Our Life at Baishan

Recently, I asked a student to write what life is like while attending our school. This idea came from Pernille Ripp who held a #studentlife challenge back on February 5th. At that time, our school was on break for Chinese New Year. Therefore it was only a matter of time after being back this semester before I could ask a student to describe life from his perspective, from which I would have to post it because most blog sites are blocked here in China. I have left the student anonymous in order to respect his privacy.

This is his story.

Baishan School is a private school in Shazikou, Laoshan District in Qingdao, China. The school shares it’s campus with another school - ISQ, which stands for International School of Qingdao.

Life at Baishan is hard work. My daily routine is to get up at 6:45, and after fussing about, I get down to catch the bus at 7:25.

Our homeroom teacher is one of the most strict teachers in the whole school, and is known to rip entire homework notebooks for lousy writing and make that student re-copy the whole thing again. Yes, the whole thing.

Each class usually takes 40 minutes, unless if the teacher decides that they don’t want to end the class. Usually, this doesn’t happen. But the student scores in Baishan are overall pretty high, and our English is some of the best for Chinese schools in Qingdao. I guess that’s the result of doing 4 ~ 5 hours of homework each day.

Our school also has an excellent Foreign teacher team, they are very professional and teach excellently.

At Baishan, lunch usually consists of homemade style Chinese food. (Which is pretty awful to me.) If you want to eat something else, you have to pay an extra 2000 RMB (Which I think is too much.) to have the option to have Korean food from food window #3.

Life at Baishan may be hard, but an old Chinese saying states “Good students come from strict teachers.”