Week 5

Before starting my observation, I spent a week researching Chinese education, mainly classroom structure and participation. While most of the things that happened during my observation was what I expected, there were still a quite few things that surprised me. But here are the things that stood out the most to me:

Things that I expected

As you could see from the schedule above, students spend almost 12 hours a day in their classroom, either for self-study or for lecture. They have only one hour a day to attend their extracurricular activities, which is far less than the amount of time that American students have.

Rather than asking open-ended questions, the teacher asks more straightforward questions (typically the answers could be found straight from the text.)

The thing that surpised me the most:

The classroom atmosphere was a lot more friendly and relaxed than what was mentioned online. Students were not afraid to make jokes and talking more freely in class.