The following was taken from a student’s Xiaonei blog, and machine translated. I have made an effort to make it understandable, while changing a minimal amount.

In the afternoon three days ago, on June 22, according to the school’s request, conducted a (scheduled) swimming lesson. Having fun when my ears heard some people say, someone was drowning, I looked up, just to see that a few people carrying the hands of a boy, to shore first aid, I thought nothing of it, just drowning, spit some saliva , he’ll be okay.

 

After having a swim, and back to the dormitory, on the succession of hear people say, that drowning boy had died. At first I did not believe. Then today (June 25th) morning, I have to believe. At the school gate, a few people who appear from the countryside, loudly crying, men and women, young and old, out of curiosity I went to have a look, I could see clearly that the family got a drowned boy. That old lady (presumably his mother) shouted, “you my baby you my baby!”, change to red on campus can be that 20 or so guards, apparently did not mean to old people go, then somehow, a person is taken to guard what I do not know name somewhere. I thought the school had finally taken some positive means to resolve the matter.

Morning, I look at Baidu, you know Baidu Shaanxi University of Science drowning, Baidu said they did not know anything. I then google about it… you know too much, Google still does not know, so I put aside time for the time being. That afternoon I passed the school gate, several family members had hung up banners, that read, “seek truth, seek justice, and so the words also arrayed wreath”. I talked to the family, the drowning man’s brother told me that the school silent on the matter, the family placed in hotels, not to come out. Leaving aside his brother said to be objective, if the school take active measures to solve the problem, who do so?

 

Write this, not because of how I have a sense of justice, how good your own business, I just care about their potential interest. Imagine everyone, far from his home school, which family members hold high expectations and not miss on this is that the school a call that your child died, to receive dead. Members will be what my parents think? The extremely sad to school, the school was so one attitude, then what to think? A swimming pool, drowning incident occurs, will be a positive solution. I think the university should not only as a business to operate, and occasionally, it should bear some responsibility, this responsibility should occasionally be larger than the swimming pool.

 

As a sophomore, the school is now more like a child, his growth, he has done, we are very concerned about, write them, not to expose anything, just hope, hope that the school can be suitably grown.

In the following days, news crews from the local Shaanxi province stations, and reporters from various publications came to see what had happened. This was of course, almost 3 full days after the incident. It was rumored that the students’ family was being jerked around and not told the truth of their son’s circumstances of death. How it happened, when it happened, etc. It seemed clear that the leadership at SUST wanted to keep this quiet.

Has no one ever told them that honesty is the best policy? Students quickly figured out something was up when rumors of a drowning started swirling, obviously this students’ 30+ classmates knew what happened because they were there. The pool was then closed the next day for “cleaning”, this too raised some eyebrows; why would they schedule cleaning on a school day when students should have swimming class? The pool had only been open for 4 weeks maximum, it couldn’t be that dirty.

Once the dead student rumors were confirmed by news reports and the family of the dead, students expressed anger of being left in the dark. Demands of why, after 24 hours, there had been no official announcement. Where was the pool manager? After 72 hours, news finally started trickling out, and students exclaimed that while this boy’s death was a tragedy, an even bigger tragedy occurred in the acts of the previous few days, the secrets, the “dirty” pool needing to be cleaned, no announcements to students, media, no police. Nothing.

When the dead student’s family members put up their memorial on Friday afternoon, along with a banner begging anybody that knew anything to stop by and share their information, the student’s death was really confirmed. The family was distraught with the loss of their son, and now they were being mistreated as well. Crowds circled around them between classes and around meal times; some watching curiously, others talking.

After 2 days of sitting in front of the gate, sleeping outside and the boy’s mother loudly crying for long periods of time, the family finally moved on, away from the school gate. it was rumored that the family received 130,000 RMB ($19,200) from the university for their loss, and hopefully some closure.

The biggest one, is that classes are graded mostly on exams. No one really cares much about performance, it’s all exam, exam, exam. That’s the way the Chinese educational system rolls. Students in high school spend 3 years preparing for the Gao Ke, the exam that decides what they will go to University for, and which university they can attend. So likewise, here at the university, it all seems to ride on exams. In fact, when making my final grades last semester I was told that the final exam should account for 70% (!) of the final grade, and all that work they did the previous 18 weeks? 30%. Thirty-six hours of instruction, participation, and homework results in 30% of your grade. No wonder no one cares to come to class or do their homework. If they can get even a decent score on the exam, they’ll pass just fine. Getting a decent exam score isn’t too hard either, cheating is rampant among written exams.

It is possible to fail a class, but here’s the kicker, the student still moves on with their grade level and classmates, despite having failed a class. If the student fails a final exam they have a chance to retake it! This exam may or may not be proctored by a random teacher who has nothing to do with the class (read: doesn’t care), more times than not, the retake will result in the student getting at least the minimum passing grade needed. If somehow the student does fail the retake (rare) they often receive the passing grade anyway. Can’t hold them back from their class now can we! Besides, the school is going to look bad if we have students failing or dropping out of school. The more students we can graduate, the better we look!

This might seem a bit sensational, but it really happens. However, these are the typical D – F students, if you remember the typical bell curve, there usually isn’t many of those, maybe a handful, these students have pretty poor English skills (they CAN tell you that though). On the other side of the curve we have the students who are always there, and are always anxious to learn something new, these students usually have a relatively good grasp of using English. In the middle of course we have the average students, they’re in attendance most of the time, and do some of the homework, but lose interest quickly.

I know that the trick here is to be a good teacher and keep their interest, and trust me, I’m trying all kinds of different things. Some turn out great, and others not so much. But I will say this, at least I can see an improvement in many of my students, despite the frustrations I might be having. That’s worth something.

Final Exams: There’s only one word I can use to describe these and it’s pretty blunt. Clusterfuck. I have no idea who organizes them, or sets the guidelines, or what, but they need their head examined.

• First of all, I am told a month before finals that I need to prepare a final for my class, that’s cool, a month notice is plenty of time! Except the exam is to be turned in on Tuesday, not cool, Tuesday is three days away.
• The exams must be in some magical Chinese format, which consists of putting them on A3 piece of paper and then messing up my formatting and fonts so that the questions don’t make sense.
• When should I give my exams? No idea. We’ll let you know. Cue me not knowing until a week or two before. Fine, I had to cut my lessons back, but it was enough time to get in a review.
• Three weeks of exams. How do normal universities manage it in one week? Clearly it’s magic. For some reason, students need to hangout on campus for a week or more just waiting to take an exam. Can’t take it early so they can go home and they certainly aren’t studying for a week. The students aren’t busy, the teacher isn’t busy, but they can’t take their exam? What the hell.

Planning Trips: Now that school is finished and most of the students have gone home, this place has turned into a ghost town. All the vendors I’m used to seeing, gone. Restaurants in the backstreet, closed. Supermarket, closing in a few days. Pretty soon, I’m not sure where I’m going to eat!

Fortunately I’m getting out of here. I am ironically heading up north to see some great snowy sights, and eventually down south for some warmth. My friend Tyler will be joining me as well, so it’ll be nice to see an American friend in person rather than a picture or video chat. I’ve spent many hours, researching and trying to organize my vacation, it’s basically all I’ve been doing. So, I’ll post in a couple more days a quick outline of my trip, as soon as I get some things ironed out. Bringing me to my next point.

• Planning trips in a language you know is painful. Planning trips in a language you’re very unfamiliar with and can’t really read is excruciatingly painful.

The Google Tubes: Many people have been asking me what’s going on with Google and China. Truth is, I don’t really know. According to China they have a “very open” internet. But to most non-Chinese, the internet here is quickly becoming an intranet. There are hundreds of blog posts out there speculating on what might happen. But no one really knows. All I do know is that the Great Fire Wall (GFW) is seriously a pain in my ass. It basically blocks popular English sites, ones that most normal Chinese people wouldn’t venture to anyway, as they have their own Chinese clone of the exact same thing. So it really feels like it’s there to isolate the foreigners in the country rather than to protect the citizens.

For instance, the other day my iPhone mail app stopped downloading mail from the Gmail IMAP server. Okay, I’ll troubleshoot it. After a few days, I seriously can’t figure out the problem. Is it my phone? Is it my internet connection at home? Is it my router? Or is it the GFW acting silently in the background? I’m led to believe that its the GFW causing problems, but it’s hard to know, they don’t exactly come out and tell you “hey, the GFW just blocked your data!”.  Fortunately I’ve got a free VPN that’s been working well for me, as well as a few work-a-rounds but when those go down I won’t know what to do. Time will tell.

Snowy Campus

I also discovered something very interesting today, the beautiful marble sidewalks (as can be seen in this photo) around campus are super slippery when coupled with a wet snow fall. I nearly fell twice, and witnessed many students falling down in the wet slush. Clearly when designing some parts of this campus they had their mind on beauty over functionality. Oops.

Wet, slushy mess.