Why Oh Why China Is So Frustrating Sometimes?

I have to be fair here. I’m not talking about the whole China here, just about the university I’m studying in. And I have to add that I didn’t sleep so well last night so that might have some effect on my mood today.

We had our last midterm exam today and I was totally frustrated with it. Why? Because we haven’t learnt anything during that course which is about Chinese culture. We were forced to buy a book but then we never use it. When we were learning about the qipao we just learnt which actor is dating which director. Dating culture would be an interesting topic but not like this. I had Korean and Chinese Culture and Japanese Culture courses back in Finland and I am comparing to those courses. Of course it’s not maybe fair to compare, because the education in Finland is the best in the world.

And yesterday I almost lost my mind during the spoken Chinese class. You never know what to expect from that class. It might be watching a video about an animal that I don’t know how to call even in Finnish. So really usefull stuff right? The teacher have some good ideas to make us speak and corrects our pronunciation but the majority of the course seem to be just bouncing from some random thing to another.

My intention is not to make the teachers to lose face, but I feel like I’m losing my head with them! The university is also constantly nagging about our absence, but sometimes I don’t see a good reason to wake up in the morning to go to class if I’m not going to learn anything. I am here to learn and I want some quality teaching. If the level of some of our courses continues like this it is ok for me too because as an exchange student I’m not paying. But then they shouldn’t be sending me a text message every morning where I am. I’m not a primary school kid anymore.

But I also have to say that we have some great teachers too. Our reading course is nice and the teacher has a clear vision what she is doing in every class. She knows how to teach. Also writing course is one of my favourites and I enjoy those classes very much. Listening teacher is also a really good teacher and he knows what he is doing. We also have a course about Chinese characters and it started out nicely but right now I’m not sure in which direction the course is going.

Our teachers seem all to be graduate students that here means they only have a bachelor degree. In Finland you would never be able to teach in university with such a low degree. Sure the situation in Finland is a little bit different because bachelor degree is not a graduation in Finland. It is just a piece of paper and almost every university student do a master degree too. At Least if they want to find a job. So how much experience can I expect from our teachers because they don’t even have a master degree?

This is not an attact towards the universty. Some of you asked me to write about not so pleasant things in China so here you go. Maybe you can’t take everything I wrote literally, but I genuenely hope that the spoken Chinese course and Chinese culture course will improve during the rest of my time in this university.