“How Is China?”

By Gary Stephens“How is China? What is it like teaching there?” “Was it fun?” New York Institute of Technology began an undergraduate program in Nanjing, China this last fall semester. I was one of five NYIT faculty, who were teaching the 321 freshmen students enrolled. Since I have returned many people have asked me: “How is China?” “What is it like teaching there?” “Was it fun?”It was fun. China can be an extremely pleasant, welcoming place. Nanjing, an important ancient city, is prosperous, modern, and has a population of between five and seven million people. Its ancient city wall still surrounds about a third of the city center, which is marked by modern skyscrapers. The Yangtze River runs around the city’s north edge. We, however, lived and worked in YanLing University City that is a suburban complex of more than eight universities east of Nanjing’s Purple Mountain. This complex is new, huge and really like a set for a science fiction movie. As you drive down the main boulevard you pass futuristic gates behind which are set distinctive architectural features like a great glass globe at Nanjing Normal, or giant Chinese characters bent into the shape of the gate you enter through. Our partnering university, NUPT, has a round administration building sitting on the edge of a small lake at the entrance. NUPT’s classroom buildings run for about 800 yards down one side of a long wide mall. When the classes end for lunch or dinner, you see all 20,000 students spill out of the buildings onto the mall and begin to walk over the landscaped ridge that separates the academic campus from the area of the university where the students live. NUPT has six dining halls, forty-six dormitories, and several blocks of arcades where there are shops, bookstores, barbers, cell-phone centers, a post-office, and grocery stores.We lived in faculty housing that was a twenty-five minute walk from the academic buildings. So we rode bicycles to class and to dinner. Although we were “on campus,” between our apartments and the main academic area there was a high hill whose base on three sides was home to a Chinese village of workers. The campus, like all the campuses in YanLing City, was fenced and divided internally by walls with gates, maintained at all times by police. In our neighborhood there were, conservatively, 150,000 students. And buildings were going up rapidly everywhere. In the future, whenever I return there, the boggy, wild fields that I passed on my bicycle on my way to class or the dining hall, will be blocks of buildings. There was no library building this fall. By the end of the spring there will be. Although all of the universities in YanLing City have campuses in downtown Nanjing, they have all outgrown their facilities there and have had to build these new campuses to accommodate their growth. But one begins to wonder why such a large segment of the Chinese population is being housed all together in one place. Are the walls for security and protection of the students, or are they to keep the students in?China is a comfortable place, because it is prosperous and modern. Most of the amenities that we take for granted in the U.S. are provided. But students do not have cars at the campus. They cannot even ride bicycles–unlike we privileged American professors. Most students are not allowed to have laptop computers or computers in their rooms during their first two years of school. Those who are allowed, like students in our NYIT program in Nanjing, find that the Internet is turned off at eleven p.m. Then all the lights in the campus dorms go off also. And, so far, the classroom buildings and the dormitories are unheated. That’s right—the only heat in classrooms and dorm rooms is that of bodies and bottles of hot tea that everyone carries and which can be reheated from boiling hot water machine on each floor of the classroom buildings. When the big snows hit Nanjing these last three weeks, schools were on mid-winter break. But in December we were all wearing our long underwear and many layers of clothing. I taught in my warmest winter jacket on several occasions. Did the students complain? No. I have a few photographs of them sitting there in my class in their parkas, holding their hot green tea bottles getting ready to listen to me go over their essays. I think their high schools had been the same: cold and tough.The students were very good. They had scored consistently high on the national university admission exam. They were eager to learn, excited to be in our “American” program, and were already looking ahead several years when they might be attending NYIT in Old Westbury or Manhattan. But they were still highly conditioned by their high school experience which had been, by American standards, “crazy.” The had gone to school about 15 hours a day in their senior year, beginning at 6:30 in the morning and ending after a mandatory study hall at school at 10:30 at night. Everything they had done for the two years previous to college had been focused on doing well on the national college entrance exam. They had been pumped full of information and tested and tested and tested. They had never had class discussions; rather, they had been lectured to and forced to stand up in class and answer their teachers’ questions terrified that they would make a mistake and “lose face” in front of their classmates. As a result, when they arrived at NYIT’s program in Nanjing they were relieved to be past high school, but were unable to relax and participate easily in “American” give and take in class. Rarely did a student ask a question in class. When they did it was with much forethought, preparation, and as if it were an examination. Privately students expressed a deep desire to have discussions, but in the class itself, it was very hard for them. Further, it is not a positive trait in Chinese culture to be a “noisy” person; being thoughtful and keeping your own counsel is a virtue. “Losing face” by saying something wrong, or considered “foolish” is quite terrible.As teachers and administrators there was a great deal that we did not know about China and Chinese education. One of the pleasures of working there was continually learning about that ancient and very different culture. With reference to universities, for example, all students must finish in four years or be considered to have done something wrong. Upon entry all students know the exact courses they will take every semester for their next four years with no deviations. They also join a small “class” of 30-40 students and take all of their courses with the same group for all four years. They are intensely focused on the “final exam” in a course and cannot believe that weekly work can count for as much or more than the “final.” And they are highly focused on gathering information so that, in a television production course, they would rather learn “theory” than produce an actual video, an activity that gives them little to show on a final examination.When we arrived, we did not know about the rigid degree maps, the “class” that you stay with all the way through school, the mandatory study halls that students must attend from 6:30-9:30 in the evening. We didn’t realize that while taking 12 credit hours in courses taught in English from NYIT, they were still taking that many credits more in Chinese from NUPT at the same time. We couldn’t fathom the difficulties they encountered trying to talk in class. And, frankly, we were not always certain in the cases of some students, how well they understood us. We were always reading a new cultural situation, always trying to fathom the depth of the communication in the moment. But the administrators of NUPT were serious and friendly. While they had as little understanding of American education as we had of China’s educational system, they tried their best to work with us and solve problems And the students were friendly, energetic, always grateful for serious teaching and attention.Towards the end of our stay, students were always asking me, “Will you be here next semester? When will you come back?” And the administrators at NUPT were asking “When will some NYIT students want to come study in Nanjing?” I would love to go back and teach in Nanjing again. And I know that I will be seeing many of my students there here in a year or two. I also think NYIT students, especially those in business or those interested in developing Chinese language skills, should think about doing a term in Nanjing. I should end by making clear that the apartments like I stayed in, and that NYIT exchange students would stay in, are all heated.