I have no idea how to begin this post, or even what it will be about. Quite a lot of things have happened recently, and I'll try and put them in some order. At the end I think I will include some observations of life around here, because there are some things that need to be said.
We started classes on Monday and the pace of work here is definitely faster than anything I've been exposed to before. Firstly, there was some confusion over our timetables - on paper I have about 24 hours a week (maybe 25), which is about double my lessontime in the UK (because all my courses in England require me to go away and research stuff and learn around topics, whereas here there is direct tuition and you go away and learn the stuff that is very relevant to the books, words you dont know, etc). So that alone came as a bit of a shock. But I discovered some of the lessons are optional (those on Chinese culture for example) and some are repeats (there are 2 culture lessons a week, one is taken at a slower pace, but both are optional and there is no test, it's purely for information and enjoyment). Some are optional but I will be attending (the HSK lessons, for example, more on that when I've actually had one - tomorrow? the teacher didn't turn up to the last one). And some are just nondescript, we were supposed to have a "Second Learning Class" this afternoon, but no one showed up, so we got the impression it's optional. We can ask tomorrow. At any rate we think it might just be a homework class, in which case sod that, I can do homework at home, as the name suggests. So my workload is now down to about 20 hours a week, hurray. But what a 20 hours!
This week alone I have been introduced to somewhere between 70 and 100 new words, new uses for words I knew, or combinations of words, and I've been expected to learn them within a day of seeing them. How it works is, my grammar and language teacher will go through a passage with us from the book. We'll see the new words, say them, use them in the passage, have things explained, etc. When we come back the next day, we have a test on these words. So you have about 24 hours to learn however many new words are being given to you, approximately 30 per lesson. We've had two lessons this week. Yup, that's right, twice this week I have had to learn 30 words (pronunciation, written form, meaning), and be tested on them. It was really brought home when the teacher got two students to go and write words she called out on the blackboard. I did not want to be shown up, so I got down and learnt the words! How much of it stays in my head is another matter, I'm guessing this pace is too intense to store EVERYTHING, unless you are recapping and using the vocab constantly. And even then you have to remember how to write it all. Yikes.
The same goes for listening class, all new words have to be learnt, and the reading class, and so on. This amounts to a LOT of new words. It doesn't help that sometimes I know some of the words in the list but don't know what other words in the book mean. I'm constantly using a dictionary to get the meanings of just about everything. Talk about being thrown in the deep end. Oh and my listening is rubbish. I barely understand the tapes when they are played, the people speak so fast. Talking of fast, that's one thing the day is not. Classes are two hours each, with a break every hour (about 5 or 10 minutes), but that's a lot of classtime. 0930 - 1130, 1140 - 1330, break for lunch, and then some days I have a class from 1600 - 1750. I imagine in the winter that last class will see me leaving university in pitch black and minus 20-something Celsius. Brrrr.
Thinking of "university", this place is WEIRD. It's not at all what I imagine an institute of higher education to be like. Perhaps the languages courses for foreigners recruit differently, I don't know. All I can say is the behaviour of some members of my class (notably the Kazakh males - the girls are really good students and I don't tar them with the same brush at all) is simply unacceptable. They turn up late for classes (three of them trooped in 50 minutes late today), are rude (one of the three walked past the teacher, who was telling him off, and just muttered "yeah yeah yeah"), and basically behave like they are in some crap middle school. Take for example the guy in Marta's class who was asked by the teacher to remove his chewing gum because they were doing pronunciation; he refused, the teacher insisted, so he opened the classroom door and spat his gum into the corridor. In the words of one of the teacher-trainers who will be working here for the next 2 years showing Chinese teachers how to teach Western-style, "I would have made him go out there, pick it up, and put it back in his mouth". Excuse my French, but too fucking right.
It's got to get to a head some time. I don't want to be in a class with these people really. Theyre not disruptive all of the time, but being even a BIT disruptive is inexcusable at a university. And getting up in the middle of a class to leave the room to use your phone ("sorry teacher" - yeah? if you are so sorry don't bloody well do it, moron) is bang out of order. Why the teachers don't take a firmer stance, or just kick people out of their classes, I do not know. It's even written in our handbooks (which we now, have, long story) that such measures can be taken. And yet for some reason they don't. If it goes on like this much longer I think I will be having a word with my teachers or writing a letter to the head of the school. These guys can go in their own damn class and maybe the rest of us can get on and learn.
In other news, Marta and I finally got our Temporary Residence Permits (YAY), and will soon have proper ones stamped into our passports (hope they look nice) ... and we were also given the International Students Handbook, which we should have got when we arrived, but our college forgot (how convenient). This book tells us how to do EVERYTHING from getting our residency permit to getting a dining card for the school canteen. In short, having this on Day 1 would have made things a lot easier for us. Still, we have copies now, that's what matters.
Penultimately, could someone please tell me if they have ever encountered something like this in child-raising around the world: the children here, up to a certain age (I assume whenever they know to go to the toilet on the toilet and not in their pants) have trousers that have been manufactured with a split around the middle, which allows the kid to squat / be held by their parents and urinate / defecate freely without soiling their clothes. This is bad enough, but when a parent is holding their child over paving and there is a grassy plot five meters away, one has to wonder about the workings of the Xinjiang mind. I've not seen it elsewhere in China so I don't know if it extends to other countries nearby, or other provinces, or what. I know nappies are expensive (and wasteful?) but there are things like terry-cloths, right? It's really brought home when you walk down the street and see a kid run out of a shop, squat himself down on the steps outside, pee, and then get up and run off again. I hope winter comes soon because they can't keep their kids like this when it's below zero. Disgusting. Simply disgusting.
Oh and finally, to Mum, Aunty Anne, or anyone else not technologically inclined, you can all leave comments on this blog (which will centralise things for me and save emailing everything) by clicking on the comments link, the grey bit underneath each entry that says how many "attempts to shut me up" have taken place. You don't need to be a member of blogger or wordpress or google, you can leave your name or remain anonymous, it's up to you, but I do like people commenting and I do (occasionally) respond! :)
9 comments:
i've seen it in china before. not sure where, but i was only in shenzen and beijing and hong kong, so at least one of those three places does the whole slit-in-the-pants thing. and as a biologist, it makes me die inside.... oh the grossness...
good luck on the classes O_O
Yeah, the kids here also have "open bottomed trousers"....seen at least one parent holding the kid up to pee on the street so far - and this was in the middle of one of the posh(ish) shopping streets!
Our classes sound about the same as yours, in other words, awful! Can't follow the teachers much of the time, and we also have the let's-have-a-test-on-30-new-words-after-we-only-just-learnt-them thing! It's bad.
Hannah (as in, Newcastle Hannah) x
lari, thanks for the info - now i know it's a national condition ;)
hannah (lol, Newcastle Hannah, who else?!), your comments dont inspire me but at least i know more people are having roughly the same experiences. what nationality are the other students in your class? and is it like mine, a difference male / female disruptiveness? i dont know about the learning-so-much-in-one-go, short term memory is all well and good but there's only so much i can RETAIN. at least we have a long weekend, woop, got this monday off! (same in Beijing?)
I think my mom has mentioned the pants-slit thing, and she went to orphanages around China.
I can't imagine classes like that. It seems like it's impossible to retain that much info. I know learning languages is different because you have to memorize words, but I'm kind of at a point where memorizing formulas and stuff just drives me nuts. It's definitely take a lot of repetition to for a couple hundred new words to sink in. And even then it might squeeze some other words out...
Good luck!
several civilisations employ the slit pant technique as it is cost-effective especially where there is a lack of sanitary facilities generally, and water, in particular. The Inuit also employ this method of toilet-training, including the fact that the child being carried is to hold on to its internal functions until the mother sets the child down to relieve itself... in much the same way as a dog-owner takes his pooch out several times a day - except in the UK and USA people are encouraged to carry pooper-scooper and specially-prepared bags for the resultant mess + in some parks, here in Brum, for instance, there are lidded bins for the filled bags. Of course, cats don't have such a regimen,which is why lawns on which no cat is resident frequently pong to high heaven with the matter released on to it... Just keep travelling and all that is under the sun will be shown to you. Not quite an old confucian saying, but it might be. Possibly Pirke Avot, ditto?
Hi, Harry
Very impressive what you are going through.
Just remember that you are going to stay there for some months.
It really is culture shock. And will make you a wiser and more tolerant person.
And HAVE FUN !
Yeah, we get Monday off too :) About half of my class are Korean (8 of them), then we have 3 French, 2 Thai, 1 Russian, 2 Portuguese, 1 Japanese, 1 Papua New Guinean (lol, is that right?!), 1 other English/American/Taiwanese/South African guy (he's moved around a lot, but was born in Milton Keynes, so I guess that makes him English!) and me! None of them are disruptive though...students here must just have more respect for the teachers/classes in general I guess.
oh hai. postcardz0r arrived :]
odd how our mail coincides, no? sorry again for waking you up this morning - won't do it again (much. your fb note seemed to imply that you quite liked it...) kthxbai!
good thing you have your medical over and done with: http://icanhascheezburger.files.wordpress.com/2008/09/funny-pictures-cat-is-suspicious-of-your-intentions.jpg
Probably another long comment, knowing me.
Your classes actually sound considerably better than ours. We were expected to learn our new words at a much slower pace. Whilst it may seem like hell right now, trust me, you'll need it. I don't know what Newcastle was playing at in our first two years; since being in China we know we are capable of learning at a much faster speed (even taking into account things such as linguistic immersion) and that our life would have been made much easier had we learnt more in England. You may not retain all of the words by any stretch of the imagination, but even just a few a day will mean you can soon cope with every little snag much more easily.
But then, perhaps they are just trying REALLY HARD because it's the start of term. Who knows with Xinjiang Normal 'University' (as we have christened it). Oh just went back onto your blog to read a bit more and turns out you have also added the inverted commas. How unsurprising.
Ah, the Kazakhs. How I miss them. Put in your complaint early. They will not change. They will not be disciplined. They will not be kicked out. Just trust me on this one. Foreign students at XNU pay more than domestic students, and so the university does everything in its power to hold on to them. So nothing will be done about them, ever. However, the fact that the university is so desperate for funding and credibility means you have one HUGE advantage. All you need to do is mention (probably best to say to Anniwar, who will suddenly snap into action) that Newcastle will not be impressed to hear of this, and that you are seriously considering asking them to change their exchange program to a different university. Even if the threat is entirely untrue, it will scare the crap out of them. Then give them a way to help you. For example: "Anniwar, I need to talk. This is a joke. I refuse to study in a class of students like this. I demand that I am moved into a different class, with only like-minded classmates. If not, I will be making sure that Newcastle hear about this and I know they will be very unhappy to hear that one of their students is being put into such a situation." [Tried and tested, my friend.] He will probably, if he hasn't already, come out with some gabble about how he was in London once and he knows conditions are different, but this is China and so you must accommodate. Tell him that this is shocking even for China, because you have friends at other institutions and they have informed you that...blah blah blah. He is easy to wrap around your little finger, trust me. If you get fake-angry (or real-angry, as the case may be) enough, he will either get on the phone and start yelling into it, or suddenly and without warning yell "NADIRAAAA!" and the poor woman will come rushing into deal with anything he can't be bothered with. She's more or less reliable, but the best guy in the whole office is Wanpar. He is a saint : )
Oh yeah and I am sorry to say, but: Harry, Harry... so naive. "I hope winter comes soon because they can't keep their kids like this when it's below zero."
WRONG WRONG VERY WRONG. I'm sorry to break the news, but the slit is an all year round feature. Minus 28 (as it regularly hit, and stayed at, this year) and they'll still be doing it. Oh and also I remember from an older post that it says it is an average of minus 15 for winter? Well we thought so too, but you're probably looking at an average of minus 23 or so. Not that it makes much difference once it gets to that temperature. Plus the shockingly high 34 degrees is not actually that high either. The forecasts for Urumqi are always wrong, and they regularly change them on, or after the day. In July to August I would say the average temperature was around 35, and the sun makes it feel hotter. However as it hits the mid-twenties by about the start of May, you'll have got accustomed to it by then. And the dry climate, too. When you get back to Britain, it actually feels wet. Nobody believes me when I say this apart from the other people from Urumqi who of course have experienced it too. You'll see.
After that long aside, where was I? Oh yeah the famous slit. It is all over China, though in some of the more modern Eastern cities, a few of the richer kids have no slit, or at least the slit can be closed. Rare though. (oh and they may have prams too, if they're rich enough. Have you noticed yet that prams are virtually non-existent?)
To be honest, perhaps because I am completely desensitized to it now, I really don't see the problem with the slit. It is much cheaper than nappies and much more convenient, everybody does it so there's no stigma, and it's no more unhealthy than animals doing it. Aside from all the airborne human diseases... but still. It was never really an issue. Wait till you see them making, yes, FORCING their children to pee on the floor of restaurants and on trains (when there are actual TOILETS, as well). Now that is when it bypasses logic and convenience. Oh and the hole in the floor by the train washbasins? Not just for drainage of the swilling water. I have seen more than enough people use it to pee. : )
And the bucket of water is used to clean, not to wash hands. If they're not washing their hands outside by the basins, they're just not doing it at all. They basically just throw the bucket over the floor and the squat and that does the job.
Sorry for the comments relating to much older posts... I talk too much.
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