I don’t think I’ve ever been more impressed by my students than at 2:28 this afternoon.
Getting class started after the break at 2:20 was the usual mess. It’s amazing how 20-year olds still don’t understand that class time is class time. And then somebody had to yell out that they were lowering the flag to half-mast in the courtyard outside, and for some reason everybody had to run to the window all excited to see. I was probably a bit hard on them afterwards, shouldn’t have told them off so harshly, but dammit, it’s the same at the start of every lesson and after every break, and the flag was bloody well supposed to be at half-mast.
But then the time clicked over to 2:28 and the siren sounded and everybody stood and was absolutely silent and the sense of respect and mourning for the dead was almost physically palpable.
And under the roar of BeiGongDa’s siren, we could hear the horns of cars on the Fourth Ring and Xidawang Lu and the sirens of the neighbourhood schools joining in.
And it really made me think, because it was at exactly that point one week ago that hundreds, if not thousands of schools came tumbling down, trapping and killing numbers of students and teachers that have still to be told.
As I guess you can imagine, it was not easy to restart the lesson after that. Even the second lesson of the afternoon, one hour later, was almost a total washout.
And then on TV tonight I see the extent of today’s national mourning. It really does look like the whole country stopped for those three minutes.
It was a very moving experience, probably the most moving experience of all these years I’ve spent in China.
As I said on my blog, I could sense the emotion in the classroom even if one of the girls hadn’t been quietly crying, and I think Class 6’s increasing exuberance afterwards was an expression of their sense of relief.
I saw that, John, but I’m having to use a proxy to get to your blog these days, and that interferes with my ability to comment.
The reaction was quite different up here. No exuberance at all, just a very distracted air about the place.
I have no problem view my blog directly from here. When did this start happening? I wonder if anyone else is affected.
Just after the quake. Could be a local thing for me, I am on a university network. Other spaces.live.com blogs don’t come through proxy-free either.