Not really everyday-life, but still beautiful. Students from a middle school (not mine) produced this video with Chinese superstar Zhou Shen. To get to the video, just click on the picture.
The Ganquan Foreign Language School, where I teach, has about 1700 students and about 200 teachers. As everywhere in China, the students wear uniforms. School starts here at 7:30 a.m. and ends at 5:00 p.m. or 6:00 p.m. The length of a school day in China can vary considerably depending on the province. In some areas, school even lasts until late in the evening. Shanghai is milder in terms of duration, but has a no less efficient school system, as the city always does pretty well in the performance rankings. The school landscape in China is not uniform. Beijing provides a framework in which each province can shape independently. In some provinces the class size is huge, it's hard to imagine, it's more like a lecture. Here in Shanghai the size is around 40 students per class. Elsewhere in schools there is also independent evening learning, in which the students sit for several hours and practice. This is a special show of strength that you cannot imagine in Germany and that I personally find incredibly exhausting for children and young people. The pupils go from grades 6 to 12 to the so-called middle schools, which correspond to a German high school, the conclusion is the Abitur, in Chinese: Gao Kao. There is no choice of subjects according to inclination. What is required here is prescribed: math, Chinese, foreign language, MINT subjects, etc. The day always starts in the morning with a hearty breakfast. Warm and strong, never cold and sweet like in Germany. I especially like these hot soups, which are really good in winter.
The mornings and afternoons are each interrupted by a long break. Before the first big break at 9:30 a.m., it goes to the sports field, where the Chinese flag is hoisted to the national anthem, which is now known from the Olympic Games because China often wins, followed by morning gymnastics for ten minutes. I think it's pretty cute when my high school graduates line up for this ritual, as they have done since they were children, and just go along with it. I think that if they realize that I see them doing it, they'll find it a good thing.
In the mornings and afternoons there are four hours of lessons at my school. In between there is lunch followed by a one-hour break, during which some students and teachers take a kind of nap. The first time I saw colleagues sleeping in the staff room, I couldn't believe my eyes, but it's a ritual and really relaxing. Food is also very important here in China. If, for example, there are meetings that extend into the break, which is hardly the case anyway, since the meal times determine the planning, the meals are kept warm. Lunch is not omitted under any circumstances.
Last week my Chinese German colleague and I took the oral exam for the German language diploma from the prospective high school graduates.
The willingness to perform and the pressure in China are high. The performance in German alone is impressive and the exams are demanding. (Who cares: https://www.auslandsschulwesen.de/Webs/ZfA/DE/Deutsch-lernen/DSD/DSD-II/dsd-II_node.html)
My final class for the German language diploma. This is what prospective Chinese high school graduates look like who have just passed the C1 level diploma and are relieved accordingly - probably proud too. With this degree you have direct access to a German university.
Competence-oriented learning is very popular in China's schools as well as in Germany. In the German subject, factual texts, diagrams and statistics are analyzed. Foreign language skills are of course an additional skill, but the content and the approach are more similar to the subjects of social sciences, economics and politics, e.g. ecological restructuring, equality, the future of self-driving cars, electric cars, consumer society, etc. In the photo below, I'm with eighth graders at the garbage cans to talk to them about waste separation, which has now been introduced in China, at least in the metropolises.
With eighth grade students at the garbage cans, topic: waste separation Linguistic subjects are always also cultural subjects that convey which literary works were produced in the language to be learned. Regional studies are also an important part of foreign language teaching. The cultural studies that I convey through Germany are, in my opinion, interchangeable; they deal with global issues that have only limited relevance to Germany. Finally, a German colleague told me from her school in China that the Chinese college asked her to impart more cultural information. From this I conclude that Chinese teachers do not consider modern social issues to be culture. My colleague seemed at a loss and put it this way: "But we don't have a culture at all."
Lessons in subjects like Chinese seem to me to be less competence-oriented. The students learn the classical texts by heart, both orally and in writing, whereby the written form is a particularly difficult challenge, as the characters have changed significantly over the centuries. A nice anecdote finally happened when I was entering an eighth grade that had just been taught Chinese. A traditional landscape painting and a poem by Li Bai, one of the most famous Chinese poets of the Tang Dynasty, could still be seen on the digital board. I asked my students to tell me what was special about this poetry. I listened in amazement as eighth graders explained to me the form, the content, the chronological order and the melancholy of this poetry in German. The appreciation of one's own culture is high in China. You can see this especially when you enter the rooms where calligraphy is taught. They are more like a museum than a school.
Room for Calligraphy
Room for Calligraphy
Room for Calligraphy
Room for Calligraphy
Room for Calligraphy
Room for Calligraphy
Calligraphy and art works on display in the entrance area of the school:
Lots of staff for a fairly large company One of the most noticeable differences compared to a German school is the amount of non-teaching staff. There are several porters who guard the entrances around the clock. Supervisors are also present 24 hours a day in the dormitory for international students. Rioting in the dormitory, boys visiting girls' rooms, etc. are completely excluded and if something doesn't work or you have questions, someone is there immediately. In the dormitory there is supervision in the lounge where the students study in the evenings, someone helps in the laundry room, some people keep the premises clean, everything is copied for the teachers, there are also computer experts and craftsmen; you get to know them when there are corresponding problems. What is a teacher's everyday school life like? Teachers are at school from 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. and mostly do an office job where they go to class in between. The lesson takes up the smaller part of the working day, so there is enough time to correct, prepare and whatever else arises. Above all, colleagues are always available, which makes some processes easier. From my point of view, a large part of job-related communication in Germany took place via e-mails. In addition, German teachers do extracurricular work at home, which probably contributes to the social image that they do little work. Every teacher in China has their own desk with shelves, drawer cabinet, power connection and of course WiFi. Ten language teachers work in my staff room. Being together all day creates something like a collegiate feeling. My colleagues are always in a good mood, especially on Fridays, I've never noticed a bad mood here. Unfortunately, I don't understand your jokes - it's all in Chinese.
The staff room for the foreign language teachers, in addition to German, French, Korean, Japanese and Spanish are taught. English is only a second foreign language and has little space in the timetable. In Germany I rarely met some colleagues because they worked part-time or their hours did not overlap with mine. Sometimes German colleagues would leave the staff room on Thursday morning at a quarter past ten and wish them a nice weekend. In my opinion, communication via e-mails also creates an abstraction that increases the feeling of being a lone fighter, which teachers in Germany often complain about. The time management of a German teacher who also has to coordinate family appointments and more at the same time makes tight planning necessary. You don't have to coordinate anything in China. As a teacher, you're just there all day. This also facilitates the individual support of students. If they get extra assignments, they are simply put in the staff room and work there for an hour. If students have questions, they can always contact the teachers, who are not under time pressure and can therefore always be spontaneously approached for students' concerns.
Can you have a family in China given the time burden? You can, most of my colleagues have children who are also in school all day. For German teachers working abroad, it is often shocking that you suddenly have to be in the staff room all day. But this gives rise to a different conception of the job description. My colleagues have set up their workplaces nicely, it's fun to go out in the evening and say hello to everyone in the morning. Above all, you really have the end of the day. If you also do something at home, it is voluntary and therefore not a burden. Teacher-student ratio The teacher-student ratio is different than in Germany. Here a teacher has the same weight as the parents in educational matters. In high school, I was asked if the class could use my name, a teacher is something like a friend of the students. To hear something like that is very unusual. I am being used by all the students here and it is a pleasant feeling.
Gifts from students to their teachers. Teachers Day is an important day in the school calendar. How stressful is school for students in China? In general, school in China is a show of strength for the students. The pressure of competition is high if you want to find a good place in the middle class of society. Once again, one need only mention the 1.4 billion people to understand why. On average, over 9 million high school graduates come onto the market every year. Chinese students know what work and study mean. The Gao Kao is considered to be one of the toughest school leaving exams in the world. This called the politicians on the scene, which has meanwhile banned extracurricular lessons, as it means further loss of leisure time, childhood and youth and also undermines equal opportunities. It remains to be seen whether there are other loopholes for tutoring. Additional lessons in sports and artistic subjects are still allowed. And Chinese students are good at that too. The other day I was walking through the foyer of the school when a student was sitting at the piano and his fellow students were spontaneously playing the 3rd movement of Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata out of his head. It couldn't be more difficult.
Those who pass an entrance exam at a good Chinese university are really above average. Therefore, the attractiveness of studying abroad also decreases. Something like the thought seems to develop: If I can make it here I can make it everywhere. Thirty years after the incredible economic boom began, China has become self-confident, is returning to its own abilities and does not fundamentally admire everything that comes from Europe or North America. A student who obtained the German language diploma here at the school last year received a DAAD scholarship and turned it down because she had also passed the entrance exam at the best university in Shanghai. Of course, other influencing factors such as the coronavirus also led to the decision not to study in Germany. The Chinese are also becoming cautious about other incidents such as the murder of the student Li Yangjie in Chemnitz in 2016. The murder was a big topic in the local media and the social networks, which are more important here than ours, do the rest . Some Chinese may not like it in Germany either. The silence in Germany is strange for some, especially on Sundays, when the sidewalks in smaller towns or in large cities are folded up and you don't get anything to eat, the Chinese experience a real culture shock. Some even find Germany a bit boring. People who live in Shanghai have a high standard. Not much comes close to this metropolis. It's like comparing New York or London to Munich.
The experiences that the Chinese have in Germany can also be positive. My colleagues seem to love the country. They studied in Freiburg, Heidelberg, Essen, Hamburg, Bonn, Bielefeld and Jena. Some of them had a really good time, made German friends and had a lot of fun, telling anecdotes about how they bought a bottle of amaretto with friends before visiting the Christmas market in Bonn in order to save the cost of a shot in the hot chocolate or how much they fell in love with the taste of Franzbrötchen with cappuccino in Hamburg and treated themselves to it every morning for breakfast.
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