What is going on? and is there any way of stopping it?

Class of 2012

By law, education in China, as befits a good Communist country, is exclusively state run. In this Utopian Heaven, central control acts to prevent the development of those social distinctions which would nucleate the class of wealthy bourgeois pigs that every good communist worth their salt learns to loathe at a young age. One would therefore be forgiven for thinking that all schools in China are equal. But, to pinch a phrase from George Orwell, some are more equal than others. The SZT School in Changsha, the capital of the Hunan Province, is one such institution and, given that they have the money to ship over a plane-load of foreign teachers for a four-week summer camp, is not surprisingly very equal indeed.

An oasis of green in the dirty, dusty, smog-drenched developing urban jungle of Changsha’s south side, the school is violently juxtaposed against its grimy surroundings. To obtain a place at this elite institution, parents have to make a ‘voluntary’ donation to SZT Group so their kids can be taught at what has to be one of the most lavish ‘state’ schools in China. It is here that, after three days of lacklustre ‘TEFL’ training in London, I find myself teaching nouns to classes of excitable  six and seven-year-olds from that wealthy middle class that Mao invested such a good deal of energy in destroying during the Cultural Revolution.

The Oasis of STZ bathed in what we wish were low-hanging cloud.

Apart from their unusual approach to the doctrines of Communism, one thing the Chinese have in buckets is a strong work ethic. To give you just one example, the classes here, instead of being called the usual ‘Classes one, two and three’ or ‘Classes orange, blue and mauve’, are named after world-famous universities. My own three classes bear the impressive appellations of ‘Class Massachusetts Institute of Technology’, ‘Class California Institute of Technology’ and ‘Class Columbia University’, and I often glimpse students, giggling happily as they skip past my window, from ‘Class Oxford’, ‘Class Cambridge’ and ‘Class California Berkeley’. I do feel I should tell my charges in ‘Class CalTech’ that it is very unlikely that any of them will ever end up studying in America, but I guess ambitions don’t hurt. Mental images of my own son, the young master ‘Oxford Cambridge Stibbard Stanford Hawkes’, receiving his own rejection letters do, however, make me wonder if the poor wee nippers are perhaps being set up for inevitable disappointment. Poor, poor Oxo; all those years of being bullied were for nothing.

A girl from class MIT prepares for her entrance exams with balloon practice.

The main downside of the Chinese work ethic, at least from my point of view, is that it extends to the foreign English teachers at SZT, including me. To say we’ve been dropped in the deep end would be quite an understatement. I arrived in Changsha last Friday afternoon and was hoisted from my bed on Saturday morning for a day of what was deceptively labelled ‘resting’. Resting, in the Chinese sense of the word, involved being bussed into school, being given our marching orders, being told lists of rules and, then being introduced to ‘the leaders’. Having met ‘the leaders’, our jet-lagged day of rest continued with the teachers of the school ushering us through a door and into a room which, to our great surprise and bewilderment, was a large auditorium filled with a couple of hundred expectant faces. Holding our eyes open and forcing smiles, we introduced ourselves and stood, grinning and grimacing, through a 15-minute speech in Chinese. Our trials not yet over, we were then told that the opening ceremony would be tomorrow and that we were to prepare our ‘dance’. The ten allotted dance-preparation minutes having elapsed, Lady Gaga’s ‘Poker Face’ came on the speaker system and we staggered around the stage wondering what on earth was going on and if there was any way of stopping it.

Our confetti-filled act in the hastily prepared ‘opening ceremony’, which explains the title of this entry.

I could write more. There is a lot more to say and I am yearning to say it. However, as I have to get up in about six hours and as I have been working an average of twelve hours a day, I should perhaps go to bed. I could tell you stories of chickens’ feet, of being thrust in front of my first class to teach a lesson with close to zero experience and of dressing children up in Hallowe’en masks and re-enacting All Hallows Eve for the peculiarly-named ‘Western Festival Rave’. These anecdotes will have to wait for another day, that is, if I ever have any free time ever again.

‘Yours truly teaches the peculiarly worded ‘camp song’ to the semi-interested California Institute of Technology Class.’