STEVE WILMARTH TOURING MOJO AROUND THE SCHOOL.
Champlain Mojo spent our Monday touring Wuhan’s best educational institutions, with our morning visiting HuaZhong Normal University and our afternoon touring at Central Chinese Normal University. After we visited Steve’s classroom of 50 students and played an intercultural “getting to know you” scavenger hunt, we stepped into the role of “honored guests in display” at the school’s daily flag raising ceremony in front of 4,000 students in the courtyard, complete with CRP national anthem and CRP flag-raising.
The school is impressive. The quad alone felt big enough to house our entire Champlain College academic quad – a reminder that few cultures do size and scale and pageantry as impressively as the Chinese. Steve had instructed me to prepare a short speech, and I enlisted the help of the Mojo’ers – we planned to introduce ourselves with a bit of Chinese and then introduce ourselves and our majors – “Ni Hao, Wuhan, Wo Jiao NAME and I am studying XXXX at Champlain College.” Due to a snafu on their end, however, we were not invited to speak.
Dodged that bullet.
As we walked around the school with Steve, I kept reminding myself that this was one of the best high schools in all of China, akin to our elite private academies in the States.
Touting the school’s library largely devoid of books, we were joined by Becky, a CRP member who clearly was assigned to our group to listen in. Only 5% of the Chinese population actually belong to the CRP, but they exercise enormous control over what is said and done, even as China opens itself to the world, and watching Becky observe our group, I marveled at the thoroughness with which the CRP has penetrated every level of Chinese society.
Apparently the school’s students are not allowed to use the library – testament to the traditional “teacher-centered” pedagogy that dominates the Chinese educational system. Steve explained that the Chinese, the world’s best savers of money, pour much of their savings into two arenas: real estate and education. That explains the real estate boom in China right now, which makes the housing bubble in the US look like child’s play. Steve also shared with our group just how difficult it is to challenge the “repetition and recitation” teacher-oriented traditional Chinese pedagogical approach with a more student-centered “ask questions and do research” approach more common on US schools.
Some shots of our Champlain Mojo students working with our Chinese host students in the classroom.
After lunch, we traveled across the city by bus, and, after a 30 minute wait at the Bank of China to exchange dollars for yuan (which an American cannot do without a Chinese citizen to co-sign), we toured Central Chinese Normal University, visiting some Chinese language classrooms where students from all over the world come to learn Mandarin, and then enjoyed dinner at the University’s hotel, before we returned to meet our host families for our second night of home stay in Wuhan.
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