The Real China: The Chinese Classroom

As a foreign teacher in China, I was only expected to teach oral English. Grammar and reading were the domain of the Chinese English teachers. My expertise, coming from an English-speaking country, was speaking and teaching Chinese students how to speak. My native English ability made me valuable to the university- enough that they would pay for a good portion of my flight costs and provide me an apartment for the 11-month term of my contract- because I could not only model proper pronunciation, but take this language that students had been studying in grammar books and speak it. Yes, grammar and language knowledge (and especially knowing how to teach) are important for teaching English as a Second Language, but if you can form new sentences in English, at will (this is the test for language fluency), then you are an expert. Growing up in English-speaking culture and speaking this language from childhood will alert you, naturally, when a Chinese student asks, “Where are you come from?” and grant you the authority to correct him, “It’s ‘Where do you come from?’” No grammar credentials needed.

But I had studied English in college and taken an English language teaching course, so I had some ideas about how best to get students to work through the language. The zeal of naivety is a powerful substitute for real experience.

I had a real problem though that every language must face: no one can learn to speak by watching a native; they must be guided to attempt speaking for themselves.

I had gathered from Chinese students and from their English teachers, both foreign and Chinese, that the oral English classes followed a regular pattern where the teacher would give a topic at the end of one class (e.g. “Where would you like to live in the future?”), and during the next class the students would speak (i.e. read or recite) what they had prepared. I could see the benefit in that: the Chinese classroom is all about following precedent, and speaking extemporaneously terrified most pupils with the dread of embarrassment in front of their peers. I might not know what word to use and then I’ll be standing in front of everyone like a fool, without anything to say!

Also, if the right topic were chosen, the students would be eager to share (in my experiences, an eager class response did occur a few times, but it was rare. The dead look on students’ faces usually said, “You expect me to talk about what?”). So if I chose to follow this method, the students wouldn’t balk at something new, a good portion of the class could pretend that they were really speaking English, and a few bold adventurers might actually wade into new conversational waters.

I decided not to do that though. Speaking is its own language skill, and real speech and conversations follow conventions and patterns that occur in real time. Speech has many forms, and even though public speaking on prepared topics is one of those forms, I wanted my students to practice speaking spontaneously in real life scenarios. So, for my lesson structure, I would introduce and explain the speaking topic of the day (e.g. “Asking for Information”), then demonstrate an exercise for the first scenario (“You are trying to find the school library, so you ask a professor for directions.”). After that, I would tell the students to role-play this with a partner, and after about five minutes- more or less- I would call for everyone’s attention and have a couple sets of partners repeat their role-play conversation for everyone so that we could review the exercise as a class. A sensible plan, perhaps, but there were some inherent problems of the Chinese classroom I could not overcome.

I mentioned that Chinese students follow precedent and avoid speaking up to prevent loss of face. This is not just a natural temperament shared by many. It is a near-universal disposition, a product of the culture that has been built in by all the small things that shape the students’ everyday experience. In contrast, American students are expected to speak up and they are rewarded for it. When I was a high school student I dreaded having to raise my hand to earn my “Participation” grade. Shyness and reserve are either mildly disdained or avoided. Many American classrooms today are shaped by expectations for open discussions. The theory is that student and teacher interaction is best facilitated through a circular or U-shaped seating arrangement where everyone can see each other’s face and the teacher is about equidistant from every desk (lecture halls are different, of course, and not every classroom is set up this way).

In China, every classroom I taught in was a large, long room with a chalkboard and podium in the front, facing rows of long, narrow desks and benches- bolted to each other and bolted into the floor. I saw no exceptions to this. Some classrooms had better furnishings- that is, they had a computer and a projector or a better chalkboard or a podium that was sturdy and didn’t fall apart when you set your bag on it.

A typical classroom at my university. The back chalkboard was always painted on with writing and pictures, usually some kind of slogan. In this case, the large characters say “Teacher’s Day,” which is celebrated on September 10th in China.

From my teacher’s vantage point, it looked like Venetian blinds laid out, with 30 to 50 students crammed in between the slats. The desks were only a bench top with (maybe) some cubbyhole space beneath to hold pens and a couple books. And the seating was very narrow and uncomfortable; there wasn’t enough room to stretch out, so most students would hunch forward and lean into the desks with their chests. Try sitting side-by-side with someone on a constricting bench and carrying on a conversation with them. This, and being asleep, is why people don’t speak up in church. And it is why Chinese students, having spent their young lives this way, will not speak in class. Goad or coax them as I would, they would not. They would not speak up in my class, they would not speak up for a pass, they would not speak up here or there, they would not speak up anywhere.

Add to the seating arrangement the Chinese reverence for the teacher, who usually lectures, and phones and other various distractions, and you have the ingredients that prevent interaction. Seating might seem like a small, surmountable thing, able to be overcome by planning and will, but its dominant effect is subtle and psychological, shaping the teachers’ and students’ ideas on classroom learning. It physically inhibits social interaction between students sitting in the desks by directing their eyes forward, and without an environment conducive to social interaction there is no conversation. Students believe the teacher doesn’t notice them individually, they disappear into the block of seats. No one wants to speak up and break the anonymous silence. That would put everyone’s eyes on them.

This is the Chinese classroom, and sitting in this environment for the large majority of their day, for most of their life, has shaped those students to the degree that I could ask them if 600 RMB ($100 U.S.) was the typical monthly rent for an apartment and repeat myself, rephrase the question, ask loudly, “Yes? No?” and still not get an answer from anyone. It was infuriating. Over and over I experienced that you can bring a horse to water, but you cannot make it drink. When lesson planning, if I came to a part where the students had to give their input, I would ask myself, “Can they be creative? Can I trust them to participate and move the flow of the lesson?” Having learned quickly from classroom experience, I knew whenever I asked myself this question that the answer was no. I would either start my lesson plan over or work out an alternative for when the students would sit in stupefied silence.

I met four students who lived in this UNFINISHED off-campus apartment.

This is their kitchen. I hope they weren’t paying $100 a month for this.

Really, the way things worked out, I learned that during the role-play time a small number of students would do the exercise I asked them to do, most might mumble to whoever was sitting next to them and kept an eye out for me, keeping their voices so low that I couldn’t hear them no matter what they were saying in whichever language they were saying it in, and a good number made little effort to conceal themselves doing math homework, reading for another class, taking my picture on their cell phone, sleeping, or text messaging. I had to accept the bad and work with it. Discipline is tough to maintain period; across languages and cultures a novice like myself stood no chance.

In my teacher training prior to China, I was taught to walk around, listen in, and offer correction or answer questions as needed. But when the students are huddled together in a block of long, narrow desks, I could only look on from the outside (that’s not a bad metaphor for China: a mass of humanity crowded together, indecipherable and impenetrable from the outside). So I would pace up the aisles and shimmy sideways, banging my knees, as I passed through the last row of desks, making a pretense of listening in and observing the students’ faces and behaviors.

I noticed all the little details that they had in common. How they would twirl their pens compulsively, each one fluidly repeating their favorite motion and passing the pen around their fingers. As a student, I was a compulsive doodler, but I never noticed any artists in China, only dexterous pen acrobats. And when they wrote, they all used their right hand- no exceptions. I asked a Chinese teacher if I observed that correctly, and she said yes, all students are taught to write with their right hand. I had to infer that this was because of the complexity of the Chinese writing system, where each word has a precise way to be written and the stroke order must be memorized.

When I watch Americans write, I sometimes notice people who invert or reverse the stroke orders I learned in school. That is, they might write the letter “e” starting clockwise from the tail and spiraling in, opposite the way that I do. But handwriting is sloppy in America. It’s very common and trite to hear people joke that they can’t even read their own writing. I always questioned what the purpose of handwriting was if it was illegible, even to the hand that scribbled it. Why not scratch whatever symbols come to mind if the writing doesn’t even look like English script? But that’s America, where anything goes, and being casual and nonjudgmental are unimpeachable virtues.

Not so in China, where students are still expected to meet a standard other than being diverse or tolerant. With Chinese characters, if a writer painted with the ink brush in the left hand, it would look slightly different; every stroke would be off because the hand would have to push the brush instead of pull. Plus, every Chinese word must be memorized. There are no phonics to make learning new words easier, the mnemonics are not at all intuitive, and everyone is expected to learn to write the characters the same way. Repetition is the only way. When each word must be memorized, and universal literacy is on the line, that demands that everyone studies hard, using the same method.

Strangely related to my classroom handwriting observations, I recoiled at the sight of the long fingernails that some of the girls and a lot of the young men grew out on their little finger. I never learned the real reason for this style. One friend told me it was convenient to have one long nail to scratch things and handle things and whatnot. Perhaps. As an observer, I can say that it was effective in raising the hair on the back of my neck in mild disgust.

Not the best picture, but it’s the only one I have where you can see the long pinky nail. Look closely at my stylist’s right hand.

I would scan the students’ shirts and smirk in confusion if I saw English words misspelled or words arranged randomly. If the clothing companies wanted to use English, I thought, why don’t they just copy and paste text they find online? These companies copy everything else. Occasionally, one student might have had on an American college sweatshirt or a sweater that read “Nebraska.” I would always ask those students, “Have you been to Nebraska? Do you know what that means?” Of course, they had no idea, and I usually had to point at their shirt and tug at mine to indicate to them that I was asking about their shirt.

I became used to seeing variations of the same five basic hairstyles for girls (four of which had bangs that stopped even with the brow line) and the same three styles for boys (buzzed short, combed across, and the popular “poof”- a tangled mess of hair that stuck up as if they woke up and never combed it). When I saw a male university student with long strands down to his shoulder blades, it shocked me. I’m sure it was the same reaction middle America had to the first longhairs of the 60’s. So, bored by the interchangeable bobs, I differentiated the students by character traits and fashion choices; things like brightly colored eyeglass frames, over-sized frames on some girls, or even frames worn without lenses. I thought that it was foolish, if not pretentious to wear frames without needing vision correction, but those who wore them defended the fashionable practice for its “cool” style.

Most of my female students’ hairstyles conformed to this.

Every so often I would see some sort of English reading material on a student’s desk space. I would ask her if she was reading the book for class or pleasure, and maybe try and milk some questions out of it if I thought the student was friendly and able to handle a bit of small talk. Some students, though, I knew to just walk by. Either they would clam up with embarrassment and fail to respond audibly, or I had learned from past experience that there was no way they were going to put together a complete English sentence. One student, when I asked her a question related to the class exercise, looked me right in the eye and quietly but coldly told me, “Please, leave me alone.” And that I did, for the rest of the year.

In the middle school I taught at, more so than at the university, I noticed a lot of calligraphy practice books and pens with special writing nibs. Throughout China, I observed brushwork and fanciful writing fonts far more often than images and icons. The Chinese writing system is what the people grew up learning, what they practiced, and hence, what they loved. It is always on the Chinese mind. I even acquired the Chinese habit of breaking down the characters I saw into brush strokes and practicing their stroke order with my finger on my palm or thigh.

And speaking of writing, I have to note the absence of pencils and erasers. The Chinese didn’t write with them (not that, in America, pencils are preferred over pens for writing purposes, but they are more common in my observation). So whenever the students made a mistake, they would pull out a thin wheel of tape, run it over the section they wanted to remove, and peel away a thin layer of paper from their sheet. This mandatory school supply could be spotted on most desks, and during a written test the tape wheels would be passed back and forth as students nervously tore away at their paper.

These weren’t for white correction tape. They had clear tape meant to pull off the top layers of ink and paper.

One unsightly thing I could not help but notice was the soft black hairs on a few girls’ upper lip, and my occasional glimpses of coarse leg hairs and underarm hair. I hesitate to mention it, I don’t mean to shame any of the young women, but body hair was a not uncommon part of real life in China. Most of the Chinese I saw grew hardly any body hair, but when it did sprout up, it was obvious against their light skin. I don’t know how the Chinese view it, but it always startled me whenever I saw girls with leg and armpit hair. Please note, this was not the norm I saw, and on average I would say that most had fair features and smooth skin.

But the truly disgusting thing I observed among my students, the feature that both sickened and infuriated me, was the sight of red, purplish, puffy hands. I’m sensitive to the shape of hands, and by that I mean that I notice the look and character of individuals’ hands, which probably began from my love of drawing, so when I first saw a girl with fat, square fingers instead of slender curves, I passed it off as a physical anomaly that I would not want to hold hands with. But then I saw it again, and then again on another girl: the skin was past red and now had the deep purple color of a contusion. What was wrong with these girls’ hands? I had never seen this before. Skinny girls with fat, square hands.

The question had an obvious answer. Just as my face was sore and red from constant exposure to the cold, these girls had chilblains on their hands from sitting in unheated classrooms throughout the winter, taking notes with un-gloved hands. Yes, because we were south of the Huaihe River (the geographic dividing line), the Chinese government did not allow central heating in buildings, except for department stores and some hotels and restaurants. Because we were right on the southern edge of the Huaihe River, that meant our city was as far north as one could get in China and still not have central heating. So, all winter long, from dormitory to dining hall (or “canteen”), from the classroom to the library or anywhere else, everyone had to wear layers of winter clothing, but either finding it superfluous or an unnecessary expense, most students went without hats and gloves. Perhaps the circumstances could not be helped, but seeing how inflamed those girls hands became, and seeing how normal they thought it, how overlooked it was, how assumed it was, was a small detail that swelled my indignation.

We’re wearing coats because there was no heat in our classroom. Side note: my student, John, in the purple coat in the upper left, wore glasses just for show. They either had no lenses or non-corrective lenses