我是学生 我是老师

The characters above read - "wǒ shì xué sheng, wǒ shì lǎoshī" and translate to "I am a student, I am teacher".

Just when I thought I was getting comfortable being a student of the Chinese language, I became a teacher of the English language. Yesterday was my first day working as a "tutor" in the Chinese migrant school. I place the word tutor in quotations because the word generally connotates working with a small group of students or 1 on 1. Yesterday I stood in front of a class of 40 or so screaming Chinese third graders, at the end of their school day no less- I am not their tutor, I am their teacher.

On arrival at the school, my teaching partner and I (a kid named Edwin, who has much better Chinese language skills than me) were handed a text book and shoved into the front of the class. We were not only given zero instructions, but their teacher, who one of my friends affectionately named Auntie Wong Wong, immediately left the class to suck down a ciggarette. Though this wasn't exactly conducive to what I felt was good teaching, we did the best we could- and the students definitely appreciated it. I would read sentences and vocab words from the text book and the class would repeat them in unison, I would point to objects in the class and the students would say their name, again in unison. If I tried to call on a single student to repeat a word - he or she would stare blankly at me, and then.... the class would respond in unison.

In China, dictations are a very important part of the grammar school education, a sentiment that I have become very familiar with in beginner chinese and learned first hand working with the migrant students. Beyond this, Chinese and western styles of education differ vastly even up through college- students are expected to memorize large ammounts of information and regurgitate it on tests- individual thinking, discussion, debate, and questioning professors is strongly discourage and considered a serious sign of disrespect.

Even though China has adopted many western ideas and has modernized at a hyper accelerated rate, it would seem that little has changed in Chinese education even since dynastic China. Over a few hundred years (and even different dynastys) the chinese emperors developed a series of placements tests that would help them fill administrative spots within the large bureacratic sytem of the empire. These tests were open to anyone, and could guarantee higher social status, pay, and bureaucratic position to those who performed well. That being said, the tests were no joke; they were about 14 hours long, required strict memorization of the classics, and questions aimed to confuse- imagine the LSAT from hell. To prepare for these tests, young boys entered grammar school at age 8 and by age 15 when they had finished they had learned an estimated 431,286 characters, nearly 169 characters a day (way more than the 20 or so I stress about every night). Although the migrant school education system isn't quite as intense - the students are still required to memorize ridiculous ammounts of information; so much information that at a few points in the day they are required to stop reading from their papers and massage the area underneath their eyes for ten minutes (obviously in unision). This is thought to prevent nearsightedness that could occur from spending so many consequtive hours staring at the characters and papers on their desk.


我是学生 - wǒ shì xué sheng

Chinese is probably one of the easiest and hardest languages to learn - another strange contradiction here in China. Gramatically it is simple - there are no tenses, no conjugation, no plurals, no pronouns and plenty of other English rules missing (I just never paid attention to grammar so I can't tell you specifically what they are - but I do realize they're missing).

An example -
I am a student- wǒ shì xué sheng
You are a student - Ni shì xué sheng
He is a student - Ta shì xué sheng
She is a student - Ta shì xué sheng
We are student - Wǒmen shì xué sheng


Why it's hard - characters. There are so many to memorize. Unlike English and the romance languages - there is no alphabet. Thus you can not sound out a word phonetically, you either know it or do not, and the only way to know a character is to memorize it. The character sytem probably explains why memorization is and has always been such a large part of Chinese education.

Though grammar in Chinese is easy - speaking and understanding are still quite difficult. The tone that you say a word can completely change the meaning. There are 4 tones, and Chinese people talk fast- it's pretty hard to know whats going on and even harder to get them to understand me. I'm spending 4 hours a night solely on chinese homework (not exactly the work load I anticipated for a study abroad program).


Long post, I know. More to come later this weekend.



If you're a nerd - here's a link to a good book I'm reading about placement exams in ancient china. China’s Examination Hell