Intro: I've been sick I had intended to write a post last week about some of the things I've learned recently about the relationship between public and private schools in China, but then I came down with a fever so the school commentary can come later.
Being sick in another country is horrible. Not because China lacks anything of substance I'd have access to at home, but because all I want when I am sick is a plain bagel with butter and a strawberry lemon smoothie from smoothie king or Collis at Dartmouth and they don't have those.
One thing I've noticed about American food in China (and in England when I lived there) is that it is never plain/basic. If there's a bagel, it has pizza toppings on it. At a pizza restaurant the crusts can be filled with hotdogs. At a different pizza place the most popular pizza is a spicy shrimp pizza with fettucini Alfredo on top. So when I want something familiar and simple I do not have access to it. This is particularly difficult when your body is raging with a fever and you can't bear to leave your apartment, let alone eat anything with more flavor or texture than plain pasta. Luckily, yellow Gatorade and barely salted Saltines do tend to be universal enough. (The gatorade tastes a little weird but not crazy different. More like it does in the UK.) So, after the first 36 hours, I asked my friend Victoria to bring me some and they did make the following days go by much easier.
Generally being sick as an adult is WAY worse than being sick while in school. I have to call out of work and then feel bad for missing classes because those kids won't get to have me for another week and some other teachers will have to take over my classes. In high school and college, there is literally always someone around me so close that they know exactly what food or drinks I could want before I'd even ask and I don't need to help them get it. In high school it's your mom, and in college it's your roommate or the one million people who traipse in and out of your unlocked apartment everyday. As an adult, you have to go out of your way to ask other people to go out of their way to get you things and even then you have to get them through locked apartments, gate codes, and the like. People like Victoria and JinDuo were all too happy to help me, there just is that barrier to aid that has never existed in my life before. (I am being whiny, I am totally fine but I do not like being sick.)
Public vs Private The school that I teach at is both public and private. I teach the private school kids and my coteacher teaches the public school kids. At first, it seemed like public and private schools in the US work relatively the same as they do here in China except that your local property taxes don't fund your schools here. But apparently around COVID, the government was uncomfortable with the inequity of private schools, so they don't let the school pick its own students anymore. Instead, there is a registration through the government and then a lottery system? I'm unclear on if it's a lottery or test based or if there's a bureau that chooses which students go to which private schools, but it was interesting to note and I am looking to find out more. This made the public aspect of the school much more intriguing because they work similar to US schools with "school zones" so the housing around good schools is astronomically expensive. Because my school is highly ranked in Hebei, families will buy the nearby apartments for extreme amounts so that their kids will be zoned to go to this school. This means that now you actually probably find as many or more wealthy families in the public side as the private side. (Operationally: At school, there's too many of the seventh graders for them to mix a lot, but they have the exact same administration and curriculum just different teachers.) I am excited to learn more, but now that my understanding of where public and private stand I have a better basis to look at public and private schools.