Beginning to Look Back
December 31, 2008
I’m officially and completely done with my first semester at SYSU and I am sitting here in a Starbucks in the Beijing airport on my way home to the States. Technology still manages to amaze me; the fact that I can travel with my laptop and more often than not, there is a wireless connection of which to take advantage. I recently started watching the acclaimed television show “Mad Men” on DVD and quickly became addicted, running through two seasons in under a month. I highly recommend it to anyone who has not seen it. There are many scenes where one of the characters is dialing on a rotary phone and I still remember my parents having such a phone in the house when I was kid, but my roommate who is six years younger than me thought such a phone was a complete oddity and found it almost funny that I could remember something like that.
Anyway, I digress.
I sent my grades in to the Lingnan office this morning and at some point they will be entered into the system. This semester was the first time ever wielding the proverbial red pen (well more like my laptop since nobody really writes by hand anymore) to assign letter grades to my students that will show up on their transcripts. While I had several grades to average together in order to come up with a final grade, there was still an element of hoping that the final number corresponded with how I felt about that student’s performance in class. For example, I had several students come see me during office hours about their final exams and as I was grading their papers, I was really hoping that they were going to do well and that their hard work and diligence paid off. It made me extremely happy when I could give them a good grade on something that they obviously cared enough about to come see me during office hours. However, there was one student who did fail my Constitution class this semester. He simply did not do half of the assignments, including the final and did not come to more than half the classes. The one time we spoke about his performance, he admitted that he did not want to be in college and it was nothing to do with my class, but his own thoughts on being in school. While it was nice to know he didn’t just hate my class, I was frustrated because the Chinese university system provides no mechanism to deal with students like this one. He can’t just take a semester or a year off to regroup as a student in the States could do. Instead, he is in a system that mandates he keep pushing to the next level, regardless of whether he has different ideas about what he wants to do with his life. Aside from this student, many of my students actually surprised me with their insight and analysis on the final exam.
What was the final exam exactly, you may be wondering? It was actually a much simpler version of a law school take-home exam with questions about the limits of students’ freedom of speech and the application of the Equal Protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The students had to read fact patters and either use given precedents or their knowledge of the law to answer the questions. I’ve attached a copy of the Fall GZ Final Exam here if anyone is interested. Many of my students skillfully analyzed the precedents and applied them to the given fact patterns and it left me feeling as if I taught them something that they were able to use in a way that is different than the usual memorizing and regurgitating information that seems the norm in other classes.
Of course, the exams were not without their . . . er . . . interesting moments. Here are some choice quotes from some of the students:
“As the teenges are too uncapable to resist the tempertationof drugs to addict to them, the danger will be uncountable . As a student, Peter turn a deaf year to the school’ s policy , while abusing his right of freedoom of speech, this beavior is within the school-supervised events.”
“It’s a common sense that the teenagers are not appropriate to be exposed to the speech include sexual content, which may disturb them from their daily life and studying, or even lead them to some bad behavior such as masturbation and rape.”
“Secondly, gay usually needn’t protection from others for the reason they are the most high-knowledge person who have superior position in the society. Finally, there is obviously less difference between the gay and no gay except that you can make a distinguish if you confront someone acquaintance on some special occasions which is only for gays. Based on the view of the civil union, the gays are the people who are enjoying much more resource of the society than the general. On the other hand, even if it passes the law for gays, it exerts little social value instead of causing social fierce debate towards the laws. Therefore, the civil union insists its attitude toward gays.”
I’ll leave you with those quotes as I get ready to board my plane. I’ll be in the States for the next five weeks, but with distance will come a different perspective on the semester that was.
