Freshmen Orientation Speeches are Boring in any Language

Seeing a gym full of bored freshmen can only mean one thing, that the President of the University is about to deliver a boring 30 minute speech. Granted these freshmen are wearing military fatigues and the speech is in Chinese but the same principle applies. How, might you ask, can I know that the speech was boring when I couldn't understand any of it? Well, there are a few dead giveaways. First, when he' the only person in the room wearing a suit, everyone else is only clapping out of politeness. Second, I began to wonder around minute 20 if everyone in China yelled their speech into the microphone, but as the next speaker demonstrated, they don't. Third, I don't know exactly what he was saying or if this is just another Chinese speaking custom but when you have to clap yourself to indicate when everyone else should clap, that's a bad sign. Finally, and most obviously when about half the audience is trying to discreetly use their cell phones, and the people in the front row look like they're about to fall asleep, you've lost them.

After the President's speech there was some military official who gave a much quieter shorter speech. After a number of other various people spoke, there were about 30 people on stage and at one point I had the bad feeling they were all going to try to speak, Bryan got up to deliver his speech in English. I wasn't sure for most of it how much the students were getting, and Bryan had been told to keep the length down since they wouldn't get most of it, but toward the end when he cracked a joke a good number of them laughed, which is a good sign, a better sign when you consider the joke wasn't necessarily funny.

After the speeches were done they went off to presumably do some of their training, though what I saw them doing looked more like orientation then training. Teddy told us that when he went to school the training lasted for four weeks from before sunrise to after sunset, but now they had only two weeks. Actually he noted that they had just reduced it from three to two weeks at this school. He said that they weren't exactly going into the military after school either it was just that all public schools had some sort of boot camp like training for freshmen. Now that's the way to make sure freshmen are nervous, "Welcome to school. Here's your class assignment, now drop and give me 20."