Appalachia, China, Education and Change

The term Culture Shock does not really resonate the way it should. It’s been overused and is perhaps past its shelf-life as a useful term. I am not sure what should replace it, but Jordan’s words demonstrate that the move to new cultures involves both alienation and acculturation. Another way of saying this might be that we find ourselves by losing ourselves. If this sounds like a mystery wrapped in an enigma, it isn’t. Just read what follows to see what I mean.

Questions

Can you tell us a bit about where you grew up in the US and what that was like.

I'm from the deep, dark hills of Southwestern Virginia. We call it "Appa-latch-uh," but everyone else in America seems perfectly content mispronouncing it as "Appa-lay-shuh" (yes, we're fiercely and irrationally proud of this).

Appalachia

It's a beautiful place, one of the most beautiful in America, and I wish it was known more for the inborn sense of rhythmic and arm-swinging storytelling in its people, and less the average household income. Think of Macondo from Gabriel Garcia-Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, except with better high school football games. For that matter, think of the film Varsity Blues. That's a nearly perfect analogue. Though I haven't lived there since I was seventeen years old, it seems my identity will always be tangled up in these mountain roots, and that's something of which I'm quite proud.

You attended one of the top research universities in the US. Was this a bit of culture shock for you?

More than you can imagine - especially considering how my university was only five hours from home, and that I'd actively decided not to attend another fantastic school in NYC because I was scared to death of living in a city. What a disaster that would have been.

In retrospect, I didn't deserve the honor of that choice. Upon arriving at college I was ludicrously unprepared for high-level academic work. My friends, students from elite private and magnet schools, knew how to study, how to learn, in ways I couldn't comprehend. Now, I pushed my high school education to the limits, with tons of college courses, but these guys were smart, worldly, and intimidating. It took nearly two years to catch my stride. When I did, however, I found myself in the greatest environment imaginable. So much of my life today I owe, perhaps not to my school necessarily, but to the individual Literature and Writing professors who opened my eyes to the world, who taught me the possibilities inherent in very hard work. Today, this is precisely how I define the great value of a university education, the people it puts in your life, and the opportunity to learn how to learn (which unfortunately, many college students never learn).

For context (and to make me look even more like a backwoods hick), my freshman roommate was the first Jewish person I'd ever met in my life. Awesome guy. The Ben Harper album he was playing on Move-In Day is still one of my all-time favorites.

                                            "With My Own Two Hands" Ben Harper 

Can you tell us how you first became interested in China and how you first traveled to that part of the world?

Here's an odd "China Story" for you. In school, I halted my pursuit of a finance degree to study English Lit and Poetry Writing, despite my parent’s tearful protests. Best decision of my entire life (though double majoring in Econ was certainly one of the worst). In my final semester, I'd been accepted to a wonderful MFA in Poetry Writing program, and felt certain I'd pursue life as a writer and, eventually, professor. However, that semester I took a seminar called "Poetics of Ecstasy" with the brilliant Lisa Russ-Spaar. One of our homework assignments was to read a compilation of multicultural ecstatic poetry, The Erotic Spirit by Sam Hamill. It was a Tuesday night, and I was sitting in a cubicle in the stacks of Alderman Library, when I read a poem titled 竹簟, or "Bamboo Mat," by the somewhat infamous Tang Dynasty poet, Yuan Zhen. I read it once. Two times. Three times...and then burst out of the depths of the research library looking for other lit nerd friends to read it to.

竹簟

元稹

竹簟衬重茵,

未忍都令卷.

忆昨初来日,

Bamboo Matt poem

看君自施展.

Bamboo Mat by Yuan Zhen

I cannot bear to put away, 

the bamboo sleeping mat:

that night I brought you home,

I watched you roll it out.

translated by Sam Hamill, from The Erotic Spirit

The poem contained only 22 words, all imagery, and it devastated me. I like to think it's how Ezra Pound felt in that asylum, pictographically translating the works of Li Bai. That week I read three anthologies of classical Chinese poetry. By the end of the month, I'd deferred graduate school, and committed to a year of teaching in China with an organization called, appropriately enough, the Center for Teaching and Learning in China. I was ready to learn as much as I could about this culture (quite naively, I might add) and the eons-old literary history that affected me so deeply.

You then became a part of one of the top schools in Shenzhen. Can you go into some detail how you got the job and what it was like. This initial teaching experience is, by Chinese standards, almost ancient history. You are now a veteran of the education system in China and know more than most about how things work in China.

First of all, can you talk about how things have changed since you first arrived?

I was incredibly fortunate to be placed in one of the most elite high schools in the country. This was 2005. With unbelievably brilliant students, the school gave me immense freedom as a teacher, allowing me to create a challenging poetry writing workshop as an elective course. This was mind-blowing for me, that 15 high school juniors were capable of learning to write valid poetry in a foreign language.

This is one thing that hasn't changed: hordes of fiercely intelligent young people. However, at the time America was only just becoming an option for students seeking a university education overseas. Australia, the UK and Canada were the primary options. Obviously, the situation is now completely reversed. Back then all 1,000 students in each grade were working through the same domestic curriculum, preparing for the National College Entrance Exam (NCEE, or Gaokao). Those planning to go abroad simply...did nothing...during the Senior 3 (12th grade) year, which only consisted of review and exam prep. The only goal for top schools at the time was placing students in superstar domestic universities like Beijing U, Qinghua, Zhejiang, etc. Students wanting to go abroad were almost pariahs, shunned by their school administrations for not contributing to the Gaokao performance data that made the school so elite.

Shenzhen

Now, all schools of this caliber feature dedicated "international programs," sometimes incorporating an AP curriculum (that's unfortunately often a sham) or British GCE credentials, and students admitted to brand name, Ivy League-type universities are local heroes. Truly. Get into Harvard and you're front page news, the example with which all of next year's students will be chastised for not doing SAT prep till the tiny hours of the night.

Are the schools encouraging more students to study abroad?

Indeed, to an occasionally problematic degree. Elite US university admissions has become big business. As I mentioned, top admissions make schools look very, very good. No different than in America, right? Unfortunately, with this whole system having only existed for about five years in China, such successes aren't indicative of tradition, curriculum strength, or the quality of teachers. Instead, they become sales and marketing points for whichever company or has been contracted to install this "international program," which comes with a price tag comparable to US private high school tuition. It's very profit oriented. At a glance, this seems disconcerting, but only from an American perspective. From a local perspective, it works. After all, billions of Chinese students are enrolling at selective universities and performing like rock stars. The problem arises for those students incapable of going to MIT, but whose families are shelling out big money for the promise that they can, as if it's a necessity. That's when it becomes a problem. Chinese students have been excelling in US universities for far longer than these AP, IB and other programs existed over here.

High School in Shenzhen

Are fewer students taking the Gaokao and instead opting for international credentials?

At elite high schools, my educated guess would be the 95+% of students hoping to study in America will choose the international program. In the five best high schools in Shenzhen, this means 80-150 students. I actually love the very few students who don't, the ones who remain in the Gaokao-focused program. The competition in the national curriculum is often higher, and the education more rigorous, simply because it's all in their cultural and linguistic wheelhouse. It also doesn't carry the giant price tag, which more often than not only covers silly, two-year SAT prep classes, if they include any classes at all (you'd be surprised how few Senior 3s actually take classes, or even visit their high schools on a weekly basis, despite what schools claim in their transcripts). Let me point out that I'm not referring to any specific schools, or making blanket claims. These kids are still brilliant people working their butts off. Not to mention, I can think of one local school whose international program is utterly remarkable, almost awe-inspiring. Though I'm not convinced American admissions officers understand the context of how or why.

Are the schools trying to adapt to a more holistic education—do schools create extracurricular activities that are significant. Do they do the same for service?

Yes, to a degree, though this is still something very new for Chinese schools. So it's not yet being handled in a sophisticated way. Anyone involved with the Chinese side of US college admissions is familiar with the old "teaching in a rural village" cliche - mandated, one-week group service trips that only "serve" in a nominal way, and are quite insulting to the people they're intended to help, if you ask me. Schools here have always offered plenty of extracurricular opportunities in sports, music and the arts, at least to the point that they don't interfere with Gaokao prep. When you have 3,000 bright students in a high school community contributing to these activities, they can become pretty darn impressive.

The US-college boom made schools increase the number of extracurricular and service opportunities, but often only because the best-selling admissions books were doling out the same old useless tripe about "leadership" and "passion." Thus...leadership class! In a test-based education system, however, it became very easy to start ignoring the validity and importance of such opportunities in young people's lives, and revert back to the test, the SAT, which is in some ways just becoming a proxy for Gaokao.

Now you're seeing the most elite students creating their own opportunities outside of school, accomplishing truly amazing things, and that's wildly impressive considering this mindset's antagonism toward the entire education culture.

Shenzhen students in AP class

Is the competition among students greater than it’s ever been or has it calmed down a bit now that so many students are choosing to study in the US?

This year was frightening. Extremely worrying, in fact. When the total number of Chinese applications gets announced this year, I won't be surprised at all, but also might have a heart attack. The competition is more fierce than anything anyone in America can imagine. The sheer volume of applicants, the sophistication of college prep, and the passive, de facto quotas applied to international students (Brown can accept six students from Phillips Andover, but not from Shenzhen Middle School) have all come to a head in 2014. Throw in the fact that admissions offices have a hard time trusting many Chinese application credentials, and the local obsession with brand-name universities (which is an entirely valid cultural concern that Americans likely can't understand), and the competition gets even murkier. Given, this is largely focused on "Top 50" schools, which are everyone's single-minded concern in China.

In fact, just yesterday one of my own students lamented what this year's admissions results "proved" to the students of the city: that if you want to get into the best brand-name schools (again, an important and valid concern for Chinese young people), you have to ignore actually doing anything of worth with your teenage life, you have to be focused, in a sociopathic way, on college admissions. You can't be too devoted to volunteering at the hospital, or the magazine you founded; you have to bullsh*t all that, because it's HARD getting 2350 SATs in a second language. It takes years. This is what students are discussing on Weixin at this very moment: if you want to get into an elite school, you have to be an automaton. How disheartening is that? Yet...the numbers prove that it's a real concern for these young people.

The real problem lies in how employers in China have never heard of liberal arts colleges, and are only impressed by rankings, so the majority of students in any elite school international program are all applying to the same twenty universities. Thus, only the top five kids are getting admitted to ALL TWENTY of those universities. Even when they're getting ED/EA acceptances to Stanford and Columbia, they're still letting their other applications ride (say, to five different UC schools, or essentially, every school US News ranks between 25 and 50), because that many offers of admission is really something to brag about (again, a cultural issue). Unfortunately, with those spots now taken, other deserving students, the other 145 students in the program, lose out. Obviously guidance counselors should prevent this from happening, but for some reason or another, it's still a problem.

My guess is that a lot of selective universities this year are going to be left wondering why none of the admits from China actually enrolled (it happened to many last year, in fact), and why so many students with 2200 SAT scores and brilliant GPAs are enrolling in schools where the average is far, far below.

You always seem to know what is going on in some of the schools with students. You have educated me a lot about how things often operate in China. Can you talk about the role agent play in preparing students for applying to US schools? Do you think that many agents go way too far in ‘helping’ students and if so in what way?

It's strange. Considering how this has become a pseudo-scandalous media issue in America lately, I feel an odd compulsion to defend the system that I've spent my entire career fighting against. Funny how that works, isn't it? Let me see if I can be as clear as possible.

Indeed, many agents go way too far. The overwhelming, vast majority in fact. However, it's no longer as shady as it once was. When I began my private education career in 2006, the agent's job was to choose the schools, write the essays, write the rec letters, receive the offers, book the visa interview, teach the student how to hack the visa interview (this was infinitely more difficult back then, before America so desperately needed Chinese money), and so forth. Though it was infuriating to watch, it made sense. By and large, Chinese people had no earthly clue how to get their kids into US universities. They only knew that these universities, this American culture...this is good. This is what I want for my child. No one can decry the impulse that led to such an industry - Chinese parents love their children. Imagine if, all of a sudden, a socio-economic shift indicated that your child could never get a good job unless she graduated from a top university in Spain. She's had a few years of high school Spanish, but now you've got one year to figure out how to give her this opportunity. Scary, yeah?

Today, everyone's gotten much more sophisticated. Blanket "agency" work was still the standard when my book came out in 2011. I like to think it had a small effect on the industry, but it's really been good old fashioned capitalism that changed things. The agencies who got kids into the best schools made money. The ones that didn't went bankrupt. The successful agencies were those that realized how cookie-cutter, ghostwritten essays and faked transcripts weren't going to cut the mustard. Nowadays you're seeing companies, once "agencies," that now resemble catch-all college prep programs. They offer SAT classes, academic tutors, employees who genuinely care about the students. Some even offer lengthy, unofficial AP courses to prep for exams, and if anyone thinks there's something wrong with that, I'd like to punch them in the mouth. Unfortunately the brutal competition of the industry still leads many private education companies to take liberties with their students' applications. But these companies often still have the kids' best interests at heart.

Then again, I'm referring to the industry revolving around Top-50 admissions. Beyond that...oh yeah, it's rife with ghostwritten essays and all the other nonsense. However, this system is necessary for US universities to keep cashing in the Chinese checks that are keeping them afloat. Show me an American university that has an abundantly populated ESL program, and I'll show you a school perfectly willing to turn a blind eye to faked application credentials and the reality that their Chinese students aren't capable of getting the education they were promised.

Regardless - this is the system now. This is the culture. It's pervasive, it's not going away, and people should get used to it, because Chinese parents still don't have a firm grasp on the US college system. They're so much more sophisticated than they were just a few years ago, but it's still a different culture and language. Again - how would you get your kid into Spain's top university? Also, it's not as if SAT prep isn't a multi-billion dollar industry in America.

Do you think most schools in the US are doing enough to examine carefully all the credentials that are being submitted by schools and students? Do you have any suggestions/solutions for many of the credential issues?

Sweet mother of Joey Votto, no! Not at all. Yet it's a matter of perspective and needs. Does Harvard need to take a harder look at their applications? No - they're getting geniuses. There are certainly plenty to choose from, and they perform like rock stars when they enroll. But less selective schools, with their desperate need for students who can pay full tuition - should they be looking harder at applications? Well, only if they're willing to stand on their idealism, only if they truly respect the words written into their honor codes, and are thus either willing to stop cashing Chinese checks, or to admit that the admissions process simply doesn't work for these applicants. Unfortunately, most schools would rather avoid this issue in favor of paying the air conditioning bills.

This is the problem. Our system of admissions is ludicrous from a Chinese standpoint. Recommendation letters? No teacher in China has any clue what these are or why there's a point to writing them. Thus - 99.9% of students write their own rec letters and have their teacher sign it.

Step Number 1: Throw away rec letter requirements for Chinese kids. The company Vericant published an article not too long ago that addressed these very issues, and it was extremely insightful.

Step 2: Publicly notify Chinese applicants that you're prioritizing AP exam and SAT Subject Test scores over the standard SAT. Yet, that's just as valid a problem in the US, isn't it?

Step 3: Double the amount of supplemental essays. Some students might be able to fake one great Common App essay with a very "open minded" agent/tutor. But four? No way. They don't have the time. A Chinese student isn't going to excel with the written word unless they're freakishly talented, or have had the kind of extracurricular writing education that prepares them to succeed in college (disclaimer: this is what we teach). I bet MIT, Wake Forest and Chicago, with their wonderfully unique and difficult essay requirements, have very little trouble determining who the stars are in their applicant pool, and likewise, who simply can't hack a US college education. On the same token, it's worth noting that the UC application system seems perfectly designed to be taken advantage of. It makes sense that they're in such a desperate financial situation, and that they receive (and enroll) the most Chinese applicants.

Okay, now I'm just rambling. If I could make one change to the system, it would be all universities dedicating a great effort to interviewing candidates face-to-face. Of all people Parke, you know how the cream rises to the top when you're speaking face to face with Chinese students. That's when the stars come out to shine. (Apparently it's half past cliche-o'clock). I don't mean crap rubrics for quantifying a student's "interview ability." I mean giving them the same opportunity that I had as a young redneck from Appalachia, the opportunity to sit down with an admissions officer, ask the questions that mattered to me, fall in love with a university, and give them the chance to fall in love with me.

Do you encourage your students to use interview services like InitialView?

No sir, not at all. Nor will we until such services become a widespread requirement. It would only put our kids at a disadvantage. However, I think these services are the future of admissions in China. It boggles my mind that every university in America isn't working with InitialView or Vericant, or for that matter, that they haven't institutionalized such services themselves. These services will be the great equalizer that makes the gargantuan Chinese applicant pool work, and the people that run them are geniuses. That every university isn't doing this only reinforces my cynical thoughts regarding the interplay of finances, hypocritical idealism, and willful ignorance when it comes to Chinese admissions.

Do you encourage your students to use New Oriental or other test prep services?

Again, no, with twice the emphasis. New Oriental...sheesh. Want to make a Chinese teenager laugh? Say "New Oriental - they're not much for the SAT, but they tell great jokes don't they?!" You're guaranteed a full-body laugh, and the admission that "Yeah, my mom signed me up." They might as well be selling magic pills...but then again, you could say the same for Princeton Review if you look at the statistics.

Our students use a self-administered test prep system that essentially hacks the learning process. It's largely based on the work of powerful minds like Cal Newport and study-method patterns among hundreds of top Chinese test scorers. It's incredibly difficult, but effective, and our kids love it. However, if they do want classes, we only recommend a fantastic Shanghai-based company called Horizons Prep. They're one of the good guys, their founder Jordan Neufeld is righteous, and they deserve every bit of success that comes their way. No surprise, their methods are based on actual learning instead of gimmicks. (Please note that we have no relationship with Horizon whatsoever and receive no benefit from recommending them, other than our students' scores improving.)

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What you’ve just read demonstrates the transformational nature of education. Jordan knows his roots and gives us a glimpse into his metamorphosis from a rural kid into one of the experts in the world of education in China. He does this with wit and wonderful style. More importantly, his passion for language has carried over into a love for the students he’s worked with. They have been incredibly lucky to be able to learn from one who learned himself about how words make us who we are.

In part two of the interview, Jordan continues his assessment of what is going on in China now as schools ship in over 100,000 undergraduates to schools all across the US. He, like me, have some reservations about how the students themselves are often not who seem to matter to those making money off them and their families. I have written about this issue, but Jordan’s on the ground experience makes the case more eloquently than I ever could.

Jordan