Results tagged “highschool”

• Just a reminder: Gourmet Month is almost ending! Book a restaurant today. IMMEDIATELY! [City Weekend]
• A group of residents are now protesting the destruction of prolific Shanghai writer Eileen Chang's grade school. The area, which was supposed to be a protected heritage site, is now almost completely a pile of rubble. [Xinmin (Chinese)]
• Shanghai may be extending what would become the longest and fastest Metro route to Kunshan, a commercial center in Jiangsu Province that's 50km away. Talk about one helluva commute! [Shanghai Daily]

The fourth annual "Chinese Bridge" US High School Student Chinese Speech Contest took place this past weekend at the University of Massachusetts. High school students from 21 states took participated in song, pronunciation, and dialogue events that were graded by a panel of Chinese language teachers and native speakers. Students with higher abilities were graded on individual speeches on self-selected topics. The American students opened the competition with a rousing rendition of "北京欢迎你," ("Beijing Welcomes You"). We're happy to see so many young people taking an interest in the Chinese language, but we couldn't help but chuckle at the thought of a young Bostonian with a thick Bean Town accent talking in a learned Beijing accent. That would be wicked pissah-儿！

A few weeks ago it came to our attention that what appeared to be a large price tag-shaped sign was affixed to the front of a building under construction across the street from Zhongshan Park. The sign was under wraps, but the shape alone was enough to conjure up images of Best Buy and many high school hours spent searching in vain for movies and music that they don't keep in stock. Now despite the fact that Zhongshan Park already has a Gome, Yolo, Suning, and a host of other crappy electronics stores, we couldn't help but get a little nostalgic for the good old days, when buying a print cartridge just meant you had to pick up the box and take it to the register. No red stamps, no getting an attendant to take it out from behind bullet-proof glass, and no waiting around for someone to go find the 'real' product after you've paid and shown your stamp to the requisite three to ten people.

By Michael Ohlsson

Just off the northern edge of Fuxing Park, this unusual building was the original French Club (le Cercle Francais Sportif) circa 1904. Later it was moved what is now the Okura Garden Hotel (and much later moved to Cafe Montmartre). For a while this was the French Concession's most prestigious public high school, Le College Francais. You can still see the monogram 'CFS' cast into the wrought-iron railing of the main staircase. There's also some excellent stained-glass in the lobby, which we would have photographed if the security guard wasn't an ass doing his job.

Déjà vu all over again? Here it is once more, Shanghaiist's nearly quarterly review the Douban book Top Ten List: Annie Baby - "Sunian Jinshi" (Beijing-based author, photographer and blogger who writes about love and self-exploration in the big city.) JK Rowling - "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows" (Official Chinese version, published by the People's Literature Publishing House.) Markus Zusak - "The Book Thief" (Australian author of Austrian-German heritage writes a WWII book...

From Southern Weekend via the Bokee blogs we learned that the controversial Shanghai high school history textbooks—the very ones that were the subject of a New York Times article last year (Sept. 1, 2006)—have been banned.

I turned to several government departments, including the local police station and the Shanghai Civil Affairs Bureau Yangpu District branch, but no one would solve the problem. I know the residence problem will affect my daughter's whole life, so I still asked authorities for help, but I was shocked by the result. They suggested I send her to an orphanage.

Though it sounds like a high school-student-and-soon-to-be-cocaine-addict's dream come true, in China, there is a real market for people with an acute sense of smell and masochistic tendencies! From the unlinkable without a proxy or psychic powers BBC:

China is about to unleash a new weapon in the battle against illegal polluters - humans trained to sniff out foul gases, according to Chinese media.

Continue reading "Sniffing fumes ... for a living"

An old military base in the Daxing suburb of Beijing has been repurposed for battle against internet addiction among China's 12 to 24-year-olds. According to a new report, 14 percent of Chinese teens are vulnerable to internet addiction, and the Communist Youth League says that internet addiction is "a grave social problem" that threatens the nation. Additionally, the Chinese media has recently drawn attention to social problems related to internet addiction including a murder over the theft of virtual property and a string of suicides.

Shanghai Sunrise, a local non-profit charity established in 1995, is looking for board members and volunteers. Shanghai Sunrise aims to help remove Shanghai families from the poverty cycle by providing education scholarships for disadvantaged students. Despite China’s compulsory education law stating that no tuition fees will be charged for nine years of education, the reality facing many families in Shanghai and throughout China that this does not cover tuition fees for high school. Often, the extra costs incurred when sending a student onto high school and university can present overwhelming difficulties for families living below Shanghai’s poverty line. In situations like this, Shanghai Sunrise provides assistance so a student can reach their potential.

Lyrics to “Nothing to My Name” (一无所有) were already echoing in our head when we passed through the door of JZ Club on Monday night for Cui Jian's show:

There's a definitely a buzz for fans of Chinese cinema with the release of Jia Zhangke's new film Still Life 《三峡好人》. In Shanghai and probably the rest of China, the film's theatrical release comes on December 14, the same day that Zhang Yimou's new film Curse of the Golden Flower. And while from the standpoint of the box office returns, it seems pretty clear who the winner will be, Jia doesn't at all seem flustered by the lackluster box office performance that his film has seen in the limited screenings that have happened over the last few weeks.

From The Search Engine Journal we discovered that Baidu won an intellectual copyright infringement case against some major music companies. From Interfax:

We're not sure why Deborah Fallows is in Shanghai, or why she is writing a week-long journal for Slate. The first entry, which came out on the 13th, is the typical breathless "wow, I'm in this crazy futuristic metropolis in China and people assail me all the time with stuff to buy." We learned of this journal from the blog of Jane Dark, who analyzes Fallows' first entry from the standpoint of Marxist critical theory, so if you might want to brush up on your Horkheimer and Adorno before attempting to read her(?) post. That said, we won't guarantee that doing so will make the experience of reading either the post or the journal entry any more interesting.

Shanghaiist has posted before about the controversy surrounding the new high school history textbooks in Shanghai, which were thrown under the media spotlight after an article in the New York Times by Joseph Kahn claimed that the new history books were a big departure from the old books and went so far as to nearly remove Mao from China's history. You can read what the folks over at the Peking Duck thought about it this issue here and here. It seems that only one or two people there managed to compare the new history textbooks in Shanghai, which move away from the "great man" theory of history, with a somewhat similar movement in teaching of American history towards more social and cultural history, along the lines of (and this perhaps isn't the best or only example) Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States.

This many come as a shock to some of you, but some of us here at Shanghaiist can be, well, a little cynical. No! Surely not, you say! Ah, but true, my friend, but true. For example, we never took much notice of the restaurant Nuova Vita, near the intersection of Fuxing Lu and Ruijin Er Lu. It had existed pretty much since we moved to the city, and considering its age and curious lack of hype, we had it pegged as traditional Shanghainese Italian fare—canned sauce, rubbery noodles, with prices fit only for a Roman Pontiff.

A Chinese reporter recently called the Shanghai Education Bureau to find out what was going on with regard to the newly revised high school history textbooks that supposedly minimize Mao and other Chinese historical figures and represent a somewhat radical departure from the kind of history taught in China in the past.

Tips, tips tips -- it’s a word that’s practically flying out of people’s mouths these days. Waitresses at Manifesto ask for it. Receipts from Zentral suggest it. The Westin Brunch includes it without even asking! What gives?

Photo by 2dogs taken from the Shanghaiist Contribute page. To see your photos on our Contribute page, use Flickr and tag your photos “shanghaiist”. Or you can email your photos to photos@shanghaiist.com and they will automatically appear on our site.

Americans, and the American northwest in particular, have caught the China fever -- for why else would they decide to construct a Chinese pavilion in Des Moines, Iowa? OK, we don't really consider that a big deal, but then again we've spent some time in places like Richmond, BC (OK, let's include Canada) and Rowland Heights, California -- Chinese enclaves where you could go days without hearing English -- so perhaps we shouldn't take the pavilion for granted.

It goes without saying that China is a country of great contrasts and irony, and we were reminded of that fact with regards to sex and sex education.

Is it strange that we had bowling during gym class in high school? The end-of-class bell would ring, we'd all head down to the parking lot and pile into our respective cars and drive on over to the P-Nut Bowl. After bowling two games, we'd drive back and get to school in time for Calculus. We always thought it was normal, but based on the funny looks we get when we tell that story, maybe it's not. Hmmmm ... maybe rural Pennsylvania is different from the rest of the world after all.

We reported earlier on an elementary school in the Songjiang District whose focus was having its 12 pupils memorize Chinese classics such as the Analects (Lun Yu) and the Book of Changes (Yi Jing). Well, that school has been closed down by the authorities, who claim that this school contravenes the “compulsory education (yiwu jiaoyu)” laws. The Shanghai Daily reports that the school will be punished for charging high tuition fees (30,000 yuan a year), not having a government license, and because children are required to get nine years of compulsory education.

How’s that an “escape” from Shanghai you ask? Good question. And a “captivating jungle experience” in a freaking mall? Point taken. Alright, there is still the miniature golf part, which is the real/only reason why we’re telling you about this place.

Imagine this: A high school parking lot in Irvine, a small city in southern California. It's the mid-1990s and Shanghaiist, who in his wildest dreams had never thought he'd grow up to be a blogger, is busy scraping a faux-"handicapped" sticker of a stick figure in a wheelchair smoking a bong off his car. So this is what teenagers do to relieve their boredom in the O.C. (Orange County or 橙县).

LAist is flashing a sad peace out to their editor Carolyn Kellogg with one hand and bumping knuckles with their new head typist L.A. blogger king Tony Pierce with the other.

Not unlike theologians of the European middle ages, we've been pondering intractable, almost philosophical problems: For example, is it worse to put prophylactics in your hair or drink water from the Yangtze River?

We found this interesting (kind of) report on people.com.cn (in Chinese) titled “What Are Foreigners Doing on Internet”. This report, written by three Chinese journalists, Zhong Xiang in America,Tang Huiying in France and Lin Xueyuan in Japan, says chatting online is the favourite online activity of the Chinese, Americans usually use internet to search for maps while French people usually write blogs. That sounds exactly right, because Shanghaiist, who is Chinese, is currently chatting with an American friend who just happened to find a really cool map of France, which happens to be the home of her boyfriend, who is live-blogging the whole thing. Exciting!

OK now, if you are over 18 years old, you have high school education, you have used internet for more than three years, you know internet pretty well -- sounds like us ... we're getting excited! -- you think you can accurately express your opinions, and most importantly, you care about establishing a "civilized internet", you are qualified be an internet supervisor, at least according to Beijing Association of Online Media (BAOM) -- first time we've heard about this group -- in this Sohu report.