A Typical Friday Afternoon

This is a synopsis of a meeting we had last Friday. This meeting was called by the Dean of the English Department and all foreign and Chinese English teachers were required to attend as well as select students. Teachers who had regularly scheduled classes were forced to cancel their classes and required to schedule a time to make them up (note, the foreign teachers all have their finals next week).

The meeting was really a lecture by said Dean. The topic of the lecture was "Learner Autonomy". I should say that some of the ideas contained in this lecture were good, but they were self evident to anyone who is accustomed to a western style of education. The basic message was students need to develop personal responsibility for their own learning and teachers need to actively engage students in the learning process. Of course we had to sit through 40 PPT slides, each one containing two complete paragraphs of text, to get this message.

The lecture was held in a large auditorium style room. And as I have come to learn, the fact that the audience of 300 people were eating, talking, grading papers, reading books, and otherwise seemingly not paying attention is quite normal. The Dean nevertheless claimed he was in control and loudly read every single word on every single PPT slide pointing at each one with a large bamboo stick. Can you say power trip? He completely ignored the one individual who tried to ask a question, because, after all, it was his talk.

Here are some of my favorite quotes from his slides (note the fact that in spite of the presence of 8 native English speakers on campus he did ask anyone to proofread his slides):

"self-realizationist"
"self-discontented"
"Students abuse their privileges of independence and freedom, waste time at will."
"The students reflection shows their confusion about they can learn efficiently."
"Learning is the goal of teaching."
"Students should be dominated in the classroom."
"Arouse students..."
"Integrant and together cultivate..."
"However studying should occupy all of the free time on the schedule. It is important to set aside time for relaxation, hobbies and entertainment as well."
"If you as a University student fail to do an assignment, or miss classes, you should be disciplined by yourself or by the Department." (self-flagellation anyone?)

This last really highlights the experience here. We are teaching 20 year-olds as if they are in high school. We take attendance at every class. Monitors assess whether students go to class at night and the mandatory reading period at 7:30am. Students cheat freely and are supported by their teachers in copying things from the internet-even their senior thesis papers. These students have no experience with time management or work prioritization. You can fail 4-5 of your 9 classes in a semester and be allowed to continue. Each student in each major takes exactly the same classes, whether or not they passed the previous year's class in that subject. Their world revolves around passing the national exam in their subject area so they spend their time memorizing vocabulary and answering fill in the blank style questions. Foreign languages are taught by teaching separate classes in: Listening, Dictation, Reading, Writing and Speaking. Even the Dean acknowledged in his talk this was simply because this is how the textbooks are written and it is easier to assign teachers to classes that way, but it doesn't work. He didn't say anything about changing it however.

Welcome to China.