the broad mindedness of my students

we discussed change in my senior 1 (sophomore) rocket class.

[a rocket class is when you take the best students of the grade and put them into one class. i believe that the students are ranked by class in order, i'm not positive about this, it just is a gut feeling. senior 1 class 1 is the smartest, while senior 1 class 2 is second, and so on and so forth. i don't get to teach class 1, but class 2 is great.]

i asked them how chengdu had changed as they had grown up. they began replying the way i had imagined. more buildings, more roads, more cars, more foreigners. i asked if change was good or bad. change was bad, they thought. there was too much pollution. one student was glad that there were more roads, as it cut his weekly commute from 2 hours to 1 hour. but he was unhappy that the cost of their meals at school had gone up because of the drought. we talked about how the road made it easier to get places, which made more people drive, which caused more CO2 to be released into the air, which helped global warming, which probably caused the drought, which caused the price of their meals to go up. it's nice when the damage done to the environment has concrete costs one can demonstrate to students.

i asked if there were any positive changes, and a student brought up school reforms, and how the NPC (National People's Congress) had provided more time during the school day for sports. she seemed happy about that.

we also talked about how there was more advertising. i asked if they trusted the ads, and they answered with an emphatic, NO! man, i love this class. it seems like they are concerned and want to do something about their problems, and they aren't sure that progress is the way. heartening news to a harden westerner.