Morning "Exercises"

I realized quite recently that I hadn’t done any posts on the differences between school life in the US and China. As I spend a significant amount of time each week in a Chinese school, I’m able to note some of these differences daily. This will just be the first in a series of posts centered on the topic of Chinese school life.

Although I’ve only taught at one school, I’m confident that the millions of students all across China, no matter what school they attend, agree on at least on thing; they hate their morning exercises. Every Chinese student is required to gather outside with their class, regardless of the weather, to “exercise” along with the entire school everyday. Once all 3,000 students are out on the “playground” and lined up properly, the students perform a choreographed routine to music that looks more like a dance than exercise. The students learn the routine as Junior 1s and use it everyday for the next three years. Personally, I love to watch the students do their exercises. It’s not because I like to watch them being tortured, but because I find it fascinating to watch them all move in sync. Take a look for yourself.

When I first arrived in China, I asked myself why the Chinese decided to use 20 minutes of their school day to gather all the students together and make them dance. Although it’s not this way at Jing Yan, some schools have the students doing the exercises three times a day; early-morning, late-morning, and evening. That means that many students spend an hour per day “exercising” with their classmates. Throughout the course of a week, the students are losing five hours of class time for this seemingly pointless activity. The exercises don't replace gym class as a time for physical activity at school. Each class also has a P.E. class several times a week. Additionally, the student have been running around the track as a class for the first 15 minutes of the last period of the day lately.

As you saw in the video, the routine isn’t much exercise to start with and most students do it half-heartedly, which takes away almost all the exercise it provided in the first place. So then why spend all the time and energy making the students dance together? I think the title of a song some of my friends sang with their colleagues at the Teacher’s Day celebration at their school some months ago sums it up quite nicely: Unity Is Power. One way to teach the students unity at a young age is to get them to do something together as a school every single day. Apparently someone, somewhere, sometime in the past decided that mass-scale exercising would serve such a purpose quite well. And so the students continue to do it today.