catagories:
1. The Serious student. In each of my class, I have about 5 of these people. Most of them are my friends and I know their names. They like English either because they are fascincated by the language or the culture--either way, they enjoy it and they do well with it. You can tell that they do well with all of their subjects because they are not like the other students--they are smart and ahead of their other students.
2. The student. Not much going on here. The majority of people at my school are these people. Not too smart, not dumb, but mostly don't really care for the academic side. They like the foreign teachers and think we are here mostly for the entertainment factor (which we hate, by the way) Most of these students are worried more about the social side of college--they are always going to all these little parties the students put together, but they don't really understand the English classes and their level of comprehension is enough to pass, but this is mostly because the level is set so low.
3. The "I am an English major because my parents made me go to college because we have money and I don't know how to do anything else."
Need I say more? These are the ones who speak little english and don't give a shit.
4. Cheaters.
I fucking hate cheaters.
Every class has a couple of ones that are just cheaters because they think (and they are mostly right until they met me) that they can get away with it. These are almost always males, which is hilarious because I have about 5 guys in everyclass. My final project assingment on its face seemed like it was a difficult assignment-- my students had to read a book in English, keep their thoughts in the journal on the book and then work hard and provide a good paper in the end to document what they learned by reading the book and what they went through in thinking about the themes in the book.
Most of the students turned in book reports of the book, which was okay with me for the most part--the first couple i read I was upset with them, but the more I read, the more I realized I was pushing them too hard with all of this. These kids have been spoon feed an education all their lives--they have difficulties thinking outside of the box, which is what I was asking them to do. I gave everyone a break on this note and seriously scaled back the assignment, admitting defeat.
Yet, I still had several students turn in work that they tried to pass off as if they actually did most of the writing--until I found the exact paper on the internet and accused them of cheating. I will probably upload a couple of examples of papers in the next couple of days, both real and stolen, so you can see the difference. It is just amazing that these kids actually thought I wouldnt find the papers or accuse them of cheating. I was more angry about that--if you are going to cheat, at least spend some time trying to be a cheater!!!

Then the worst part of it all, none of this matters. If you fail a student, they don't have to retake the class, they just keep going forward, getting toward the degree. What motivates any of them to do any better? I think that it mostly comes from a need or a desire to suceed for some of them. For the others, they know that they are stuck in this wierd realm where they pass through without proving themselves to anyone, which must be a strange and somewhat difficult place to be. I try to have patience and understanding with this system, but frustations like these draw me on edge. The school makes light of the foreign teachers finals and puts heavy stress on the week long "finals", which do not account for that much in the long run because the finals don't actually cover as much what is taught in class as much as what the students need to learn, which is what they just memorize a week before the exam. This makes it very difficult to educate--both for the institution and as well as the instructors.