per ardua ad noodles

These fragments I have shored against my ruins.

T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land.

Rise and Fall chronicles the melancholy recent history of Sham Chung, which was the most populous village in the Sai Kung peninsula in 1970 but now has a population that can be reckoned on the fingers of one person’s hands. Nature has almost totally reclaimed what was once the village’s ‘main street’, and because the main hiking path keeps to the cleared area that functions as an ersatz golf course, that main street is now almost completely overgrown and difficult to penetrate.

The first of the following photographs was taken in November 2007, when it was still possible to walk along the main street without impediment, and the rest were taken after fighting through the undergrowth in February this year.

Paula contemplates the fate of a traditional Chinese house.

There is an almost Marie Celeste feeling about some of the houses, as if the occupants had left in a hurry. This is a typical rural kitchen.

Traditionally, Chinese houses had double doors. These would originally have been locked but are likely to have been forced open by passing hikers looking for souvenirs.

These houses will not last much longer, now that trees have got themselves established.

As can be seen in this photo, many of the village’s less substantial houses were merely stuccoed mudbrick, making them easy prey for the encroaching vegetation.

No, this wasn’t a prison, but it must have felt like one for the occupants. Barred windows were a standard security measure.

There is little difference between indoors and out in a house that no longer has a roof.

Ask not what you can do for your country. Ask what’s for lunch.

Orson Welles.

If anyone is wondering why Paula and I cycle the 45 miles from Fanling to Sham Chung and back every Saturday, weather permitting, the final picture should be explanation enough. A cautionary word if you plan to check the place out though: Tom Li is a friend of ours, so the plate he prepares for us is about half as large again as his ‘standard’ chow mein. This photograph shows last Saturday's lunch, our first at Tom’s place since I came back from the UK a month ago.

‘Special chow mein’ in England is never like this: pan-fried noodles topped with prawns, pork strips, choi sum (a Chinese brassica), sliced Chinese mushrooms and bean sprouts.

questions, questions

Michael is a 16-year-old Form 5 student in Hong Kong. His parents, neither of whom is a graduate, have high expectations, but he is already disadvantaged by not studying in a school where English is used as the medium for instruction. The number of such schools was drastically reduced after the handover of sovereignty to China in 1997, mainly as a result of pressure from academics who maintained that instruction in students’ mother tongue (Cantonese) is more beneficial. It is hard to disagree with such a sentiment, but for one crucial fact: entry to any of the local universities requires equal proficiency in both languages.

Michael has another problem: his teachers don’t like him. Why? Because he asks questions. He is often slapped down in class for daring, as his teachers see it, to challenge their authority. Hong Kong is a society in which respect for teachers has become entrenched, ossified into a sterile convention that stifles creativity and individuality. The influence of Confucianism, combined with a feeling among most students that by asking questions they may appear to their classmates to be stupid and thus will lose face, means that students like Michael, whose style of learning does not conform to local classroom norms, struggle to make headway.

Yet Michael is of above average intelligence. He recently passed the Grade 8 exam of the UK’s Royal College of Music in violin. However, his interest in and talent for music have also landed him in trouble: his mother frequently scolds him for listening to music while studying, even though he finds it useful because it helps him to remember key pieces of information by association with the music he is listening to.

What Michael needs is a sympathetic teacher or, since this is most unlikely in his present circumstances, an experienced mentor. This is where Paula entered the picture. His parents were worried about his academic progress, and a friend of Paula referred them to her. Her initial meeting with Michael was scheduled to last an hour but lasted three. Michael described, in quaintly unidiomatic English, the weekly ‘brain-draining’ that he received at the hands of his parents. They wanted to know what he’d learned in school that week, thus unwittingly piling even more pressure on him. However, most of the discussion was in Cantonese, and it is clear that Michael needs more practice if his command of English is to be raised to the required standard for entry to university.

When Michael recounted how his mother disapproved of his listening to music while studying, he was surprised (and delighted) to learn that Paula had always listened to rock music while studying at university, and that I frequently do the same when writing, although in my case I do have to be selective. I will have no problems if Led Zeppelin’s Rock and Roll or Deep Purple’s Highway Star is thumping away in the background, but something like Dylan’s Subterranean Homesick Blues would be disastrous. Too many words.

Anyway, Michael went away happy, and his parents were also delighted when Paula told them that he already thinks like a university student. This remains a work in progress at the moment, however, and Paula will be successful only if she can educate Michael’s parents in the best way to encourage their son. As for all those questions, no one has said it better than Jacob Bronowski, in his landmark BBC television series on the history of science, The Ascent of Man:

It is important that students bring a certain ragamuffin, barefoot irreverence to their studies; they are not here to worship what is known, but to question it.

lock, stock and barrel

For the past two years, Paula has run a series of workshops for newly qualified teachers on behalf of the extramural department of one of Hong Kong’s leading universities (see above). In the first of these, she starts by showing three short video clips of teachers in action and asks her students which of the three deserves an award for good teaching.

Professor Lock is an eminent German physicist at MIT, and the first video shows him explaining some fundamental concepts in electricity while drawing diagrams and writing formulae on a blackboard. Although he does turn to face his audience from time to time, usually to ask a question that he immediately answers himself, for much of the time he is scribbling on the board and talking simultaneously. He jokingly suggests that everything he is explaining is so simple that his audience will wonder why any explanation is necessary.

Dr Stock is an economist at the Harvard Business School. He is seen using all the latest multimedia gadgetry to augment his performance. Assessing the three teachers, Dr Stock’s style is most akin to that of a business presentation, and, like a typical businessman, he reads his PowerPoint slides aloud rather than using them as an aide memoire, something to be developed in greater detail.

Dr Barrel is a Chinese lecturer at a Hong Kong university who is seen addressing his students in heavily accented English. He is reading from a prepared script, and unlike in the first two videos there are shots of the students, all Chinese, who are writing furiously in an attempt to get everything down.

Alert readers will have spotted that Paula had set a deliberate snare here. None of the three represents a paradigm of good teaching, because what is missing in all three clips is any form of interaction between teacher and students. In the video of Professor Lock, at one point a small window opens in the corner of the screen, and the professor, apparently watching himself in action, suddenly realizes that he has made a basic error.

“Oh my God!” he exclaims, “I’ve got Ohm’s law wrong.”

And so he had. Instead of writing that the voltage in a circuit is equal to current multiplied by resistance, he had written that voltage is equal to current divided by resistance. The interesting point to make here is that no one in the audience ventured to point out the error, although whether this was because no one was aware of the mistake, or because, out of deference to the professor’s status, no one dared to challenge what everyone knew was incorrect, can only be guessed.

Two years ago, Paula ran this same series of workshops in China on behalf of an international NGO. Students there unanimously selected the professor as being worthy of the hypothetical award, because, they said, he was knowledgeable. As an aside, the NGO decided to dispense with Paula’s services and instead place all the materials online, thus missing the point of the exercise, which is to provoke discussion.

The students in China were clearly unused to being asked for their opinions, but one student did point out that the professor had started with a simple example and worked towards greater complexity. Hong Kong students are much more analytical, although they are invariably taken in by the deliberately misleading inclusion of examples from prestigious American institutions like Harvard and MIT.

The problem, as Paula encourages her students to work out for themselves, is that the majority of teachers in higher education do not understand the other side of the coin, the learning process, so they follow the worn-out paradigm of the ‘sage on the stage’, and the majority of students fail to notice that they are being short-changed, lock, stock and barrel.

I should have stayed in bed

The rain had been relentless all week, but by Friday afternoon the sky had begun to clear, and by evening it looked like conditions would be okay for us to visit our friend Tom in Sham Chung the following day. Unfortunately, it rained again overnight, and the wet conditions meant that cycling there wasn’t a viable option. The alternative was to drive to Yung Shue Au and walk the last two miles along the coastal path (Rise and Fall).

Traffic was very heavy on the main north–south expressway, and the road was wet, so extra caution was required. About two miles south of Fanling, three lanes condense into two, and with it the speed limit drops from 100 to 80km/hr. This isn’t really relevant, because the traffic was moving at only 45–50km/hr, and I continued to maintain a gap ahead of me that was roughly twice that of the red (city) taxi behind me.

In these circumstances, I tend to look beyond the vehicle immediately in front in order to anticipate any sudden changes, so I failed to notice at first that the car in front was braking so sharply that it quickly came to a standstill. Thankfully, the gap I was maintaining still gave me time to react, although when I did eventually come to a halt I was less than three feet from the stationary car.

I barely had time to think “Phew! That was close” before we were slammed from behind by the taxi. I felt as if someone had just whacked me across the back of my head with a blackjack (thank goodness for headrests). When I got out of the car, my first impression was that at least six cars had hit the one in front, but in fact only the car immediately behind the taxi had failed to stop. The others had been able to brake in time.

The police were quickly on the scene, and we were instructed to follow a police motorcyclist, who led the three cars involved in the collision off the expressway at the next exit point to a small car park in the large town of Taipo. At this point, I was asked whether I wanted to go to hospital for a check-up—two ambulances were already on hand in the car park—an offer that I took up because although I couldn’t accurately describe how I felt, I didn’t feel ‘quite right’. I wasn’t dizzy, and I didn’t have a headache, but I simply couldn’t find the right words.

So it was that Paula and I were ferried to the nearest A&E department, where my condition could be assessed. Being in the back of the ambulance, I was unable to see precisely where we were going, but I did note, with dismay, that we seemed to be making a lot of turns at various junctions. How, I wondered, would we find our car again.

The medical staff at Nethersole Hospital decided that it would be prudent to keep me under observation for a few hours, which in practice meant that a nurse came to check my blood pressure and shine a light in my eyes every hour. This gave rise to an interesting observation. You might think that my surname is not difficult to pronounce, but I remember from my time at the local Outward Bound school that many local Chinese do have a problem.

In my home town in northern England, the local pronunciation of the third most common surname in the town omits the ‘g’ altogether, but many Chinese omit the ‘d’ while pronouncing the ‘g’ as a cross between a howk and a glottal stop. I have always been slightly puzzled by this, because I’ve never noticed that local Chinese have any difficulty with words like ‘badge’, ‘wedge’, ‘ridge’, ‘lodge’ and ‘fudge’.

Anyway, the nurses here avoided having to attempt a pronunciation of my name by adopting one of two strategies: either they would notice that I was the only gweilo in what I would describe as a holding area and beckon me to them using hand gestures, or they would ask me for my ID card number, which would have been registered when I arrived in A&E. Paula has told me that she experiences similar difficulties at work. Some ask how her name should be pronounced, while others address her as ‘Dr Yung’ (her maiden name). She tries to pre-empt all of this by saying “call me Paula” when meeting someone new.

Things started to look up immediately I was discharged, several hours later.

“I’ll buy you dinner if you can find our way back to the car without asking anyone for directions,” said Paula.

Dinner or no dinner, this is the kind of challenge I relish, as Paula well knows. It was easy to get started, because we were in an extensive hospital complex with only one way in and out. The first decision came when we reached a T-junction. By this time, the sun was out, so it was easy to determine north and south, and I could see that we were close to the northern edge of Taipo. We therefore turned south. We were in luck. At the next junction, a crossroads, there was a blue sign with an arrow indicating that anyone wishing to go to Fanling should turn right. It was then simply a matter of following this road for a mile or so until we came to a right turn that I recognized as the point where we’d turned left when we came off the expressway. The easiest dinner I’ve ever earned.

So we headed back home, at which point our first priority was an afternoon nap. I mention this only because I had an incredibly weird dream. Paula and I were cycling around the New Territories, but this wasn’t the real New Territories. At one point, we encountered a group of Tudor houses, and at another we passed a section that reminded me of my home town. One road into town approaches the railway at right angles, passing a terrace that was built in the 1850s. However, the terrace in my dream was unmistakeably Georgian in both style and grandeur. When it reaches the railway, the road turns left, continues for about 50 yards then turns right over a bridge across the railway, which gives this part of town its local name: ‘over the bridge’. However, in my dream, there was an imposing church next to the bridge, which doesn’t exist in reality. There were many other strange events in my dream, but this brief account gives some idea of just how bizarre it was.

We spent the evening sitting on our balcony talking about education over a few bottles of Tsingtao (a Chinese beer), and I decided that over the next few weeks I would discuss here some of Paula’s ideas on the subject. None of her theories are particularly radical, but she does know what she is talking about, being one of the few people working in higher education to have a formal teaching qualification. She has taught in primary and secondary schools, vocational training centres, and universities, and she understands the teaching/learning process far better than the kind of arrogant politician whose opinions on education are driven more by ideology than by what works.