Celebrating labor day

Today was our kickoff meeting in the Foreign Languages department. A total of about 14 “foreign experts” in the dept. Most are American, a few Brits, a couple of Japanese, an Italian, and a Dutch. All really nice and helpful. A handful of us are new, first timers. The meeting was filled with gracious speeches by one dean after another. The big takeaways? Tsinghua is a prestigious university; challenge your students; be prompt and prepared. I don’t yet know about my students’ language levels, etc. as I need to meet up with the business school

The rest of the meeting covered departmental policies, including the issue of plagiarism. Like universities everywhere, it’s a big problem but in the case of Chinese students, it’s a bit complicated. Because rote memorization is fundamental in the Chinese education/learning system, one could argue that when students copy or paraphrase, they actually don’t realize they’re doing something wrong. Got it.

A foreign teacher brought up the other hot topic: attendance issues with the Korean students. Ah, yes, the Korean students. Eyes roll. Heavy sighing. Touchy subject. Seems that there's an odd two-tier admissions process going on. On the one hand, this place is arguably the most difficult university to get into in all of China… if you’re Chinese. On the other hand, the university admits a lot of Korean students on a different, sub-standard criterion, but charges them a heftier tuition. These students were described to me at lunch, by one of the instructors, as kids who were not academically strong enough for Korean universities, but since they're wealthy-- but not enough to afford US schooling-- they settled on one of the many schools in Beijing. Apparently their Mandarin is mediocre and they have terrible attendance. One faculty whispered, “if you see boys hanging out wearing earrings and smoking, then they’re probably Korean.” Yeah, but they sure make good soap operas.