Su-Joe & Anette: This Is Not A Game

Merry Christmas everybody! It's the 23rd and in

Denmark

it's Little Christmas Eve today. This week we have been showing our students pictures of Christmas traditions in Anette's family, and this has gone down really well with the students. They were especially intrigued by the live candles on the Christmas tree and the very strange food!

We are still fighting an uphill battle with the college about getting Christmas Day off. There may have to be some compromises, but we'll see what happens.

We've had a rather non-Christmassy December out here. We've put some Christmas decorations up in the flat, and yesterday we put up a Christmas tree and wrapped some presents, so it is very slowly starting to feel like Christmas, but it's probably for the best that it doesn't feel 100% real, because then the distance to our families might just hit us! In our next entry we will tell you how we got to celebrate Christmas. We have some rather loose plans at the moment (2 days before Christmas Day), but as already mentioned it all depends on getting the day off etc!

It's gotten really cold out here now. We have seen that Europe is more or less covered in lovely white powder and that it's very cold. Here it's just cold. Inside and out. The last few days we've been able to see our own breath in the kitchen and bathroom, so imagine what it's like taking a shower! It takes some planning - or failing that, severe courage! We've more or less moved into our bedroom, which we can keep warm with a mix of air-con and a little radiator unit that we have bought out here. Anette has got an electric hot water cushion, which keeps her feet warm at night! Chinese builders (south of the Yangse River) don't seem to have grasped that insulation in houses is a good idea, so people who can afford heating what is essentially a thin shell are alright, but our thoughts really do go out to those who have to put up with being cold 3 months of the year! At least we have means of keeping warm-ish! Everywhere you go around here you will see people wearing surgical-style masks, that are meant to keep their noses warm. We think it kind of looks like Ninjas have infiltrated the community, but no, it's just our students!

With winter and Christmas comes also exam time. This is the final week of teaching before the exams, and our students have already got nightmares about their oral exams next week. It's quite fun to be on the other side of exams for once. We were asked to invigilate a very high-profile exam on Saturday morning. This was the CET4 exam, which is an official Chinese English proficiency exam, which was taken by 8 million students at exactly the same time all around China on Saturday – this was hammer and sickle military precision in action! The exam was so high-profile that all invigilators had to attend training beforehand and the test papers arrived accompanied by governmental guards. We were told that the papers (which are the same all over the country) would be kept in a locked room over night with some of the guards sleeping with the papers (probably on top of them) and the other guards would guard the door! In the morning the area surrounding the college was full of police and official guards, who were checking our special invigilator badges at different check-points. Joe nearly got in trouble, as he had not put his badge on a string and hung it around his neck - his 'string' was up in our office on the 5th floor, but he wasn't allowed up there without it! After a little bit of panic Anette decided to use her charm and powers of persuasion. After much battering of eyelids and smiling sweetly, the guards seemed to soften and let Anette up to the office. Meanwhile Joe slipped away, which the guards’ attention fully focused on Anette. Joe managed to make his way into block A, up to the top floor and stroll across the adjoining walkway over to B Block and into our office, where Anette was rather surprised to see him. Catastrophe was avoided! The invigilation was rigorous. We were not allowed to sit down for the nearly 3 hours it took. The official governmental seal on the exam papers had to be broken in front of the students, so that they knew that no-one had seen them before. The students were not allowed to go to the toilet, and we had been given authority to body search them for mobile phones and other illegal items they might try to bring into the exam room! The question books and answer sheets were meticulous distributed, and some of our students thought it fun to play a sort of ‘question book peekaboo’ with us. They would turn the book over and start reading the questions in front of us. We would sternly turn the book over again, and before the book had even come to a halt on the table, the students would be at it again. This continued for a little while, and certainly kept us busy for a few minutes, until they understood that this was not the time or the place for playing games. We had heard stories of teachers losing their jobs because of incidents during invigilation of CET4 exams, and therefore we were definitely not prepared to allow these students to mess around with us.

This exam was a special one, and the next exams that we will be invigilating will not be quite as rigorous, although everyone does seem to worry a lot about cheating. - and from what we have seen out here, they should! A lot of students cheat in their writing assignments, copying and pasting whole paragraphs straight off the internet. This week a student in one of Anette’s classes had plagiarised an entire powerpoint presentation on Interpersonal Communication, and was passing it off as his own work, and the culprit then proceeded to stumble his way through it, and it was very clear that he did not know what interpersonal communication even was. It was painful to watch. Cheating is not tolerated out here, and the college wants to be seen to be doing something about it. One day when we had one of our Chinese lessons with our lovely, and very patient teacher Vicky, there was a student in the next room, who had been caught cheating in a test. This poor student was wailing and screaming like a pig that was being dragged to the slaughter house – literally – and this went on and on for maybe 45 minutes, until he must have passed out from exhaustion and we could finally concentrate on our Chinese again. It was horrific, though. He was really distraught, and we never knew that human beings could make noises like that! Afterwards, we found out that all the college was doing to him was giving him a stern warning though, so his reaction seemed somewhat exaggerated! You must understand, however, that our students are under tremendous pressure from their parents to do well. This is a very expensive college, and as most of our students have no siblings, all of their parents’ expectations rest on their shoulders, and for many parents out here (we have come to understand) anything less than perfect just doesn’t cut the noodle. Thus even good students feel the pressure to cheat, and this is really quite sad. Perhaps unsurprisingly ‘copying’ seems to come quite naturally to the Chinese, for some of whom it is something of an art form, and they don’t seem to grasp the seriousness of it. A student peeking at his friend’s answers is not consciously ‘cheating’, but is simply ‘curious’!

We’re very interested to see how many of our students pass their English exams. In the CET4 exam there is a national pass rate of just over 20%, so this may make you appreciate the kind of challenge with are faced with with some of our students! This semester, though, we have seen a real improvement in our students, which has been incredibly encouraging. Some of them have really benefitted from being exposed to us in the classroom and in the English Club. The students are really lovely, and today one of Anette’s students gave her a lovely Christmas present from her hometown. It was a Chinese teapot and mug made of clay, and they are quite pretty – a lovely sentiment!

Tonight we were invited to attend a Christmas party for all the universities in this area. It was held at a conference centre right next to our college. We didn’t quite know what to expect, apart from western Christmas food, and nothing could have prepared us for it. They do not celebrate Christmas in China, as you probably all know, and it was pretty obvious that they had no idea of what Christmas is all about. While the food was decent enough, although it had nothing to do with Christmas (probably more Easter), the whole event just felt hollow and artificial. A Philippino band, from our favourite nightclub, was playing during dinner, a Church choir opened and closed the evening with Chinese renditions of famous Christmas hymns, the various universities presented a very odd mix of entertainment ranging from horribly out-of-tune attempts at singing Christmas songs to magic tricks to some strange version of a rather agressive Tai Chi-performance, which is something of a paradox. Skinny Santa’s were running around handing out presents, and people were pulled up on stage to play silly Chinese party games. It was certainly an experience we will never forget! So while it didn’t exactly help us get into the Christmas spirit, we still had a good time with our colleagues.

Below are some pictures of the Christmas party and from when we went to see Norway play Hungary in the Women’s Handball World Championship here in Suzhou. Anette really enjoys watching handball on television, so when she heard that the World Championship was going to be held in China, and weirdly enough in our province and even in our city, we decided to go and experience it first hand. Of course she would have preferred to have gone to Wuxi to cheer for the Danish national team, but the tickets there were sold for 100 Euros each, and although a proud Dane, she sold out to Norway instead, where tickets were sold for a mere 8 Euros and were held here in Suzhou. Everything has its price, and so Anette was just ‘Scandinavian’ that night! We sat with all the Norwegian fans, who were all dressed up and were blowing into fog-horns and ringing cowbells, which is something they are notorious for in Handball circles! We both got caught up in the atmosphere, and joined even joined in as best as we could on the Norwegian national anthem and cheering for Norway. Heya Norge! It was a great night, and a really good experience, especially since Norway beat Hungary (Anette still vividly remembers the Olympic final when Denmark beat Hungary after having been behind during the majority of the match, before finishing them off in style). Joe has never previously been at all interested in handball, but now he has been converted, and is one step closer to completing his viking training. This comes at a good time seeing that our next home is going to be in Denmark, where we will be starting PhD studies after the summer holidays!