Blog News

1. Comments are still disabled though I am thinking of enabling them again.

2. There are now several extra pages - Poetry Index, Travel, Education, Childish Things - accessible at the top of the page. They index entires before October 2013.

3. I will, in the next few weeks, be adding new pages with other indexes.

Tuesday 19 March 2013

End of lesson

Most of the schools here signal the ends of lessons with music - usually something bland and inoffensive, Richard Clayderman is popular - but one of the schools I work at is differeent. It signals the ends of lessons with a long spoken text - in English - about the companionship of books. The full text may be found at
http://www.mifengtd.cn/articles/companionship-of-books-english-cornor.html

I found this with only a minimal amount of web searching (one search actually on "companionship of books") and as you can see my first hit is dual text English and Chinese.
I have no idea why this particular text seems to have captured the imagination of the Chinese education system but it clearly has.
What I do know is that in the whole school there are probably two people who can fully understand it - me and the other foreign teacher. A few of the teachers will understand most of it and a very small number of students will understand some of it.

Seems an odd choice but I hear it every day. Maybe they think that it will sink into people by some alchemaical osmosis, absorbed through the pores if not the ears.

Well, at least it beats  Richard Clayderman.