My present teacher of Chinese is a fine woman, she’s smiling all the time and she likes to go off track during the class. But there is still something that annoys me with her… I have already mentioned the “tofu generation” phenomenon in one of my previous posts, that is to say the fact that Taiwanese youngsters don’t feel any concern about politics, neither about the environment they’re living in, and are mostly obsessed with a successful career which would give them an enviable position in the society and the salary that goes with it.
One of my previous teachers of Chinese once told me that foreign students were more active, more independent than Taiwanese students who encounter big problems of adaptation when they enter the university. I think this time of adaptation is normal and most of my friends studying at the university seem perfectly happy and autonomous, as a majority of them live away from their family. In fact when I attended some second year classes as an auditor, what struck me more was the way students are taught. It was a class of social work in Taida (the National Taiwan University) and the teacher seemed to me incredibly motherly for a college teacher: she would first ask the students if they had read the papers (I don’t remember any of my teachers asking me that, they would just assume I had read it and if not… too bad for me!), if it was not too hard, if they were tired… I may be wrong but it appears to me that her teaching method was leaning towards treating the students like children. My experience in Taida was not that bad and, in fact, it can be quite nice to have a professor who does not simply enter the classroom to give her speech and then leave but encourages interaction with the students. But the other side of the coin is that sometimes it can be really boring and annoying, most of all when you wonder if the teacher is not thinking you're an idiot!
Like I said before, my actual teacher of Chinese likes to digress, her favorite subjects being her son when he was 4 years old – he is now 20 – and food or physiognomy. She believes for example that when your index is longer than your ring-finger, then you have an artistic nature, that if you have a mono-eyebrow, then you might be an obtuse person. When my classmate said these are superstitions, my teacher just very firmly replied that these come from a precise observation of nature and people… For having already heard these sayings I just accept them as part of the local folklore but it worsened when she started explaining us once that there are four seasons of three months each because the Earth is tilted etc… It is interesting indeed… for an 8 year old kid!
Well, as we seemed to have definitively put aside the short story of Bai Xian-yong that we were reading, we started talking about the situation of Tibet which lead us to Taiwan . As our teacher just remained silent all the time, we asked her about her opinion which was: “you know, it is so complicated that we’d better leave it to future generations.” No comment.
Once, my teacher described herself as being an ostrich for joking: a door had just violently slammed in the hallway and her first reflex had been hiding her face in her hands. My teacher is also extremely conservative: she only eats Chinese food, and thinks that taking a shower in the morning after waking up can endanger one’s life. In a time when Taiwan is promoting its cultural diversity, I’d rather ride a tiger than an ostrich…
One of my previous teachers of Chinese once told me that foreign students were more active, more independent than Taiwanese students who encounter big problems of adaptation when they enter the university. I think this time of adaptation is normal and most of my friends studying at the university seem perfectly happy and autonomous, as a majority of them live away from their family. In fact when I attended some second year classes as an auditor, what struck me more was the way students are taught. It was a class of social work in Taida (the National Taiwan University) and the teacher seemed to me incredibly motherly for a college teacher: she would first ask the students if they had read the papers (I don’t remember any of my teachers asking me that, they would just assume I had read it and if not… too bad for me!), if it was not too hard, if they were tired… I may be wrong but it appears to me that her teaching method was leaning towards treating the students like children. My experience in Taida was not that bad and, in fact, it can be quite nice to have a professor who does not simply enter the classroom to give her speech and then leave but encourages interaction with the students. But the other side of the coin is that sometimes it can be really boring and annoying, most of all when you wonder if the teacher is not thinking you're an idiot!
Like I said before, my actual teacher of Chinese likes to digress, her favorite subjects being her son when he was 4 years old – he is now 20 – and food or physiognomy. She believes for example that when your index is longer than your ring-finger, then you have an artistic nature, that if you have a mono-eyebrow, then you might be an obtuse person. When my classmate said these are superstitions, my teacher just very firmly replied that these come from a precise observation of nature and people… For having already heard these sayings I just accept them as part of the local folklore but it worsened when she started explaining us once that there are four seasons of three months each because the Earth is tilted etc… It is interesting indeed… for an 8 year old kid!
Well, as we seemed to have definitively put aside the short story of Bai Xian-yong that we were reading, we started talking about the situation of Tibet which lead us to Taiwan . As our teacher just remained silent all the time, we asked her about her opinion which was: “you know, it is so complicated that we’d better leave it to future generations.” No comment.
Once, my teacher described herself as being an ostrich for joking: a door had just violently slammed in the hallway and her first reflex had been hiding her face in her hands. My teacher is also extremely conservative: she only eats Chinese food, and thinks that taking a shower in the morning after waking up can endanger one’s life. In a time when Taiwan is promoting its cultural diversity, I’d rather ride a tiger than an ostrich…
