Wednesday, October 18, 2017

I'm still shaking...

I teach at the Beijing campus of a US school (the US campuses are K-12, my school only has grades 7-11). All of our students are Chinese and they will complete their schooling at one of our US campuses before going to university somewhere in the west, most likely in the States. These parents are not only spending a lot of money, but they are also taking quite a risk. Let me explain.
Chinese education is all about tests. Students take a high school entrance exam to determine which high school they can go to. They are further arranged in classes according to their test scores (the students take all their classes together as a class). Every so often they take exams, the results of which are used to rearrange the classes once again putting those with the best results together and so forth. This grading of both schools and classes is important because the best schools are allotted the most resources and the best classes are given the best teachers. It's also really important because university admissions are based solely on the students' results on the college entrance examination. These exams require students to memorize massive amounts of knowledge (However, the Chinese education system is entirely focused on memorization and includes almost no higher order thinking skills). By choosing to attend an international school like mine, the students are not learning (memorizing) the information on the college entrance exam and are therefore precluding themselves from attending most Chinese universities. While the 7th, 8th and 9th graders could still leave our school and attend a Chinese high school, the situation is further confused by a system called the Hukou. Hukou is a family registration system which determines a number of things, including where you can go to school. If your Hukou is not in Beijing then you cannot attend a Beijing public school. Also, not only are the college entrance exams different in different provinces but if your hukou is in a province other than Beijing you are required to get a higher score to qualify for a Beijing university. Many of our students are from Beijing (i.e. their Hukao is in Beijing), but some of them have lived in Beijing for most of their lives, but because their Hukao is not in Beijing they either have to attend a private school or go back to the province of their Hukao (they also have to return to the city of their Hukao to renew their national ID cards, get a passport and my other things). A few of our students are even from entirely different provinces and only get to go home during breaks. Thus, these parents, and of course their children, are taking a great risk. If they do not do well they will have trouble getting into a good university (and in China, it's all about the ranking). Even if they get into a good university they need to be well prepared enough for the university and to be able to complete their education in English.
This takes us to this afternoon. Today after school we had a parents' meeting. The purpose of meetings like this is to educate the parents on what we do, introduce them to the foreign staff like myself and answer their questions. Because they are taking such a risk with their children's education the attendance rate at these meetings is very high. After a school-wide meeting where the administrators spoke to the parents, we had grade level meetings. There were 1-2 foreign teachers, 1-2 translators, and the class advisor in each grade level meeting (along with the parents of course). I was assigned the 10th grade because while I do teach 7th-grade general science, I mostly teach 10th grade. I teach 10th-grade chemistry and 10th-grade calculus. The other teacher who mostly teaches 10th grade had to be out all this week so I was the only foreign teacher (which also meant we had only 1 translator). The class advisor greeted the students and began to introduce me, but I told him I could introduce myself. I introduced myself in Chinese, as I had planned, and then gave some explanations of the chemistry and calculus courses. I gave the explanations in English, but when we got to chemistry some of the translation was incorrect. So I re-explained, in English. The translation was better, but it was still a little bit off so I explained in Chinese. At this point, you could tell the parents were impressed. When I had given my introduction in Chinese they were impressed, but this of course went well beyond introducing myself. After the introduction of the courses, I opened it up for questions. Some of the questions I understood and some of them I needed a translation. I answered the questions in English initially, but as the time went on I was answering more and more of the questions in Chinese. It sort of felt like an inquisition. I know the parents were curious, and I know they are very concerned with their children's futures, but man oh man some of the questions. I got questions about how do we teach chemistry without a laboratory (this is one of my biggest issues), will we learn the whole textbook, and how does this course compare to the Chinese national curriculum. The last question was challenging because I've never taught in a Chinese public school. It was also a question I had to answer carefully so as to not insult anyone. Remember the Chinese curriculum focuses on memorizing. From talking to my previous students I'm quite sure the Chinese curriculum requires students to memorize a lot of useless information and to doesn't work much on analyzing and other important skills, but I couldn't say that. I had to simply speak about the differences diplomatically and avoid any sort of judgments. Even though I could not address every question and topic without a translator, I'm quite sure the parents were very impressed (matter of fact one of my colleagues, who doesn't speak English by the way, told me they were really impressed). I, on the other hand, was so anxious I didn't even realize until I finished, how much I was shaking!

Monday, October 16, 2017

There's a moat around Beijing

This Wednesday marks the beginning of the 19th Party Plenum. Unless you are extremely familiar with China you're probably wondering, "what in the world is a Party Plenum?" I have spent years connected to China and was unfamiliar with the word, but not the idea behind it. Every five years the Communist Party has a big, secretive meeting where they decide who their leaders are going to be and unknown other things about China's future. When I lived in Baotou I would comment on how relaxed things were because Baotou was politically very far from Beijing (geographically it's not actually that far), but now I live IN Beijing. Events like the upcoming Plenum create for interesting situations.
It all started a few weeks ago. It was a regular evening and I am my colleagues were all in our respective homes watching Netflix and using other western media sites using our VPNs (as you are most likely aware China has the Golden Shield Project that most foreigners call the "Great Firewall." This prevents people in China from accessing about 70% of all outside websites including all Google products and western blog hosting platforms). All of the sudden most of our VPNs went out. We started chatting on WeChat and sharing which servers were still working. Prior to this, I had read an article that said China has to discover each of the VPN servers one-by-one and since it wouldn't be effective to cut the connection to a single server, they would wait until they had discovered a number of connections and then cut them all at the same time. This is, as was confirmed by our VPN provider, in fact, what they did. Our VPN provider worked hard and in about 24 hours or so had all of the servers reconnected.  According to articles I've read online, the government called for an extra layer of protection around Beijing which was deemed a fire moat. This so-called fire moat is a second firewall just around Beijing. This appears to have gone into effect last Friday. All of the sudden the servers went down. Based on messages from the VPN provider and my personal experience, it appears that China is currently constantly cutting connections and the VPN provider (I'm intentionally not stating which one I use) is restoring a few. They have informed users in China that they are working around the clock to maintain service and directed us to use one of only three servers.
Over the weekend, one of my colleagues sent us a message warning of long waits and complete screenings and pat downs to enter the subway. I only went into the main part of the city once (for church on Sunday) and didn't encounter any of this, but today's Beijinger (an English-language publication) showed pictures of security lines at subway stations taking up to 2 hours! Boy am I glad that I don't have to commute via public transportation!
Finally, today our administration sent us a WeChat message informing us that for the next several days (the actual number is unknown) any packages being sent from outside of Beijing will be stopped from entering the city. Thus, there really is a moat around Beijing.

Thursday, October 5, 2017

A walk on the wild side

The most famous site in China is the Great Wall of China. As someone who has lived in China for over four years (total, not consecutively), I have of course been to the Great Wall. The most commonly visited section of the Great Wall is Badaling. This area is accessible by train and super easy to get to but tends to be incredibly crowded. (My mom and I went there in late June or early July and managed to find a section of the wall that had almost no one on it). Another slightly more difficult to access, but still very common section of the Great Wall is Mutianyu. I've been there before (although not in almost 15 years) and also to a place I can't remember the name of (it's been over 15 years since I was there), but it's where the wall comes out of the sea. Now each of these places is really neat and I highly recommend them, but they are highly reconstructed. 
Our first view of the Great Wall as we approached the top of
hills.
Yesterday, two of my co-workers C and K, and I went on a hike to Huanghuacheng which is a mostly wild section of the Great Wall. It was awesome. Matter of fact it was so awesome that we are already planning to do another hike in just over two weeks.
We went with a company called Beijing Hikers and I must admit I was a little nervous about using a tour group because I'm not really into the whole tour, stick together thing, but it turned out to not really be a problem. The way Beijing Hikers is set-up you can do the trip at your own pace. They have a lead guide who puts out red flags and a tail who collects them. You can be anywhere in between and the tail won't pass the last person so that you can go at your own pace.
Definitely not the typical trail found in China.
I'm not positive, but I think part of that is a really old, worn
down part of the wall.
 We drove to a section of the Great Wall that was about 2 hours northeast of the center of Beijing (which is about an hour's drive northeast of where we live) where they then provided us with plenty of water bottles and hiking poles. I almost didn't take a hiking pole, but I'm so glad I did. The hike began with about a 40-minute uphill hike to the wall (if you don't know, the Great Wall is built on the ridges of the mountains). One of the things I liked about this part of the hike was the fact that it was a real hike. Every other time I have been hiking in China it was on well-manicured paths with hundreds of people. This was a hike through the woods where you are pushing back the foliage and feel like you're out on your own (but there are other people nearby and the tail who will help you if you have a problem). Then we arrive at the wall. It was so cool! We were on a part of the wall that was built in the 1500s and hasn't been refurbished. I didn't realize how wild, wild was. The wall at places wasn't distinguishable as a wall (from on top) because there were so many trees and grasses growing on it. When then hiked a few miles to another part of the wall that was re-done in 2004. It still wasn't as "modernized" as sections like Badaling and Mutianyu, but it was definitely easier to hike on. We watched the sunset from the peak  (or nearly, we left a little before the sun finished setting) and then hiked down to the Shuichangcheng (水长城) section (note 长城 Changcheng means Great Wall in Chinese) where we had a well-deserved and delicious feast. While the uphill parts were steep and difficult, I almost think the downhill parts were the hardest. It was a challenging hike (Beijing Hikers ranks their hikes on a scale of 1-5 with 5 being the hardest. This was a 3+. The distance was like a 2, but the hills were like a 4), but if you can physically do it, I would totally recommend it.







It was a gorgeous day, unfortunately, the day was smoggier
than most recent days. 




We hiked all of the wall (and more) that you can see in this
picture. It was definitely a lot of ups and downs.








There was a giant LED screen down in the valley. I saved you
the pictures, but we were taking pictures of it and trying to see
what they were watching (I could see it pretty well with my telephoto
lens, but I needed a tripod to hold it steady for the image to be clear). As
one of my friends pointed out, give us a screen anywhere and
that's what will hold our attention. Sad, but true.


水长城



At first I thought C and K were goofing off. Then I realized we
were all walking like this because it was so steep.