"School Meeting"

(Michael)

I woke up this morning at 5:30 to attend one of the more misleading school sponsored events that I have attended on any continent. The event was given the generic title of “School Meeting” and it was just that. The attendance of every student, facility member,  was compulsory and attendance appeared to be organized and counted with military precision. The students organized themselves into lines divided by grade and class and organized by height while the faculty formed a separate block of people. Students in red sashes and armbands moved about the sea of people and counted and shifted their peers to better fit the lines of the group.
Despite the unfamiliar format, the School Meeting contained mostly the same topics as the daily announcements; it was the usual menu of housekeeping information with an urging of the students to work harder and to strive for the best grades, and completed with a flag raising ceremony. The School Meeting format to convey information to students seems to champion uniformity, hard work, and self-criticism over everything.

Seemingly contradictory to the values of the School Meeting, we attended the theater club where the students performed with a gusto and confidence that is almost unseen in America, where a poll ranked the students the most confident in the world. Some of the students were a little apprehensive about reading lines from Jane Eyre with Patty and I, but all eagerly presented their self-written English plays, songs, and live-dubbed cartoons. The kids appeared to be quite shy, but when they read their lines, they were with emotion.
The kids and I met up for gym class  for some ping pong and Taiji. As for the ping pong, it was one of my first times playing the real thing in years, but I thought I was going to be half-way decent because I beat my younger sister, Sarah, in Wii tennis once. I was wrong. I challenged Brandon as soon as we walked in the room and lost a Jiao, almost two cents, when he crushed me by eight points in our game to twenty-one. Even with the massive gap of points, I am convinced that Brandon went easy on me after watching his match with our gym teacher. Every point scored in their match came at the end of a long volley with both competitors sending blistering forehands and backhands at each other until one of them sent an over powered shot off the table and into our small group of spectators. It was amazing; those cats were fast as lightning. In fact it was a little bit frightening, but they fought with expert timing. 

Everybody was Kung Fu Fighting after ping pong, working on the martial art of Taiji, the slowed movements of ancient combat. The movements are much more difficult than they look and focus on moving like water to avoid and deflect attack. Though the physical exercise is strenuous, the mental strain is at a minimum; it is quite a different feeling to focus entirely on mimicking another and defending against imaginary attacks. Taiji makes for an excellent low-impact exercise, but the experience is not one I would like to repeat.

All is well here.
Mike