China from the Inside by Liam Brunt

Author:Liam Brunt
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer International Publishing, Cham

© The Author(s) 2017

Liam BruntChina from the Insidehttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-65672-4_13

13. “School’s Out for Summer, School’s Out for…”

8 June 2016

Liam Brunt1

(1)Norwegian School of Economics, Bergen, Norway

Dear Tim,

The girls’ semester finished on 30 June—an occurrence that caused us considerable confusion. We were originally told that the semester would finish on 13 July. Then we were told, around 14 June, that the semester would finish on 7 July (i.e. a week earlier). Then we were told, around 21 June, that there would be no more classes after the girls’ end-of-year tests on 30 June. What? So, with basically a week’s notice, the school just lopped two weeks off the end of the semester. It is lucky that we had nothing else planned for those two weeks—work, for example—and that were just sitting around waiting to do some extra childcare. If this happened in the US, then parents would be in revolt (rightly so)—and probably threatening to sue the school—but Chinese parents just shrug their shoulders and accept this kind of arbitrary action without a murmur. (We asked various parents about scheduling for the semester and discovered they were as surprised as us by the sudden shift in dates. Of course, most of those families have grandparents on hand to provide childcare—indeed, this is often a key reason to return to China from the US, where many of them previously had academic careers—so it is easier for them to cover shock shortfalls in childcare.) In fact, Elizabeth’s kindergarten had already terminated their timetable on 24 June—which was another working week de facto destroyed by having a five-year-old at home. Ironically, in Elizabeth’s case we had the opposite annoyance. The term officially finished on 24 June, but it turned out that classes ran for an extra week for those who wanted to bring in their children each morning. We would certainly have exercised this option—since Annabelle and Catherine had to go to school every morning anyway—but there was no way that Elizabeth was going to accept an additional week of kindergarten if it were voluntary. If we had known in advance, then we would simply have told her that kindergarten finished on 30 June! Most annoyingly, Annabelle and Catherine were still required to be in school on 8 July for class prize giving—an event that would last about 90 minutes, and to which the parents were not invited. So we were not even free agents after 30 June: we were being held in limbo, at the school’s whim, until they deigned to release us.

We understood that Annabelle and Catherine were slated to have end-of-year tests for the last two days. In the event, only Annabelle took any tests, since Catherine’s year apparently do not have them. The school takes these tests quite seriously. Although they are marked by teachers in the school, they are not marked by your child’s teachers and they are common tests for all schools in Beijing . Since we have been told by several people that the girls’ elementary school is the second best in the country, I suppose that there is some kind of school benchmarking going on.

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