GEH1073 Review

The Art of Chinese Poetry: Past and Present

(Why don’t you read some Chinese poems?)

Taken in: AY18/19 Sem 1
Expected Grade: A-
Actual Grade: A-

This is a general education module for the history pillar and the alternative name of this module in the bracket above is the absolute mood of the prof when he is teaching this module. In my opinion, this was a very interesting module but this was the first semester they were offering it so the structure and everything was slightly messy. Hopefully, this will change in the subsequent semesters with feedback.

To start, lectures were not boring (I expected them to be but they weren’t). But, the prof moves very slowly, usually taking two weeks to cover what he initially planned to cover in one week and because of this we did not manage to complete the syllabus that he had initially set out at the start of the year. But I also felt that he was trying to cover too much in too little time and I hope that the syllabus can be reviewed. Through his teaching, I could really feel his passion for Chinese poetry and that was one reason I enjoyed this module so much and another reason why he took so long to cover each lecture I guess. Lectures looked at different genres of Chinese poetry and considers the context behind it (which is where the history comes in) and he will also go through the literary devices used in the poem. Do not worry if you have no literature background because whatever he is teaching in lecture is sufficient for you to handle the tests and assignments. It is also useful when he brings in English poems to set as contrast to the Chinese poems that we interact with.

The bonus to this Chinese Studies module is that it is a full English medium course and they made it clear that answering in Chinese will not award students with advantage. They even penalised students who only answered their quizzes in Chinese. So if you do not know Chinese or if your Chinese is bad and you still want to take it, do go ahead! Translations are also provided for the Chinese poems.

Tutorials were held once every two weeks. The first three tutorials were discussion of poems in class and the last two tutorials were group presentation. Each group had to present their analysis of the poem and this makes up 20% of the grade. The cumbersome thing was that each group had to do two presentations – one in the fourth week and one in the fifth week, each amounting to 10%. While the presentations can be prepared within a few days, I think that this is still quite a lot of workload for a GEM mod, considering that these presentations would also clash with a lot of other submissions towards the end of the semester. My tutor made the tutorials quite interactive and fun so I did enjoy tutorials a lot. He also tried to help us with our understanding of the materials as most of us were generally confused as to what was going on in the module (this was apparent in our mid terms).

Other than group presentations, there were two quizzes within the 13 weeks (so no finals) and a term assignment along with class participation. The first quiz was the testing of technical knowledge e.g. What is pathetic fallacy? and the second quiz was analysis of unseen poems, one English and one Chinese. The first quiz, as mentioned above, was a disaster for the whole cohort. But I appreciated that the teaching team made adjustments to the scoring and marking so that some marks could be pulled up. As for the second quiz, the prof did mention that most people got the gist of what was going on and I suppose that this would mean that we did manage to learn some things from this module. The term assignment was also on analysis of selected poems and you just have to apply what you learnt in the module to score. Do consult your tutors if you are unclear of anything because they are very willing and happy to help. But I also figured that you can’t really be wrong in your analysis because everyone has different interpretations. What is crucial is for you to articulate why you have interpreted it this way.

To sum up, this module has too much workload as a 1K GEM module and it would really be great if this could be lessened. It is definitely worth taking if you are interested in Chinese poems. While they do touch on Chinese history, this course really just touches the surface of it – what was revealed was more of the history of Chinese poems within these context. Do take note that this is also not a module to take if you are looking for an easy A. A lot of work and effort has to be put in to score relatively well in all the assessments, making this module slightly time consuming as well. But I am grateful for the teaching team as they I could feel their passion for what they were teaching.