Life at school.

---

I will use this diary entry to tell a little about the daily life of a student in the final years of high school in China. The students at our school are in 3 grades and range in age from 16 to 18. They have entrance exams for university at the end of their final year (grade 3). These entrance exams not only determine which university they can go to - it is almost impossible to get into high rated universities here - but as importantly how much money they pay for their fees at university. As the people are very poor and consider an education their escape from poverty how much they pay for their education is very important to them.The higher your marks the less you pay to attend.

Our school is made up of two campuses - the one we live on which is very large and about 6 years old - and the original campus which is 20 minutes away and very old, dirty and rundown. The students at that campus are not as bright so we presume that campus has a lower rating then the new school. We teach at both schools. The new school has 16 grade 1, 18 grade 2 and 27 grade 3 classes. The old campus has 16 grade 1, 8 grade 2 and no garde 3 classes. All the classes have over 70 students in each class but I was told that there are over 80 in the grade 3 classes. The students study Chinese, English grammar (in Chinese),
Computing, Polictics, Maths, Chemistry and Physics. We think they have some classes in History and Geography but they really don't know much about other countries and we've been asked to spend time 'telling them interesting things about other countries and Western culture'.

They attend school classes six and a half days a week. The only free time they get is between midday and 6pm on Saturday. During this time they can leave the school to go shopping etc, though most of them just go to their dorms to catch up on sleep. At 6pm they have to be back for evening classes. Sundays are not considered holidays here. They get a few days off to celebrate the spring Festival (Chinese New Year), a short break in May for Labour Day, another few days in October for National Day holidays plus 2 months off during July and August. However the Grade 2 students will only get a one month holiday as they will do a months preparation for Grade 3. A lot of students will however attend summer school elsewhere during this time to do intensive study courses however. A lot of foreign teachers come to China during those months to teach English. The students will spend the whole day with the teacher studying one subject. I guess we could teach at a Summer School but we have absolutely no intention of doing it.

All the teachers and most of the students live at the school, though a few students at the old school do go home in the evening. The teachers will spend all their working life at the school, some have dreams of going to Australia etc one day but they still say that will retire at 65 and expect still to be working and living at this school then. Most started teaching at 18 many years ago and are presumably not university educated. They only teach one subject and only the teachers who teach English can speak English. Even the headmaster of the school can't talk to us - he relays message via Champion.

The senior teachers live in apartments like ours, presumably rent free as we do. Junior teachers have small single rooms in the students apartment buildings. All the students sleep in dormitories, 16 to a small room in 8 bunk beds. The beds are metal with wooden bed bases. No mattresses are provided - the students bring their own - most sleep on thin cotton squares of wadding which they air each day by hanging them from windows and over the balconies. They have no curtains or heating and no bathrooms. They wash themselves and their clothes in buckets, as do the junior teachers. The dorms are segragated of course and their life will be the same when they all go to university - they will be in their mid twenties before they will enjoy any form of relationship with the opposite sex as most will go to university for 6 years. This is one of the many sacrifices they make to get an education. They live their lives by rules and have very little freedom at all. Grade 3 students have visited us (we don't teach them) and told us "We must suffer to be rich and powerful one day." They are very aware that they have hard lifes, especially in comparison to Western students. For all that 'luxury' they pay 1000 yuan (6.2 yuan to the Aussie dollar) a semester. This covers their bed, text books and lessons. All food is extra.

The school day starts everyday at 6am with loud military music played over the speaker system to wake the students up. By 6.40 they are all outside doing 'exercises', which usually means running around the perimeter of the school. We often hear them running past our apartment as we wake up. At 7.15 they head to their classrooms for half an hour of reading or revision before going to breakfast in the canteen at 7.45. Breakfast consists mostly of noodles doused in a sesame flavoured sauce with a sprinkling of vegetables (usually a spoon of shallots and peppers), a sweet bun or anegg whic has been hard boiled in soya sauce. After breakfast the students are back in the classroom by 8.25 ready for lessons at 8.30. Our day starts then though only if we have to teach the first lesson - some days we may not start work until second or third lesson. We are only expected to be at school when we teach.

The students have four 45 minutes each morning and three in the afternoon. Between each lesson they have 10 minute breaks though there is a 20 minute break after the second lesson. It is announced with more loud military music being played as all the students file outside to the grounds where they line up for another 10 minute exercise session before going back into class.
Lunch is at 12.10 to 2.30. Most of the students go to road side food stalls set up outside the school to eat - food is similar to breakfast but a lot of deep fried skewered food is also eaten. Bananas, chicken feet, dried fish, vegetable slices and squares of tofu (grey in colour) is all deep fried together in big vats. Fried rice (with very little vegetable) is eaten widely as well as pancakes filled with noodles and a spicy seasoning (they are very nice). Bread like a thin damper is also cooked on the sides of metal drums filled with hot coals. We've tried a lot of the food sold but consider it snack food and would not like to live on nothing else as the students do. It's 'bulk' food, filling but not particularly nutritious though at the moment there is really delicious sweet pineapple for sale.

During the lunch breaks gangs of students go around the school cleaning - sweeping the walkways and pathways with small straw brooms and mopping the internal corridors and verandahs. They are very slippery after they've finished so I've learnt to take care as I walk around them after they've mopped. The students also use the lunch break to do personal chores such as washing though they are not allowed to go into the city proper to go shopping. After lunch lessons agin till 5pm when they have their evening meal. It is the same as lunch, usually eaten at the canteen or the road side stalls. The evening meal is always eaten to the accompaniment of loud 'pop' (as apposed to rock music) over the loud speaker system.

At 6pm they are back in the classrooms for evening classes until 9.30pm. If they are lucky they may get to watch the evening news on TV - the only time they would see TV at school. Most of them dream about spending their holidays watching sport on TV. Lights out is 10pm - and it starts all over again the next day! The classrooms at the new campus all have TVs which can be connected to our laptop. We haven't been given Powerpoint as they only have the program in Chinese. We are sharing one laptop though the school has told us they will find us another computer. It makes it virtually impossible for us to use the computer in the classroom as one of us just can't use it - it can't be in two places at the same time. There is only one photocopier in the school so we cannot do very much photocopying. We have no classroom text books at all and the school cannot afford to buy all the students any of the oral English books which would at least give us something to work from. We are allowed to do whatever we like re classes but as we can't copy handouts for the students it is very difficult. We would need about 2000 copies of everything we do!

The students are crammed into the classrooms - they all have tiny little desks which are covered in piles of textbooks leaving them very little space to actually use as a desktop for writing on. Some of the classrooms are so crowded that we have to slide sideways up the aisles to get to the back. All classrooms only have 2 aisles to slide along! There are no whiteboards, only squeaky blackboards and chalk (horrible stuff!). The teacher stands on a raised area at the front - I'll fall off it one day as I tend to forget about it. The teacher has no desk in the classroom - there's no room for one! All the students sit on tiny backless stools. All the classrooms have hot/cold spring water dispensers. Nobody drinks tap water. The old campus is particlarly dirty and very rundown, with a lot of broken windows.

The school buildings all have 6 floors - and no lifts! At the end of each floor are the toilets. They are disgusting! The smell from them nearly makes you retch as you walk past. The cubicles have no doors, and walls that are only about 3 foot high. You squat over a trough which runs the length of the floor and which has no flush system. Presumably the students flush out the troughs with buckets of water regularly. No toilet paper, vanity basins or waste bins for used sanitary products either! I'm only glad that we have a clean Western style toilet 5 mins away and we don't have to use them. Though there will come a time when we will have to....

We have a pretty easy school life here. Jerry teaches the Grade 1 students - 16 classes at each school. I teach Grade 2 - 18 classes at the new school and 8 at the old school. We teach them in rotation so only have to do a lesson plan up every 10 days. The lesson plan is the hardest thing we do - without a lot of resources I guess it will become increasingly difficult. However any lesson plan we use now we'll be able to reuse the second half of the year once the new school year starts in September. We teach 4 classes a day each between 8.30 and 5pm Monday to Friday. The Chinese teachers only classroom teach 2 lessons a day but do have to supervise morning and evening study and revision classes plus mark exams and bookwork. They also have to spend their days at school in the staff rooms whereas we only turn up for classes and leave. The school provides us with desks - they bought us brand new ones - to 'rest' at between classes. They are constantly concerned that because we have 4 classes a day we'll get very tired! They want us to use our desk during our 10 minute breaks between classes - as if I'm going to walk down and then back up 6 flights of stairs to sit for 5 minutes!

They must be accepting that we don't get tired and have asked whether I would teach 4 classes in a row. I'm happy to do this as it means the rest of the day is mine after I've finished work by midday every day. The days at the old school are longer for us as we have to travel by bus 20 minutes to get there. If your classes don't follow each other you tend to wander around the city filling up time to the next class. We have to catch the school bus at 7.50am if we have first class at that school. It is very old with seats that slide off there frames and tends to be full of strong petrol fumes wafting in through the cracks. Most of the time we catch one of the little local minibuses which drops us virtually at the front gate of the old school.

Last week in my class we were talking about gender issues eg how in Australia headteachers weren't only male (shock!). I asked the students whether they were happy with their gender. A lot of the girls said they wished they had been born as boys (hardly a surprise) but most said they liked being girls because girls were pretty, kind and 'could have long hair'. The boys all loved being boys because they were stong, handsome, brave and good at sports. They all said that they had more freedom than the girls - at least in the holidays! Without exception every class gave the same answers - all 26 of them. This week I decided it might be the right roduce some more challenging adjectives

---

Photos

Teachers' apartments.
Our apartment is top floor on the far left of photo.

Mid morning exercise classes
Every day around 10 o'clock all the students exercise in the grounds - it is also the first thing they do each morning, around 6 am.

Boys' toilets, old school
The girls toilets are the same - no doors or constant running water.