This English version was translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The Chinese text is authoritative.
(About the student: Zhang Huimin, female, born in 2002, began studying Chinese at our school in 2011. In 2016 she passed the “Test of Chinese as a Foreign Language (TOCFL)” Advanced level (Level 4) with a high score.)
My School
Zhang Huimin
I am now a lower secondary student, so I go to a collège. I won’t say its name, but it is quite close to my home.
In my first year at the school, everything looked a bit old and worn, but personally I quite liked it. At the school gate there was a structure as decoration: a giant coloured pencil. Inside the school there were two three-storey buildings. Apart from the offices on the ground floor and the library on the first floor, all the rest were classrooms. The two buildings were connected by the canteen on the second floor, joined together; that is to say, the canteen was like a bridge by which you could go from one building to the other, but not everyone was allowed to pass through it.
Speaking of the canteen, I find the food sometimes delicious and sometimes awful. The good days are things like pizza, pudding, potatoes and so on, while on the bad days it is simply impossible to swallow: undercooked dishes, rock-hard noodles, vegetable soup with everything thrown in together, and so on. As for drinks, there are basically none; when there are, it is only milk, and otherwise we usually drink tap water.
When we eat, there is always a staff member there holding a megaphone who calls us up to eat class by class. If you are late more than three times you will be punished. When we go up, we line up, and when it is my turn I have to give my name, and then another staff member records it. Finally we choose our food: there are starters, main courses, desserts and dairy products. You may only take one of each. Each time you can take a small bread roll. After eating we can go straight downstairs, except that unless you eat at eleven o’clock, you have to wait until the bell rings before you can go out.I remember once I was late for lunch, even though the staff member was calling us with the megaphone, simply because the playground is so big.
The school walls were colourful and bright, very pretty, but the undersides of the desks and chairs in the classrooms were covered with chewing gum, very dirty. Fortunately the toilets were fairly clean, but there was no toilet paper. Also, the boys’ and girls’ toilets were separated by only a single wall.
Oh, and behind the school there is a gymnasium. Although it is so close, you have to go a long way round to get there, because there is a wall in between. At that time the school was being rebuilt.
In the second year the school became completely new. Now there is only one building left. It only goes up to the second floor. Above that is the roof terrace, where there are three or four wooden houses, said to be for the staff to live in. Although it has only two floors, it is very long and has three staircases. Now the offices and the library are all gathered on the first floor. Every floor has toilets, and every classroom now has a dozen or so computers. This is something we never had before. Now the boys’ and girls’ toilets are also separate. The new school is good, but since it is new there are always some problems, such as computer breakdowns, and the classrooms leak. The walls are drab and colourless; when they finally decorated them, they used black-and-white paper drawings, and everyone knows paper cannot get wet, so as soon as it rains they tear. As for the toilets, that goes without saying: after two days of use they are dirty, after another two days the sinks are blocked, and someone even found a hamburger in a toilet bowl. And there is still no toilet paper.
The canteen used to call us to eat; now we queue. Although queuing is no big deal for me, I always arrive early and eat late, because there are always people who cut in line, saying they have club activities. I won’t make a fuss about that, but some people who have no club activities arrive last and still brazenly cut in. The canteen has also switched to recording by machine. Every student has his or her own card. If you forget your card three times you will also be punished. If you lose it you have to buy a new one, and it costs five euros. To be honest, I think the food is getting worse and worse, and the surroundings have become worse too. Before, it was on the second floor, so there was sunlight, but now it is on the ground floor. Every day we eat in pitch darkness and have to turn on the lights. But there is one thing I admit is good: they built a door between the gymnasium and the school, which saves us a lot of time.
Compared with last year, I think it has become worse. The old school gave me a warm feeling, but now it feels cold. Of course this is only my opinion; others may see it differently from me.
