After we sign our contracts (again), we are routed to an auditorium in the corner of campus. There’s a large stage, rounded at the lip, and rows of red folding seats. The curtains are also red. IK-12 is strangely built. Most of the structures are drab, hulking, inartful, and run down; and the classrooms are very basic. Yet there is money spilled like a tipped drink over select chambers.
Onstage, there’s a table and mics, like we’re about to interview the players after an NBA Finals game. (“I just went out there and taught 110%. Left it all in the classroom. We have the best fans in the world here!”) Red tea takes a mic. “Welcome,” she intones, “to your first day of pre-orientation.”
I’m not sure what the difference between pre-orientation and regulation orientation is, but it’s clear that the distinction is important to Red Tea; because everything about this is important to Red Tea. She loves this moment, and this microphone. When she hits the big lines, she breathes sharply through her teeth; gasping at the drama of her own words. Up there, I get to see her real smile, which is somehow tighter than her permafrost, polite smile. I think I like the permafrost better.
Red Tea breathlessly explains the school to us: We are going to work very hard, and do incredible things; and by the way her family went on vacation this summer, to Australia, and it was very good. Here is some more about Australia, even though “I cannot talk too much, because the teacher last year say, ‘You talk so long about vacation!’” She laughs at this. The teacher this year do not laugh as much. (I ask French 75 about this later, and she says, “Oh yeah, Red Tea showed us a slideshow of her vacation. It took like forty-five minutes.”)
Once it is established that Red Tea has, in fact, gone on a vacation, she tells us that she is going to show us a video. “This video will show you about the school,” she explains. “It is very good quality, and we work very, very hard at this video.” Apparently, like most works of film too advanced for their time, this avant-garde production won’t be intelligible without an introductory lecture.
The video begins with a bright light washing the screen. “International K-12,” beams the lettering emergent from the flash: “Capturing the future.” The camera pans lovingly around the school. The day is suspiciously sunny (I haven’t yet seen the sun in Shanghai). Students frolic.
“International K-12 is an educational community,” monotones an American voice. The voice seems pretty depressed to be here.
“We have teacher here make voiceover!” beams Red Tea over the sound of a man coming to terms with his lack of existential meaning. “A reporter visits campus one day,” says the man, tying a knot and slinging the rope over a rafter.
On cue, a young Chinese woman knocks on a door: “Hello, Doctor Lin, here is the reporter who wanted to speak with you about all the students’ progressing!”
Dr. Lin, we are informed by some super specific dialogue and a few title cards, is a Grand General of Education. “You are such an accomplished teacher!” say the reporter (a word here meaning, “not a reporter”).
“He is very important teacher here!” yells Red Tea, pointing at the screen above her.
Dr. Lin takes the reporter on a walk-and-talk, explaining how the students at IK-12 are a new breed of superior person; relentlessly devouring accolades and awards.
“Are the students often ranked number one?” asks our intrepid news hound.
“Of course,” says Dr. Lin, limply.
Graphs appear: Relative to the top 20% of students in the world, among Chinese students, and also among Asian students more broadly, the IK-12 supreme beings rank in the 99th percentile. Of all the percentiles. Got it?
(“The 99th percentile,” explains our narrator, mixing some hemlock into his tea.)
The formulations induce a little vertigo, but the punchline lands: the students here are the best at everything, and for sure better than your pussy-ass American students.
“They’re not all nerds, are they?” asks the ace interviewer.
Not at all! It turns out IK-12 students also dominate sports. (This plot twist is some Sixth Sense shit.) The synthesized music swells and the school, fueled by its own glory, explodes in an orgy of accomplishment. “Capturing the future,” says the narrator as he flicks the cover off a razor.
Red Tea shines as the movie ends. “We are very, very proud of the student here,” she says.
My mistake at this point is assuming this will be the last clip Red Tea shows us today.
“I want to show you a TV show,” she announces. “It is called, ‘Are Our Kids Tough Enough?’” (I’m trying, as a guest of the Chinese government, to be cool about pronunciation. But the “R” sounds in this title are fucking brutal.)
A murmur from the UK contingent. “Oh yeah!” Tom Collins nods, bemused.
“In this show,” Red Tea drones, “There are Chinese teacher and English teacher. And you see what you think – I know that there are both sides, and some advantage, and I think you find it —” here she kind of hiccups in satisfaction “—very interesting.” We spend a bit more time analyzing content none of us know about besides Red Tea. When her talk concludes, the show begins.
Music – cheap, software-orchestra music – thunders from the ancient speakers on stage. I know this music: it’s the kind they use on “Survivor” and “The Bachelor.” True to genre, clips splatter the screen, mixed with quick interviews shorn of context: Kids, in full British school uniform, trotting to class. Loving shots of school grounds – fresh lawns; trimmed shrubs.
“We’re going to see how it all works out,” says a foppish, sandy-haired teacher to the camera.
“It is my first time in Britain,” says a Chinese woman.
More plaid skirts. More brick. Class bells. Lockers.
“Soon enough, we’ll have an answer,” says a very smug British teacher, smugly.
The title card smashes the screen:
Are Our Kids Tough Enough? Chinese School.
Red Tea is hopping in her seat. Her excitement doesn’t seem entirely positive. When I was a kid, some of my friends would get very excited about frying ants with a magnifying glass.
RR Kids Tough E Nuff? Is a three-part BBC series for Tories who are afraid their kids aren’t – you know. The setup is this: Five Chinese teachers are imported to a posh school in Britain to train the students in the Chinese method. The students will be compared, at the end of a month, to their counterparts taking the same classes under British direction. (Education is not the filling of a pail, but the ritual humiliation of foreigners and children for higher ratings.)
We manage to watch about half of the series, with Red Tea breaking in periodically to reiterate things said by the players onscreen. When the Chinese teachers institute 7am “morning exercises” for the British kids, Red Tea pauses the video.
“And so you, you see” she begins – and I’m not sure we do – “that with exercises, the children are having much fun. And then, because of the importance – it is so important, and we say this.”
I think Red Tea counts out 650 words before she feels she is allowed to articulate a thought. What she’s working towards this time is the koan “sound body, sound mind.” The Chinese teacher in the series is exemplifying this apparently national doctrine by having the Brits exercise in the morning before school. Red Tea presses play. I could be sleeping off this hangover right now.
The Chinese teacher onscreen barks at her British charges: “One, two, three!” And with each number, she moves her arm to a different place. The motions aren’t particularly athletic – it’s kind of like yoga if you never really stretched anything, or used abdominal muscles. The British kids take about a minute before they start mocking it, and it becomes clear what Red Tea was saying: Not-Quite-Yoga is good; ignore these brats mocking it just because it is not exercise.
A lot of RR Kids runs like this: Chinese teachers try something – like lecturing in monotone for 90 minutes – and the Brits snidely and quietly undermine the Chinese teachers.
The upshot, which we get a long time later in Pre-Orientation, is that the Chinese teachers win: scores are unveiled, and the British kids under Chinese instruction test better than the British kids under British instruction. The music swells, a few of the British kids cry, and the most foppish of the very foppish British faculty looks genuinely depressed about the whole thing.
(Which is funny, because it means he’s not very good at higher reasoning himself, because look: control groups were not a part of this reality show competition, which was – it bears repeating – a reality show competition; nor were there any mentioned controls to test variables within the TV show masquerading as an experiment; the obvious candidate being the 12-hour schoolday instituted by the Chinese teachers in the show: A rote-learning bootcamp, run for a short enough time period that the cadets refrain from suicide, will pretty obviously result in better test grades; unless the test asks, “Yo, solve this slightly ambiguous problem – be creative!”)
Red Tea stops the clip, radiant (which, n.b., does not here mean “looks beautiful”). She turns to us slowly; a beneficent conqueror. “So you see, it is very interesting,” she says. “There are many advantages to each system, these are very different, and we must learn.” I still can’t speak Chinese, but I’m starting to learn how to translate Red Tea: “Chinese teaching is called ‘teaching;’ leave your pitiful American bullshit at the door.”
I’m not exactly eager to defend the U.S. educational system. But I’m a little concerned: if our new boss is so convinced we don’t know anything, why did she hire us?
I think that the end of RR Kids means the end of the video instruction for Pre-Orientation, and I am wrong. Before we leave for the day, Red Tea announces she has something special for us: “I see this, and I know: this is how to be a teacher; the best for yourself.” (Sure.)
The thing she sees is Dead Poets Society. I’ve traveled across the globe to watch Robin Williams stand on a desk. (“I am so sad when I hear he is gone,” says Red Tea.) After everyone else stands on their desks, and the music rises, Red Tea sighs a little orgasmically. When the clip is finished, she gives a speech. I know it is a speech mostly by following her tone and her hand gestures, which suggest the speech not found in the words she is saying. Her tone and her gestures look a lot like Robin Williams’ work.
It’s all so desperately grand to her. I’ve met bureaucrats before, like this. People who treat procedural meetings like tent revivals; people who care about seating order and nametags. Those people also worked in education. I don’t know if our kids are tough enough, but they probably don’t deserve the sort of people who aspire to academic bureaucracy.
When Red Tea has released the words that she feels, in nearly random order, she exhales: “This… has been your first day… of pre-orientation.”
I get out without eating another croissant hot dog, so it could have been worse.