No Pressure Kids!
Surviving the Chinese school system
I teach 16 junior 1 (equivalent to seventh grade) classes at Changjun Bilingual School in Changsha, Hunan province, China. Each class has about 30 students which makes me a teacher of roughly 500 kids.
“Do they have homework?????!?!” — was the typical response to my lesson on Christmas Holidays in America in all my classes. After explaining that American kids get about a month vacation for winter break in the States, my classes freaked out over the fact that it is uncommon to be assigned homework over the holidays. “How can that be?? Soooo lucky,” they would groan in unison.
One of the best things about teaching English in China is learning about China’s educational system and feeling extremely #blessed that I did not go to school in this country. In a country of 2 billion people, where academic excellence rely mostly on grades and rankings, students must learn to be competitive to distinguish themselves from their classmates. In America, academic success is more of a holistic term that relies on more than just good grades, but also on participation in school activities, sports, leadership, art, etc. But here in China, schooling is mostly based on the two standardized tests that pretty much dictate the rest of a student’s life.
Taken in the last year of middle school, the 中考 zhongkao exam places students into high schools. A high score on the zhongkao will offer entry into a top ranking high school. School rankings are a big deal here. A top ranked high school means highly skilled teachers and education curriculum that will train students better for the 高考 gaokao — the test that high school students take for college placements (similar to SAT/ACT but arguably much, much, much more difficult). A prestigious college implies stronger courses and more esteemed professors that will better prepare students for real life and jobs with higher pay and better benefits. This is all information that is pretty intuitive to us but we take for granted because acceptance into good colleges and jobs in the States are more reliant on other non-educational factors such as experiences, personalities, and aspirations.
Life as a Chinese student consists fully of homework, studying, homework, tutoring, studying, homework, and homework. (Sidenote: this mostly applies to cities and urban areas. Student life in the countryside is quite different). Middle and highschoolers have class about 6–6.5 days a week with school days that go from 7am to 9pm.
Many schools, like mine, have dorms on campus for students to board in during the week. Cutting down on the travel time between home and school will maximize study time. Every single assignment, homework, test is dedicated to preparing students for the zhongkao and gaokao. That classic line that we were once so familiar with — “What is the point of learning calculus…I won’t need it when I grow up,” isn’t much of a question here in China. TL;DR, if you don’t study well, you won’t get into a good school, and won’t be able to marry a good spouse, and won’t get a good job, and won’t earn enough money to take care of your parents or children. And that’s that… so no pressure kids!
Another notable difference between Western and Chinese schooling is the publicity of students’ academic performances. While American teachers are careful about keeping grades and test scores private, it is not uncommon for Chinese teachers to display test scores in the classrooms or hallways for everyone to see. This might be related to the Chinese cultural habit of using public shaming to encourage positive behavior. Students are very aware of where each other stand in class rankings and grades. Usually after big testing weeks, I would ask my classes how their exams went. Many times, they responded by reciting off names of the those who did the best and worst in each subject. “Sally is number 1 in English. She got 98. Harry is number 2 because he got 96. Diex is last one because he only got 28.” Although I am impressed with their striking memorization of each other’s grades, why can’t they ever remember the new vocabulary I teach them??
Yes, this is really only about my seventh graders; it can very well be a much different story for older students. Still though, they do more school work than I ever did in high school. And not to mention their disciplinary duties on campus. In most schools in China, like mine, the academics come hand in hand with discipline. There are no janitors because students are tasked with their own cleaning responsibilities, along with other duties too.
From sweeping the stairwells to cleaning the windows, students take their tasks very seriously. Particularly the classroom monitors who are responsible for making sure that everyone does their eye exercises correctly and are behaving well in class. I get a kick out of watching the student class monitors go on their power trips and reprimand their peers for misbehaving, as if this is their own version of the Stanford Prison Experiment. I do admire the disciplinary aspect as part of the Chinese education, especially for these students who spend most their time at school and not at home where most domestic responsibilities are learned.
I often ask my 13 year-olds how their weekends went and I have yet to receive a positive answer. It is always- “oh, my weekend was bad. not good. just so-so. Too much homework!” I feel for these kids, I really do. But that is because I am holding them to Western standards of education. I can only speak for what I can see and from my observations, but to my surprise, they are amazingly sane for all the pressures that would haunt any American kid.
Although their responses to my “how are your weekends” are usually negative, their smiles still shine away as they run past me to say “hi” in the hallways or as they pile into the room for class.
My class lessons are often met with hyperactive participation to the point where, many times, I struggle to calm them down (though I must admit, some days, it’s like pulling teeth to get them to speak in class…it really depends on the mood they are in). True, they are at that age where just about everything is absolutely hilarious but how are they still so hyper and full of energy all the time? I guess you can say it might be a way to mask their internal stress but I think it’s just their way of learning to balance the rigidity of their academic strife and maintaining their inherent pre-teen vigour and playfulness.
Similar to students at most other schools in China, the students here at Changjun Bilingual School maintain an extremely busy and rigid academic lifestyle. I am pleasantly surprised, however, to find that within this crazy demanding of an academic routine, they still manage to humor me and each other with their weirdness, jokes, and endearing faces that they bring to my English class. It is refreshing to see them find time to build close friendships with their classmates and partake in the few and insignificant extracurricular activities that the school offers. I have yet to see a student eating alone in the canteen and even during mandatory morning exercises when they must run on the track, they stick together as a pack in impressive formation. It’s as if getting through Chinese schooling is easier as a collective even in the competitive nature of grade and student rankings.
I know that school and societal expectations will only intensify for them as they grow older (though college is known to be much more relaxing). I only hope for them to maintain their vivacious spirit and playful energy that they have impressed upon me so far as they escalate onto the haunting pressures of high school and standardized testing.
加油 jiayou students — you got this!
