Jinghong Middle Vocational School

Located in the road to Gasa, in the south riverside of the Liusha River, we can find the Jinghong Middle Vocational School. In the intersection of the old road to Gasa and the new higthway only 15 minutes far away by walking to the airport, even you cand see how to the planes take off form the windows of the school.

In China the obligatory education is until 15, then the students can go to the Preparatory School or to the Vocational School. In the Preparatory School the are preparing the university tests, and then if they are successful can go to the university. Meanwhile in the vocational school they are training for theirs future jobs, they stay in the vocational school for 3 years, and then they can go to theirs differents jobs or they can try, making the university examinations and go to one.

In the vocational school the are training diferents subjetcs like music, chinese language, sewing, foreings languages, cooking, mechanic, etc. Basically they are being prepared for theirs future jobs. And a complement of all of this right now in China is the english language. The chinese goberment are focusing in preparing their population for being productive and keep rising the country economic development, so that is the reason for they are investing and training their people to learn english.

The people that is working on the school is arround 300 teachers, and others like security, cleaning, cookers, etc. And if we talking about students, we have about 3000 people, they come from diferents places of Xishuangbanna, mainly from the capital, that is Jinghong, but also from little towns in the countryside. Here have also an important number of foreing people, like from Laos and Thailand, those students com

e here to learn chinese for 2 years.

The school is composed by differents buildings, mainly buildings for the classes and buildings for accomodate students and teachers, buildings for the offices, buildings for the equipment, cantine, playgrounds, sportive instalations, and a very large building that is actually in construction and is suposed that it will be for make more clasrooms, between the buildings are green zones in addition with the playgrounds, even they have their own potability water instalation. So in few words the place is really huge.

The students stay in the school for all the week, they live here. The classes start on Sunday afternoon at 8 and finish at 5 on Friday afternoon, so yes they stay all the week in the school and practicaly they stay studying all the day. The students wake up at 6:30 in the morning, time for breakfast and start the classes at 8:00, four hours in the morning, then take the lunch at 11:30, have 3 hours for rest and take a nap, and then the classes start again at 15:00, dinner at 17:00, time for rest again and finally 2 hours more in the night from 8:00 until 10:00, and then immediately go to the bed until the next day.

Sometimes they have differents contests, like singing contests, dancing, cooking, basketball matches between differents clases, and a lot of different activities. So here the life for the students one with the life of the school.

And basically this is the life in a vocational school in China, at first is difficult to understand, here is like this, that the way that China uses to teach the new generations, but in a country that is developing so fast like this, you cant expect other way.