Foresight (and the Chinese lack of it)

Another in my ongoing series, Why I hate working for Chinese universities...

I have just started teaching a class on Presentation Skills to a small group of mature students. It is arranged by a Chinese university (groan). It is taking place on Sundays (groan!!).

The idea was first broached to me well over a month ago, when I was so desperate for money that I felt obliged to say yes (in the time since then, I have become insanely busy, and am wishing passionately that I had turned it down).

The scheduled start date was June 5th. I didn't think anything of it at first.

Chinese holidays have a way of ambushing you - because the lunar calendar allows them to wander around so freely, often varying by at least two or three weeks, sometimes a month or more from one year to the next; and also because the government (at least until recently) would seldom decide very far in advance whether it would grant a day off, or a number of days off, for any of these holidays.

Thus, I got rather caught out by Duanwu Jie, the Dragon Boat Festival, falling on the first weekend of June this year. It's only in the last two or three years that the government has started acknowledging this traditional holiday at all - and surely it was much earlier in the year last year?

The university had evidently been caught out as well. Surely they wouldn't schedule the start of a new course over a holiday weekend?

I pointed the matter out to them.

They took two or three days to ponder it.

Then they e-mailed me back: "Monday 6th is a public holiday. Sunday 5th is just a regular Sunday."

Hello!!!! Three-day weekend?!  Do you really think our students are going to want to sit in a stuffy classroom all day long in the middle of a three-day weekend when they could, you know, be away having a trip somewhere, or meeting up with family and friends in Beijing? Why don't you ask the students what they think about this?

Reluctantly, they concurred with my suggestion.

Unsurprisingly, the students all gratefully agreed that they would much prefer the course to start on June 12th.

There, that wasn't hard, was it?

Well, yes, in China, it always seems to be.