Road to Rwanda----Teaching English on the Other Side of the World

 And so begins our second full time job!  Peking University is ranked as about the 17th university in the world.  It is considered a very deep privilege to teach there. In fact sometimes faculty takes a pay cut to be a professor at PKU just because of the prestige.  I have heard various statistics about acceptance level.  One was that 2 million students take the college entrance exam in China every year, and PKU accepts 2,000.  In one of the journal entries my students write every semester, I ask in the autobiography about their acceptance to PKU.  To a man/woman, they gush about what an unbelievable, dream-come-true privilege it is to be attending this university.  Having not been raised here, I do not have the full visceral reaction.  

Our lectures are on PPT, so we only talk face-to-face via WeChat, Asia's social media app, about 4 times in the semester.  This happens when they gather in the classroom to peer review their 4 major essays.  They are always very nervous to talk to their professors.  Most have never spoken to a native English speaker.  I take those few hours and set my students here in Rwanda with desk work and then call up Beijing on the social media on my phone and spend the hour.  Otherwise my interaction with them is by grading their essays.  We have about 100 essays a week to grade.  They are not long and I (more so than Rick who works more carefully) can move through them fairly quickly.  I am mainly doing grammar and format checking rather than content because they often say the same reflective things about marriage partners, accepting a bribe, or whether to take the "road less traveled".  With a 100 a week, though it still takes me extensive time that is carved out between when I get home from school at 5 and when I go to bed every night. 

These are Ph.D. students who mainly failed their English entrance exams.  So on one hand we have absoltutely some of the best minds in China, because of the top of the top university, but one's that are not real good in English. I wrote down some of their majors: integrated circuits, life science, intelligence science and technology, chemistry, remote sensing, psychology, software engineering, physics, economics,Chinese literature, scientific socialist theory, general mechanics, high energy desity physics, photogramistry, pure mathematics.  That is just a sampling.  I give more life time reflection essays rather than much to do with their academic areas. Partly because I could never understand their technical writings, but also because it is less of a tempation to plagiarize work if it is your personal reflection rather than more technical articles.  A long converstion with PKU adminstration and fellow teachers happened a week ago in preparation for the semester. How do we treat ChatGPT and what that means for writing English essays? Although it might be blocked in China, these are the students who know their way around the firewall and some are probably working on developing similar kinds of programs.  I wrote a letter spurring the students on, not to fall to moral degradation and educaltion malaise through their use of such AI tools. The response from the students was very positive.  They commented how direct and clear spoken the letter to them is.  Some said they did not think they could express themselves so directly even in Mandarin.  .....That is a reason they need a class like ours: Western and Eastern writing styles are very different, and they have to be publishing in Western journals.

Anyway, I write all of this to ask for prayer.  It is a heavy load and at times even a heavier responsiblity to be the only outside and sometimes only Believing contact that most of these students have.  We have many restrictions on what we can say, but He finds a way.