Having Fun All The Time

There are few things more humbling than looking at a Chinese college English exam.

Thursday night I spent two hours with some students, helping them prepare for the CET-6 English exam, which they took on Saturday. The CET-6 is a test that (apparently) almost all college students here take to measure their proficiency in English.

The test is extremely advanced for a second language test and yet contains quite a lot of grammatical errors and yet is U.S./Euro-centric and is the kind of thing that would make anyone who espoused progressive education in the United States scream bloody murder. The exam tests English reading, writing and listening by using fill-in-the-blank excercises/multiple choice and standard reading comprehension tests like you’d find on the SAT or GRE.

The thing is, though, that the test is almost unimaginably difficult for any non-native speaker. To pass, the students have to get something like 60 percent of the answers correct; but most of them don’t know I would say probably 30 percent of the vocabulary (I read somewhere that a reading passage is technically “illegible” to a reader if he/she doesn’t know 20 percent of the words).

An example of a test question (from memory):

One of the fill-in-the-blank excercises is a long passage about Germany’s response to the success of the U.S. economy in the 90’s. Random words are blanked out and the students answer by multiple-choice. One of the early sentences says something like

“Germany’s response came about after seeing the U.S. economy _______ in the 90’s.”

A.) Soar B.) Amplify C.)       Hover D.) Extend

I think, maybe, without a dictionary, some of my more advanced students might know the meaning of “Soar” and “Extend”. Amplify and hover I think they wouldn’t know. Maybe they would have seen them before. But, nonetheless, they are expected to know these words, and to somehow understand why “soar” is preferable to “expand” in this context. Although, without living in a Western culture or having some idea of what happened in the U.S. economy in the 90’s, I don’t know why they would be expected to know the answer at all.

The reading level is, I think, somewhere around the reading level on the pre-SAT you take in junior high-school. So around the level where native speakers are at the age of 16. Except the subject matter is all about Western culture. So they’re being tested on the use of the language in the context of Western culture, when most of the students have met less than a handful of foreigners. Most of them have not traveled far from home. I don’t think any of them have left the country. It’s not like they have English-language newspapers in the library, either. Considering all that, they know an amazing amount about the West. But they don’t know things like what the U.S. economy did in the 90’s, and they certainly don’t know the word “amplify”.

The only analogue I can imagine would be if you took a 14-year-old in the U.S. and expected him to be able to score a 1200 on the GRE. Even if the kid had studied every day since he was six years old, only the occasionally lucky or brilliant student would pass. Most of my students won’t pass the CET-6. That would be incredible. Of about 200-some students who I know, three of them have passed it already. And those three, I think, worked incredibly hard. And they also, I suspect, got incredibly lucky on the day they took the test.

That is what most of these students will be relying on Saturday when they take the test–luck. The tests are timed and there is not enough time even for a native speaker (read: me) to comfortably read the material and answer the questions with total confidence. I am sure that if everyone in the U.S. had to take the test, a good portion of the population would fail. I can’t really guess at the number, but I bet it would be in the teens at least. So my students will basically go into the test room, read frantically, guess on most of the answers, and if they are lucky (stats say that someone always passes by guessing) a few of them will pass.

The rest will go on thinking that they are no good at English, even though they are. And who knows how not passing the CET-6 will affect their chances at getting a job (some say that they won’t be able to get a teaching job without passing it).

So Thurday night, after two hours of trying to explain to the students things like the difference between “soar” and “extend”, and why we typically use “soar” and “crash” when we talk about the economy in English, I threw up my hands and told them that the test was unfair, that it was criminally difficult for them and that it also included a bunch of grammatical errors, typos, unclear questions/answers and some multiple-choice questions with no single logically correct answer. I told them that I knew that they had all worked incredibly hard, and that whatever happened on Saturday, they should feel good about how hard they had worked and how much they had learned.

And I walked home thinking: sometimes you can be frustrated at the students’ limitations, and then sometimes you can be frustrated at your own.

Some pictures from recent trips to some towns / cities near Sanming. I need to make some changes to the blog, I think, before I can post these a bit bigger.

Taken from the side of XianJing Mountain in Datian.

About picture #1: We took a walk up the road along XianJing Mountain on my first afternoon in Datian — it took us about 30 minutes to drive there from Datian and we saw few cars or people once we arrived. There were old-style Chinese houses on the way to the top and a lot of rice fields. Near the top you could look down and see the laddered rice fields on the sides of a lot of mountains. These things look just like topo maps and you see them a lot driving through the countryside. They are really pretty. Note that on this mountain we were high enough so that a lot of the smog/pollution was below us, hence the rarely glimpsed blue sky.

Taken in Shaxian at a small hike / tourist attraction. A couple of different people told me this is China's largest "lying Buddha".

A not-so-old Buddhist temple in Shaxian, again mostly for tourists. It was pretty, though.

We took a meandering boat ride on QiXing (Seven Stars) Lake in HuMei (Beautiful Lake) near Datian. I learned (a little) how to play MahJong.

The city of Shaxian from afar.

An iron bridge near Datian. Getting there in a car involved asking multiple people to move motorcycles, piles of woods, driving over piles of dirt, etc. Clearly a car hadn't been through that way in a while.

Self-portrait in Shaxian

There is an aspect of my present life that I am already familiar with, and that is the mild episodes of paranoia that accompany living in a place where your actions are scrutinized more than usual and people in the community are generally aware of who you are and what you are doing on a daily basis more than you could ever guess.

In some ways, living in a tiny town in Vermont (where I went to college) for five years was like this. Even though I was just a college student, I knew the names and faces of most of the people in my college and a lot of the people outside the college. There weren’t a lot of distractions in Vermont (the town where I went to school had 3,500 people and the college 700), so people chatted, mostly, about each other.

That was, in almost every way, right up my alley; for most of my time I immensely enjoyed living in a place where I saw familiar faces every time I walked outside and where the term “tight-knit community” was more a mantra than a slogan. When I moved away to Portland, Oregon after college, the pointed disinterest with which most non-acquaintances regarded me and my overall insignificance in the social mix of a mid-sized city took me off guard. I had forgotten how different life in small-town Vermont is from the norm.

But now that I am living in a relatively small (by Chinese standards) city in China, I am realizing again what it means to have my actions scrutinized (maybe that’s too strong a word; looked upon with intense curiousity might be more precise) and to have my general reputation and public image be something that can and will change based on almost all my actions. (What I say in public, my politeness while interacting with people, my skills as an English guide and language learner, my shoe size, what I did for work prior to coming to China, how much money I make….every detail about me, it seems, could become something that is used as a detail to describe me to someone who doesn’t know me..) Everything I do / say / write is in a sense potentially public knowledge, and that adds something of a burden to the daily acts of life.

A case in point: A few weeks ago when I was meeting with some students on a particularly cold day, I took off my sweater in from of them because I was feeling warm. I had a button-down shirt on underneath it, of course, so it wasn’t like I was doing anything out of the ordinary (at least, according to my social norms). But everyone in the room gasped and emitted the “Waaaaaaaaah” that is the Chinese version of our “Woah”. Based on their response, you’d think I had just vomited in front of a roomful of students (which, please note, I have never done, despite what some people might say). I often here this “Waaaah” when I walk past little groups of students on campus and it usually makes me flash my trademark “shit-eating grin”. For some reason it is always hilarious to me the amazement I cause in students who don’t know me just by existing. Either that or I have a giant brown stain on my back when this happens; sometimes I wonder.

It turns out (at least as far as I was able to deduce from aggressively questioning students) that they all said “Waaaaah” because they were all freezing, sitting at their desks, and they thought I must be “Very strong” to be able to take off my sweater in such cold weather.

In retrospect (and I have only realized this upon writing about it) they must have been blowing smoke up my ass, because they know I am not that strong (I have always been, and still am, a slender, willowy bastard) and that is just too abstruse a reason for them to have all “Waaaaahhhd” simultaneously upon seeing me taking off my sweater. I’m guessing it just had something to do with the cultural appropriateness of taking off clothes in front of people. Maybe they thought it was weird. I think that is probably it. So, starting that day, I started taking off my sweater in the hallway before going into any classrooms. That seems to do the trick in quelling “waaahs”.

But, that’s not actually the end or the point of the story. The point is that just yesterday, weeks after I took my sweater off in front of the students, another student told me that she had heard, second-hand, about me taking off my sweater in front of the class. I believe her exact words were: “The students think you are very interesting. They said that you took off your sweater in front of the class. That’s very interesting, I thnk.”

My impulse was to ask, again, aggressively, “What on earth does INTERESTING mean?!” But I did not. Instead I smiled, nodded, and said I’m glad that the students find me interesting.

What happened in the classroom that day, what exactly caused them to “Waahhh” at me, perhaps I will never know (note that the students in question who “Waaahd” were all older than me, some by 10 or 20 years, and about evenly divided by gender). But, I am long past worrying about it. More noteworthy, I think, is the kind of general paranoia inspired by a vague awareness that anything I do could become a story that is passed from person to person as somehow emblematic of me. I mean, it’s not like the student I spoke to yesterday heard anything about my progress in Chinese, or my patience or professionalism, or anything (not that I care that she didn’t) – she heard about how I took my sweater off.

All this, however, I understand and am actually pretty comfortable with, I think. After living in a tiny town in Vermont for five years I know that talk is often just talk, and people are usually happy to have something to talk about. It (usually) has little or nothing to do with the subject of the conversation. And I feel OK about my ambassadorial performance so far (despite one experience with a bit of excessive drinking, but that has more to do with the Chinese penchant for forcing beer down one’s throat whenever possible and was not my fault, and I will get to that in another post….) And, as the title of this post suggests, paranoia is, in my opinion, an unavoidable facet of modern life – in America, in China, wherever. If people have the means and the leisure (and now, the technology) to gossip and chit-chat, share judgements and observations within a shared worldview / framework (which the Chinese seem to have in spades), you will have paranoia. Especially if you are a foot taller than everybody else, have different colored skin and hair, and they turn and say “Waaaaaah” when you walk by.

These are just some of the pros and cons. You get much love and affection, and along with it, plenty of attention.

Peace out for now.

: )