Read my latest story, "The All-Nighter", at 52|250.

This evening, I served as a judge for the sophomore speech competition. Sixteen students had been selected by their peers in their oral English classes. The podium was almost bigger than some of them (and probably was bigger than I am). The judges– myself, another foreign teacher, one of the Chinese teachers, and the son of the school founder– sat in the front row of a hall containing more than 200 people. As you can imagine, this led to quite a few voices crackling and cracking with nervousness, a few skipped words, and a lot of false starts. One of the more unfortunate incidents happened when one of my students from last year lost the thread of his speech in the midst of distracting chatter from the audience. Granted, better speakers can overcome such difficulties, but you have to remember that these students are only in their second year of university-level English studies. (By contrast with the audience, the other finalists were extremely supportive and gave him a strong round of applause when he did make it through his speech after starting a second time.)

Still, this performance reflected one of the common weaknesses I see in the way students here prepare for just about any test or competition. Instead of learning about a subject and memorizing some facts or even an outline, they tend to try to memorize speeches or papers word for word. When you memorize a speech as a whole, it can be quite difficult to get back into it after an interruption, and it limits your ability to adapt to the audience’s behavior and level of interest.

Of course, this is a minor issue compared to incidents in which students memorize statements others have written– a common occurrence when students here know that they’re going to be required to write an essay in class.

Memorization is not a habit students here have developed because they want to avoid having to think. (Indeed, though they may be shy about it, feedback from my students indicates the opposite.) It is, however, what they’ve been taught to do in order to succeed in the testing regime. Tests determine these students’ whole future: they determined where the students would attend college, various specialized tests will grant them professional licenses that will determine their career success, and only those who pass the post-graduate examination will be able to gain further education. And so they spend their time learning by rote instead of developing critical thinking skills. It’s a rational decision.

Those who would like to see an increase in high stakes testing would do well to consider the effects it has on students in systems where it already exists. (The more frightening possibility is that those at the head of movements in favor of such examinations– in the U.S., for instance– may already have considered this.)

On a lighter note, I must admit to laughing like the geek I am when the other foreign judge responded to the necessity of adding up our scores to select a winner by saying, “Damnit Jim, I’m an English teacher, not a mathematician”.

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