Essay IV: Comparison

Have you ever been to the L.A. international airport - the largest airport in the United States? The sounds of roaring planes, beeping luggage vans, and humming crowds permeate the whole terminal. Within the endless stream of passengers, you can recognize many Chinese people easily from Americans, not only by their outstanding features, but the different verbal and nonverbal languages that they are using during their conversation.

It has often been said that many Americans find silence uncomfortable. They will talk continually to fill any pause in a conversation, even if it lasts only for a moment. If you are silent for long periods of time, Americans will do their best to include you in the conversation. They may ask you if you are feeling well, or if there is anything they can do to help you. In comparison, Chinese usually prefer the role of listening. It's just like the old Chinese saying: "The more you talk; the more mistakes you make." Going through the long river of Chinese history, we can easily learn about countless examples of people who died for expressing their opinions openly. During the Chinese Cultural Revolution, thousands and thousands of innocent people were put into jail, even dying there just because they were talking about the politics of the government freely. The important lesson that the Chinese learned from their miserable history is: "If you want to survive in this complex society, you have to control your mouth." As a result, during a conversation most Chinese people like to stand there listening, smiling, nodding instead of giving any opinion.

Americans like to express themselves with their body language in their conversation. They may show friendly feelings by touching you on the shoulder; they may show their affection by patting a child's head; or they may say good-bye by hugging or kissing you on the cheek. On the other hand, Chinese culture discourages the overt demonstration of feelings like happiness or anger. The conservative culture encourages people to appear much more controlled and placid in public place. This is the reason that hugging and kissing in public is still not considered an appropriate behavior in current China. I still remember an incident quite clearly that happened in GuongZhong, the second largest city of China, about one year ago. In a crowded cinema, people were watching The Story of Beijing , a famous American film describing some American-born Chinese who found a totally different society when they took a trip to Beijing. During the showing of the film, when the American-Chinese father and his son were joking with each other, rubbing and patting each other's head, sounds of criticism arose in every corner of the cinema. "Such behavior is really shocking! What kind of attitude does the son have toward his father?"

American people are used to exchanging eye contact during a conversation; if not, they may think you are not interested in the topic or even that you are hiding something. However, according to Chinese custom, exchanging eye contact constantly has the significant function of sending signals of love, especially when you talking to the opposite sex. Another effect is that China was a country of monarchical power for two thousand years. For a long period of time, when people were talking with elder people, such as their sovereign, a clan member, or even their parents, they had not been allowed to look directly at elder people. The rule is that you should be hanging your head, staring at the floor to show your respect. For these two reasons, you may better understand about why the Chinese like to stare at your hand or the floor instead of looking at your eyes.

Every culture has its own world view, its own way of looking at the world. Affected by the Chinese culture and history, the Chinese also have different nonverbal and verbal languages during a conversation. So, when you talk with them, do not feel embarrassed, impolite or rude. They may speak and respond differently from you, but they are still a warm nation.

Lisha Li is from Macau, a small city near Hong Kong.

A Great Change
by Galina Schlangman

"Girls with earrings?! No school uniform? We'll spoil our students, and there will be no way back!" Strange? More than that. Those were the words of indignation which I heard only some six or seven years ago in my school. And those words came from more than half the teachers, and of course, from the school principal and her assistants. It was so hard for us, a few teachers, to convince almost the whole staff to change some of our ancient school traditions. But we did it!

The reason for the terrible conservatism was quite understandable: the Soviet school always required students to fully obey its regulations. Nobody (even school teachers) was allowed to say anything against this or that issue in school regulations. I remember myself in high school. All of us had to wear school uniforms. Poor parents! They had a problem finding them in the stores. As the economy was structured in a very strange way - there was a variety of goods in the capital of the country and in a few big cities only, my parents asked some people who were going on a business trip to Moscow to buy me a uniform. And then my parents did the same for my friends. On the one hand, you did look neat in a dark brown dress with a shining white collar, and in this way school taught you to look strict and precise, not to pay attention to your classmates' clothes instead of studying, to think only of your classes. On the other hand, it was awfully boring to wear the same dress all year long. Besides, we had to wash our collars every two days at least. As for the dresses, our moms washed them once every two or three weeks. By the end of the school year our uniform dresses would become transparent in the back where we usually sat. It was similar with the boys; their uniform trousers looked good in the front, but not behind. In addition, most of the families couldn't even afford to buy a new uniform for their kids more than once a year. When we had dancing parties, we were still prohibited to put on some fancy clothes. It was a great temptation to have a new dress on which your parents had bought or given to you for your birthday. If you did put on this dress of your dreams, a special guard at the door wasn't supposed to let you in. But you were fifteen or sixteen; you had started to date a boy. So you were always to choose; to dance with your passion in that awfully boring dress, or stay at home. One can't imagine how hard all was for a teenager!

When I started to teach, myself, the situation with school uniforms was almost the same. Oh, excuse me! There was one small step forward; we allowed our students to wear their fancy clothes for some of our school parties. School parties and meetings could be divided into three categories at that time. The first category was related to purely political meetings. During those Komsomol meetings, students were supposed to vote for (not against) one of the government's decisions. It goes without saying that they were urged to wear uniforms for those meetings. The second kind of parties was more flexible as far as uniform obligations were concerned. The students had to give a performance under their teachers' guidance. After the performance was over, dancing was usually allowed for an hour or so. In this case, students could change into fancy dresses which they had brought from home. The third category of parties was purely dancing. Those were the most favorite, and students were allowed to wear any clothes at all. In comparison to the'50's, this was an enormous improvement and progress!

Society has progressed during the last years to a great extent. More freedom has come to Russia. This couldn't but influence school life also. There have appeared students in shorts, or in very short skirts, some even wearing decollete necklines. Nowadays, girls also wear earrings, beads, and chains of various colors, sizes, shapes to school. And what do you think? Even the most conservative teachers have to put up with it now. I remember myself and some other teachers fighting that group of teachers who tried to insist on girls taking off their decorative accessories. A few of those teachers even sent the girls home and invited their parents to come to school to talk about their daughters' "terrible behavior." We kept explaining to our colleagues that they didn't have the right to do that; they were humiliating their students. We said that most of the students would understand more about wearing jewelry very soon. "Look at Lena! She has excellent marks in all her subjects. She does her best and everybody respects her, but she doesn't know much about fashion and how to apply it." we would say to our colleagues.

The last year I worked in my school, nobody recollected our hot discussions. None of the teachers wanted to talk about uniforms and the prohibition of makeup, jewelry etc. From time to time, I had a great desire to come up to one of our teachers who had mentioned that we would spoil our students by giving them more freedom in this area - to remind them of our previous fight. On the contrary, the most conservative teachers would now say to me: "Look! How beautiful our students are in their colorful clothes!" Thinking about these remarks, I told myself: "Come on, they are quite smart to understand they have been wrong. The main idea is we have won!"

Galina Shlangman, an English teacher in Magadan, Russia, is now an ESOL teacher in Greece, NY.

Education in the US and in Vietnam
by Binh Ngo

First of all, high school students in the US have a bus driver who comes to their house every morning on time and picks them up for school. They eat lunch at school and stay until three o'clock when they go home. But in my country, we don't have school buses so we have to take the city bus at the bus station. Sometimes, because we have to walk for about sixty minutes to get to school, we feel very tired before school begins.

Another difference is that school in Vietnam is more difficult than school in the US. For example, in the 9th grade in Vietnam, students study subjects that a person in the US wouldn't study until the 11th grade. We don't have sequential math courses. We have to study algebra and geometry together and it is a lot more difficult than in the US. For literature, we have to memorize very long poems and recite them in front of the class. In the other classes, when a person gets called to the board to do work, he must answer questions out loud in front of the class about the subject he is working on. If he doesn't do it well, the teacher will put a bad grade in the student's gradebook. In Vietnam, each student has his own gradebook. Every time he gets a grade, it is recorded in his book that he takes home and shows his parents. After every week of school, parents have to sign the book so the teacher can make sure that the parents have seen the grades.

Also in Vietnam, there are no hall passes. That's because we don't have enough classrooms for students. As a result, the schools have split sessions and the school principal chooses which grades meet in the morning and which grades meet in the afternoon. After we are finished at school, we go home immediately. On the other hand, American students have hall passes during study halls, when they do not have a class. They have permission to go anywhere in the school if the teacher gives them a hall pass. For example, students can go to the lunch room, library, and lockers, which makes the halls very noisy and disturbing. Some students even get into fights during the time they are walking around the halls. Because of our limited space, there can be no hall passes in Vietnamese schools.

Moreover, Vietnamese students are more respectful of their teachers and work harder in school. Students would never yell or swear at teachers because respect for older people is very important. Even though there is no one telling the students what to do, they usually study hard and do a good job. In fact, they can even graduate after the 9th grade because they have worked so hard and learned so much. They can also wait to graduate after the 12th grade, and if they do this, the diploma is more respected. In Vietnam, the students can drop out of their school early if they want because of economic problems, so many students have to graduate after 9th grade. Keeping students in school longer in the US sometimes makes more problems because older students tend to be troublemakers and set a bad example for younger students. In fact, in the US, all students must stay in school until they are sixteen and the schools must provide education for students until they graduate, or turn twenty-one, whichever comers first.

Also, there are differences in sex education in Vietnam and in the US. When I was in high school, I didn't have health class in school and I didn't learn how to prevent pregnancy because the Vietnamese thought it wasn't a good idea to teach students about sex education. They felt afraid and embarrassed to talk about it and so, unfortunately, many teenagers are dying from AIDS in Vietnam and thousands of children have HIV. Many young people get AIDS from sex. They don't realize the dangers and consequences of unprotected sex. In addition to sexually transmitted diseases, Vietnam also has problems with single mothers. Vietnamese high schools and colleges don't accept any students who have babies, which means that the girl's education is finished. But in the US, it is very different. If a woman as a baby, the school sometimes provides day care. High schools have health classes and teach the students how to prevent pregnancy by taking the pill and using condoms.

In conclusion, every country has different resources to teach students to become useful persons. Education is the most important duty in a person's life. The best education system would take the best ideas from other systems or countries. The US could teach its students to be more respectful and allow students who have economic hardships to leave school after the age of sixteen. On the other hand, Vietnam could learn about pregnancy and sexually transmitted disease prevention from American health providers. Educators in all countries should be helping each other to provide the best educational systems for the twenty-first century.

Binh Ngo is majoring in Computer Information Systems.