Science Class-Teachers and Tape

Students regularly have random competitions like an upcoming math contest, an 11-legged race that did NOT end well, and a singing competition. Well, they turned to me for help with the song of "encouragement," asking me to combine Michael Jackson's Heal the World and We are the World. I got out the music composing software and got it done. Every day I've been helping a somewhat-tone deaf group of 60 students prepare these songs.

Well, this is from lunch today where I was invited by that classes's head teacher, Ms. Dai, to hot pot, a really popular style of dining in China. Ms. Dai is on the right in red and Della, an English teacher of my other class is on the left.
This marks two proud moments as I held an entire lunch in Chinese and my colleagues are starting to respect that I'm not a lazy foreigner! Hooray!

Next, we have a great student, Catherine, writing her essay. See what she has in her hands? Tape. Why? Chinese students must worry about handwriting in their test scores. It's not the rational illegible=unscoreable, it's the prettier the hand writing, the higher the score. One student writes ok with beautiful handwriting. Another writes wonderfully with a boy's handwriting. The handwriting wins out always.
Therefore, Catherine and others use tape to peel off that outer layer of paper to "erase" their pen marks. There are so many students that evaluators may only spend 20 seconds on a paper; this then drives handwriting clarity to higher importance than content or ability