About Chinese schools

Sorry for not explaining about the schools in China...

The mandatory schooling for Chinese students is only through what we call middle school, or 8th grade, until they are about 15. What we call middle school they call junior middle school. Then the students who have good grades, in the top 10%, from junior middle school have the opportunity to go to senior middle school, what we call high school. But of course like in all places if a student's parents have money or power they can bribe the schools to accept a student with bad grades into the senior middle school. This sometimes sucks because you will have some spoiled students who don't want to be in the school and who've taken the place of a poorer student with good grades that worked really hard and that could really benefit from the extra schooling.

Then in senior middle school they have 3 grades; grade 1, grade 2, and grade 3. Grade 3 is the highest grade and these students are preparing for the Chinese college entrance exams... but i don't really know how these exams work. The students are placed in grades based on their test scores. So in theory a smart 15 year-old student from junior middle school could be placed in grade 3, do really well and go off to college the next year. But I think more normal is that the young students start in Grade 1 and work their way up.

I teach Grade 2 in Senior Middle school. And in my school they put 1000 students in each grade, I just found this out yesterday that there are only 1000 seats per grade. So they're divided in 16 classes, and half of these classes are studying the sciences and the other half are studying literature and arts. So, I finally found out why some of my classes hate English and refuse to work, because they are the science group, and the other half love English and even want me to stay after class to talk with them, they are the literature group :)

Then in every class there is a class monitor. I think the job of the class monitor is funny because its their job to quiet down the class if they are loud, or erase the board for the teacher, or even listen to the students if there is something wrong and talk with the teacher about it after class.

Out side of class the students have a 2 1/2 hour break for lunch to go home eat and take a nap. Most students eat at one of the many small one room restaurants(?) or food stalls on the same street as the school. The students have 7 periods a day just like American schools. They finish the regular school day at 5 pm. They have classes during the day Monday through Saturday, and night classes Sunday through Thursday. Every student get tasks, like chores, assigned to them and to my surprise they are very diligent about completing them. They're tasks like cleaning the white tiles around the gardens with a mop and water or sweeping the leaves off the basketball court, lol (an Asian favorite of sweeping leaves!), or wiping down all the desks with a wet towel.

Some students come from rural areas from as far as 2 hours outside of town. These students live in the dorms on campus. There are three 4-story building for Grade 1, 2, and 3, then there are 2 lab buildings, a 5-story office building, the dorms, a cafeteria building that I think the students only use it to get hot water for their thermoses, a football stadium, basketball courts, badminton courts and ping pong tables. This is what I've seen of the campus so far.