Another Brick in the Wall

I have exactly 1065 students. They’re divided into about 20 classes, each with 52-54 students. Each class sees me once a week, and so I have the blessing of only having to prepare one lesson plan for week; after doing that, I proceed to teach the exact same lesson 20 times. On a side note, that means my Monday classes are perpetually cursed with having to endure relatively sloppy, rough-edged lessons, whereas my Friday classes get a pretty streamlined and smooth lesson since, by the time I’ve reached them, I’ve taught the same freaking lesson 16 times already. But I digress. While on the upside, having 20 different classes means I get plenty of free time outside of the classroom, since I only prepare one lesson a week, the downside is, I have a huge, huge number of students. That comes with its own set of problems. The point of this update is simply to share with friends, family, and readers, the enormity and diversity of my personal student body. And the best way to do that, of course, is with a picture!

So what’s the story? One of the problems that comes with having 1.065*10^3 students is remembering their names. I think, for someone of my memory abilities, this task is completely impossible. But by God, I’m going to address them by their names in the classroom, because I refuse to just haphazardly point and say “You,” or make up some anonymizing system of letters and numbers. So I devised a system. This system. About two weeks ago, the designated punishment for the losing team during a competition-based classroom activity was to “give me their mugshot.” At first, the mugshot system was simply an incentive not to lose, but eventually, I explained to them that I was taking these pictures so that I could eventually print out a sheet with all their faces and their names on them. Ta da! Once this is accomplished, I can glance at a person’s face, then glance at the magic sheet, and presto, I have their name. The classes are divided into 5 tables of 10 to 12 people, and I will arrange the picture sheet to correspond to the tables, so that when I want to talk to any given person, I can instantly narrow it down to 10-12 people, then, by their face, quickly locate their name. The hope is, of course, that eventually I’ll start using the sheet less and less, especially with the students who stand out – good or bad.

Of course, logistically speaking, taking 1065 pictures is a difficult task. I have to come home every day and spend about an hour cropping and labelling photos (which is a hastle, since my class rosters have all their names in Chinese characters, many of which I can’t recognize). At this point, two weeks into the photo taking, I’ve got about half of them: 441. And all 441 that I’ve taken so far are crammed into the collage above, vivid enough to demonstrate the diversity of my students, but blurred enough, I hope, to preserve a semblance of anonymity for them (they use the Internet, too!).

The title of this post isn’t meant to be any sort of commentary on the Chinese education system. That song is heavily laden with various levels of meaning, but I couldn’t resist using that as a title because, well, I literally made a wall, and each of my students are a brick in it. Another amusing point – for the first several days, by some wacky coincidence, all the teams that lost consisted entirely of girls. Therefore, for a period of a few days, my creepy-weirdo levels spiked to unprecedented heights, as I spent my weekday nights cropping and labeling hundreds of photos… of high school girls. As soon as I noticed this disturbing trend (I identified its cause – the girls sit in the front, and I kept on picking the front two tables for the first matches), I made it a point to rectify the situation by picking two tables with at least a few boys in them. Everything’s okay now, as you can see, the collage has a good 50/50 ratio going on.