JISHOU, HUNAN — It has been raining pretty steadily since last evening, and the temperature has dropped to the mid-50s (F scale), making a tour of historic FengHuang this weekend less than appealing.
This past week has been pretty busy on the teaching front, none the least because of my diary-keeping assignments to my writing classes. Now that I have 60+ freshmen writers, the task of reading their journals has escalated nearly to a full-time job. But I tell them to practice writing English every day, so it’s my own damn fault that I have to read their efforts.
As a physics teacher, the only student writing I saw with any regularity were lab reports, which don’t lend themselves to creative expression and introspection much. (Though, I have had some gifted writers over the years who played with the form.) I was a little unprepared, therefore, for the remarkable honesty and emotional revelations some of my students put down on paper.
My two smaller senior classes have the same assignment as the freshmen. Their thoughts revolve around the crucial events of their young careers: passing English competency tests, passing subject-specific graduation exams, finding jobs after graduation, writing their 9,000-word exit essays. Layered on to these pretty overwhelming obsessions is the realization that in a few short months they will leave the cocoon of university and the camaraderie of their friends and classmates.
