It's been long enough since I last wrote something that I feel bad for not having written recently, but I'm running into a problem that will probably be a constant one throughout the rest of my four months at this school: I have nothing worth writing about. My days are every bit as humdrum as one would expect them to be, because my writing as thrived on the adventure inherent in moving around every two weeks. The amount of new information that I get on any given day has slowed to a trickle. I haven't done anything important or meaningful for at least a week, if not more. I'd love to keep traveling, but outside of weekends, I don't think I'm going to have all that much time off. Why? Well, Monday is the Mid-Autumn festival, and we're working that day. We're getting three days off in October for National Week, we're supposed to be getting a week.
This may seem odd, but it's actually an important reflection of a lot of what's wrong with the Chinese education system. You see, this is a system that puts quantity far over quality. It's a system that exists almost exclusively to teach to a big standardized test, and as such, kids aren't treated as learners, they're treated as information regurgitatiors. This school takes that concept to an extreme. These kids are in school from 7 AM to 10 PM, and I'm not really sure if they get a day off, and if they do, it's only a day. When I asked about this, one of the teachers simply said, “The headmaster is crazy.” But you know what? In this broken system, it's these kinds of things that get results. This school sends more kids to the top tier of Chinese universities than any other in the province, and they are damn proud of it. I'd say that this is a problem that China is going to have to deal with, but the system is so deeply entrenched that I don't know where they would begin. For my portion of international class, I'm leading discussions every four days, and I'm starting to think that discussion based classes are not going to go over very well here.
The students may be in class all the time, but we are most certainly not going to be. I will be teaching two classes a day, Monday through Friday, for a total of 1.5 hours per day. Every four days I'll be teaching for an extra hour of international class, so as of right now, I'm working a salaried position for 8.5 hours a week, and one week out of four, I'll be working for 9.5 hours a week, and I think that nobody in the world is as unhappy as me to work for so little time for a guaranteed, non-hourly wage. All this really means is more time for me to sit around in a town with nothing to offer me to do in my free time. If I were in Beijing, I'd already have applied for many part time jobs. But this is not Beijing, this is Fuzhou, and there is nobody in this town that requires the abilities that I possess.
And, uh, that's really about it. Things haven't changed here, and I don't really think that they're going to. Life will be as it has been, and that's just something that I'm going to have to adjust to, generally for worse. I've been having trouble sleeping, we'll see if that keeps up. More when I have things worth writing.
-Cooper
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