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Published: March 29th 2010
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Textbook
There you have it. School. Because my textbook doesn't have a lot of visual appeal to offer, I'm only going to add one thematically relevant picture to this post. Enjoy the pretty, irrelevant Kunming flowers.
The title for the post comes from an exercise we had as homework to practice some new vocabulary. This particular exercise is "collocation": you're given a list of vocabulary words, and instructed to add a noun, or verb, or some other specific part of speech in order to create a suitable and grammatical combination. For simpler exercises, you're given words like "conserve," and told to add a noun (e.g. "conserve labor"), or "hooligan," and told to add an adjective (e.g. "loud hooligan"). From a language learner's perspective, this is actually a very useful exercise, giving practice in creating short verb phrases and noun phrases and offering sort of a semantic backing to the vocabulary, rather than just grammatical. The exercise becomes hairier when you are prompted to, say, add a transitive verb to the front of "the universe."
I originally was going to write "enter the universe," but I reckon my grasp of quantum physics is not exactly strong enough to defend that concept in English, much less Chinese.
Purple flowers
Not sure what these are, but they have the poinsettia-like quality of having petals that are apparently true leaves. If we didn't have to maintain a degree of
semantic correctness, we could say "eat the universe" or "decorate the universe," but that kind of thing doesn't fly. What I eventually settled on was "explore the universe," which it turns out was The Answer. That is to say, it was the word the textbook and the teacher wanted. A clever classmate of mine, when faced with collocations without immediately easy answers, usually makes combinations like "discuss the universe" or "consider the universe," but as it turns out, these are not The Answer. This phenomenon is probably at the heart of many exchange students' (perhaps mainly the Western types) frustrations with Chinese education. Now I'm going to tell a story.
In the 7th Century, China first implemented its Imperial Examination system. This was an open-enrollment test that allowed, in theory, any Chinese man from even the poorest of circumstances the possibility of becoming a government minister. A man's score on the test, and not his social standing, would determine his fitness to work in the government. I have heard many Chinese people remark on the Imperial Examinations as a mark of national pride, because this tradition shows a very long
Yellow Flower
Not sure what these are called either, but they are cute and adorn a lot of hedges around the neighborhood. cultural history of favoring meritocracy over nepotism. Of course, it's kind of a stretch to imagine the system resulted in the common people's horizons being broadened immensely. Even the most intellectually gifted pig farmer, if stuck farming pigs all day, probably didn't have a chance to open up a book and study on account of being too busy subsisting. Anyhow, the Imperial Examinations lasted until 1912, when they were abolished (along with some
other stuff).
Okay, so that was the first half of the story. The second half can be summed up in a single observation I first heard years ago from Japanese people, but is also echoed in China: "In the East, universities are very hard to get into, and easy to graduate from; in the West, universities are easy to get into and very hard to graduate from." And from everything I've seen, I think this has a lot to do with the Imperial Examination tradition.
There seems to be this strongly held value here that, once a person has proven himself worthy, then he is certainly deserving of the merits that go along with that worthiness, indefinitely. It's not as if this idea doesn't make sense,
Azalea
Azaleas are all over this city. There are rhododendrons when you get to more mountainous terrain. It turns out the Chinese word for rhododendron translates to "azalea in tree form." but it does seem to me that in the West, we place
more value not on proving oneself through one large, initial trial, but on consistently performing over a long period. This is why it's not so hard to get into Western universities (on average), but it's notoriously difficult to accomplish a degree. In the East, the trials are fewer, but individually extremely important. This is, I imagine, why the education system here values Right Answers and Wrong Answers so deeply: if you're going to test an individual's merit
one time only to determine the opportunities he will have in life, there had better be a very strict, standardized method for doing so. There is very little, if any, room for "That's not the answer we were looking for, but it's also correct." Whereas in the West, one concept we tend to value is "thinking outside the box," many Chinese teachers view what we would call "creative thought" as deviant studying patterns, which will lead to poor results.
One of the difficulties I have as a student here isn't exactly the problem of subscribing to this mode of thought. I have a pretty good grasp of the history behind why Chinese education values the things it does, and I'm not here to try and sway the hearts and minds of the Chinese to be more Western. However, what does give me difficulty is that my Western-trained mind is unwilling to take any classroom prompts for granted. The prompt for the "universe" collocation said nothing about the noun needing to be used in a context-laden situation, or treated as a tangible thing. There was nothing in the book to say that the answer "discuss the universe" was incorrect until the teacher declared it to be so, since it wasn't the word he "should have" used.
In the West, we're more comfortable arguing with teachers.
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Auntie Lauren
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Wow! You are getting an Education!
Very interesting. I think some of the Chinese students might be called "suck ups" here. The un-named purple flowers look like bougainvillea. Loved the honey jar story. My dad brought a little "honey pot man" figurine home from Japan, so I kept thinking of that. Your experience going after the butter sounded like a few experiences Chuck and I have had in some of the old cities of the world! They all seem to change names every half block, and in Dublin the street signs were somewhere posted on buildings. Trying to navigate was useless. We gave up driving and used public transportation and this was in an English speaking country! So, how was that cornbread? Should we bring you things for baking? email if you have time.