Is Apathy Normal?

"The idea of teaching a Shakespeare soliloquy written in the English of 400 years ago to people of a very different culture," replies one correspondent, "is inspired, classic and hilarious. And, I hope, instructive to everyone involved."

Errr ... I am supposed to have drawn a lesson from the failure of my lesson?

Assuredly, old English is a different language, which is why I would deal with no more than a small quantity of it in an English class. But the obsolete usages are readily explainable in modern English -- "contempt" for "contumely," for example. Really, the inconvenience of old English's divergences from the modern are trifling when dealing with a mere page of text, compared to the benefit of exposure to an outstanding piece of writing by an author who is still influential today (witness Monty Python).

As for cultural differences, it seems to me these are generally overstated. Frank Sinatra's "As Time Goes By" has it right:

You must remember this
A kiss is still a kiss
A sigh is still (just) a sigh
The fundamental things apply
As time goes by

And when two lovers woo
They still say: "I love you"
On that you can rely
No matter what the future brings
As time goes by

Moonlight and love songs - never out of date
Hearts full of passion - jealousy and hate
Woman needs man - and man must have his mate
That no one can deny

It's still the same old story
A fight for love and glory
A case of do or die
The world will always welcome lovers
As time goes by

What is there about "the pangs of despis'd love" that should be alien to the modern Chinese experience? Or for that matter, the oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely, the law's delay, the insolence of office, and the spurns that patient merit of the unworthy takes?

In general, the difficulty here is not the topics we're addressing. In fact, in the B group we just finished with an alternate reading that a student had proposed -- a short story ("The Sixth Diamond," by Nora Piper, from Reader's Digest), set in the Depression-era U.S., about a young woman who finds that what her mother had taught her is true -- human nature is inherently good.

It's a simple, sweet, pleasant little story (despite the questionable moral). When we'd finished with it I asked the class what they preferred, this kind of thing or the type of stuff we'd been reading from the New York Times. The mood was morose that day, perhaps because they were still feeling the aftershocks of our first real exam. I couldn't describe the response as an outpouring -- no stamping feet or whistles. But those who offered an opinion all expressed a preference for the kinds of articles we'd been doing before.

They'll opt for the good medicine -- they just don't like taking it.

Incidentally, the consensus seems to be that I'm their best teacher, of the three Western and three Chinese teachers they have. This from Mr. Meng recently (after he'd spent some time in discussion with students), relayed to me in the presence of Jim (my one-time "assistant"), and confirmed as the general opinion of students by my closer student contacts. But, Meng says, I need to change my style. Dangle the right answer before them when I ask questions, and laud them more when they answer correctly.

But Meng is merely parroting the wishes expressed by students, who want everything to be easier, softer, more lazily relaxing. Ever the pragmatist-politician, he wants what's simplest -- just give people what they want, like Microsoft changing its encyclopedia entry on Bangkok. But what if I'm already dangling the right answer? What if I'm openly giving the right answer to anyone who's listening rather than daydreaming?

Incidentally, these kids are mostly 18, not 17 as stated in one of my previous missives. The one-based age counting, whereby a kid turns 2 one year after birth? Just another Chinese "misunderstanding." The number representing a young person's age is figured the same way here as in the West. The one-based system was told to me so unequivocally that I didn't even question it at the time. But now that I've asked a few other people, some say they've never heard of such a system. One informant tells me that's how elderly people count their age, but not young people.

I ask the guy who originally told me about the one-based system: How old are you; when were you born?

He answers 24 and September 1977 respectively.

But, I tell him, everyone else here counts differently.

He now tells me that the way you count depends on your cultural group within China.

So a person's age has to be qualified with their ethnic or regional origins?

He says it's only a difference of 1 anyway, not so important. If someone says 22 and you really want to know exactly, you can just follow up with the query, 22 or 23?

I could go on with these explorations ...... but who's got the patience?

It's long been abundantly clear that Meng's sales pitch to me when I was still in Toronto -- about the students' passion for improving their English -- is a fantasy. But there's a more basic problem, having to do with something that is a cultural variable: the kids here simply do not attach much inherent value to learning, insight, enlightenment.

It's not just Shakespeare. We just did an article about a federal investigation into sexual harassment in New York City's welfare-to-work program ("Federal Agency Accuses City of Illegally Ignoring Harassment," The New York Times, October 1, 1999). In these so-called workfare programs, welfare recipients are required to work in order to maintain their benefits. With 40,000 participants, New York has the largest such program in the U.S.

The article introduces two major features of Western society -- sexual harassment and related law, and welfare/homelessness -- which the students know little or nothing about. At the same time, it tells how these two features intersect in New York, where the Giuliani administration's audacious legal defense, in the face of serious charges of sexual harassment, rests on the theory that people required to work in workfare programs are not protected by Federal civil rights laws because technically they are not employees.

"I know it's not a particularly sympathetic position," concedes counsel for the city. "But this is a legal issue. We have a good faith duty to protect the taxpayer."

Retorts opposing counsel: "We have a supposedly law-enforcement Mayor who is hiding behind legal technicalities instead of addressing what is a horrendous situation. It's absolutely outrageous that the city's claiming its program mirrors the world of work, and then it denies these women the basic rights that are available to other workers."

The article relates:

Maria Gonzales ... said yesterday at a news conference that she had complained to two levels of supervisors, to no avail, that her boss at the city's Human Resources Administration grabbed her genitals, demanded sex, stole her time cards and threatened her life when she refused his advances.

"I don't think it's right that the city should treat women who need their help like this," said Ms. Gonzales, 32, who was unemployed and was facing eviction when she applied for public assistance in 1997. "I have nightmares and I still cry when I talk about this, and I'm still very afraid of that man."

Obviously this stuff is at least a teeny bit intriguing. But it would have taken a cattle prod to move the students.

They are mostly fired by a wish to go to the West -- maybe because of inchoate yearnings having to do with nicer clothes and toys. Or, according to more mature Chinese contacts here, they haven't formed even that much of a rationale, but wish to go simply because that's what's currently fashionable among their peers. They are incurious about the world outside their narrow experience and how it works. And they are intellectually indolent and undisciplined.

Damn. Seems like in under three months I've become as bitter as any curmudgeonly fixture of the faculty lounge.

What I've had here is a close-up view of a single school. What I can't say with confidence is how representative these kids are of Chinese students as a whole.

I've been speaking above of the students in the two classes I've referred to as group A and group B. I've been teaching them 15 hours a week (7.5 hours each, though following a recent schedule change, this dropped to 12 hours weekly, or 6 hours each). They are failures in two senses: they are at this college, which implies they haven't done well enough on China's national entrance exam for universities for admission to a state university (though it might also mean they overshot when designating their preferred universities, which they have to do before the test is written); and they haven't even scored high enough to be admitted as freshmen at this college. The A's and B's are a pre-university year. They spend September to January here, March to August in an English-as-a-second-language training centre, either in Eastbourne or Surrey, England, or in Sydney, Australia. (I also teach two groups of freshmen here, but only 3 hours per week each, so my impressions of them are less clear.) Their primary qualification is that their families have money.

Some time ago I tried to discover if any minimum standard was applied in admitting students to this pre-university program. Meng said yes but other sources conflicted, and I finally gave up. Just another simple-as-pie question that cannot be reliably answered. Someone did assert to me, as a matter of certainty, that one girl's family paid a million RMB (about $120,000 U.S.) to get her into this program; and no one I mentioned this to found it the least implausible. But most people also say there are no standards, which seems inconsistent with paying a premium for admission.

It's worth noting that Meng's sales pitch also stressed that this college (the International College of Beijing, or ICB) is part of the China Agricultural University (CAU), a reputable state institution: "Please consider that our university is one of the National Key Universities in China. It is not the private school or the street restaurant." But CAU's academic stature is irrelevant, since the A's and B's are in a pre-university program, not a CAU degree program, and have never been admitted to CAU proper (nor could they have been, given their scores).

In fact, the convoluted academic structure of ICB is such that even the freshmen, for the most part, are not really students of CAU. They are ICB students, and ICB is one CAU's 17 colleges; but they will not be granted a CAU degree when they complete their studies. They will only get a degree from the partner university in England (the University of Luton) at which they do their third and final year of studies.

The reason for this is that ICB accepts students whose scores on the national entrance exam are below CAU's minimum standard. (The minority of ICB freshmen who scored over the threshold will get dual degrees, from both CAU and Luton.)

If simple questions were answerable, one might like to know how many students nationwide, in a given year, score above the minimum score required on the national entrance exam for admission to CAU; how many write the exam at all; and how many who score lower nevertheless study at alternate institutions such as ICB.

But this still wouldn't provide a clear picture of how my students compare with those who really are in "National Key Universities." The results of even well-designed exams have an element of randomness, particularly when a young student's decisive score is decided at one sitting (as I believe is the case with the national entrance exam). And it would certainly be optimistic to assume that China's national exam is especially well designed.

So it's unclear to what extent teaching at a real "National Key University" might have been more rewarding. But why is it, in any case, that I am not teaching at such a university? It may be that my search for positions via the internet, and with one New York-based Chinese agent, never had much likelihood of yielding openings at those institutions. Possibly they have no trouble recruiting their quota of English teachers every semester directly from the faculties of American and other Western universities, or through professional teacher networks.

If ICB's grafting into an established "agricultural" university seems initially unintuitive, there is an explanation: money. As explained to me by Meng some time ago, China has a "2-1-1" education reform project underway under which the nation's top 100 universities are to be assisted in various ways, including by an allocation of 10,000 RMB (about $1200 U.S.) per student per year.

Universities are ranked according to size, quality, breadth of curriculum and other factors. By design, this reform has encouraged mergers among universities, and CAU is the product of one such merger (in 1995, between two agriculture institutions which were distinct at the time).

The name of the project indicates 21st century ("2-1") and top 100 ("1"). In the first phase of the project, which began in May, 1999, the top 20 universities began receiving the student subsidies. CAU was ranked #15.