Jiaxing--Don't Drink the Water

I'm a bad journalist. 8th post in 3 months? Yeah, I suck. Anyway, I gave my students their midterms last week. They did debates on environmentalism vs. economic progress. Yes, a loaded issue I know, but it gave me an excuse to show them WALL-E (which half of them had already seen). Man, I love that movie. Well, I loved that movie, but after having seen it 8 times broken into 45 minute installments, it begins to lose its luster.

But like I said they had debates. Some were good, some were "meh." They were more speeches than debates, but what can you do? Also, the arguments tended to repeat. For the pro-environment side it was always "the environment is the basis of everything" and for the opposition it was "how can you protect the environment without money?" Both positions tended to lead into the inevitable circular "chicken-and-egg" debates about "how can you have progress without the environmental resources?" and vice-versa. I did my best to keep things moving.

Still, some we're pretty energetic and every now and then, improvisation occurred! My favorite was when somehow the topic of dinosaurs came up--the quote was "how can you talk about economic progress with the dinosaurs?" I'm still not sure which side brought it up. I love some of these kids. Another good speech came from one student on the pro-environment side. He brought up how bad pollution was in China, especially here in the JX. It killed when he talked about how prettier the people would be with less pollution. He's got his priorities straight.

Leb Wohl