College... High School... or Worse?

We have an interesting arrangement for classes on the Xujiahui campus that none of us saw coming before we arrived in China. We are taking three classes on site and one distance learning class online. The three classes we have on site are an international business class taught by our Purdue adviser who traveled with us, a Chinese culture class, and a Chinese language class. Our classes rotate so that we take two classes a day for 6:30 of total class time. We meet from 8:30 to 11:45 and 1:00 to 4:15 every weekday. We still have reading assignments, homework, and our distance class to attend to after classes finish each day. We had been told that we would not do nearly as much school work as we did at Purdue, but this has not be the case at all so far.

Moving back to our actual classes, here are some pictures of the school building and room we take our classes in.

The buildings here are freezing during the winter, with only wall mounted heating units provided in the classrooms. Our Chinese culture teacher, Sa Weiqi, keeps things lively by discussing Chinese pop culture and recent controversial events. We appreciate her decision to avoid classical texts and ancient philosophy in her culture curriculum. Catriona and I's half of the group got a brand new (to the program) Chinese language teacher. She runs her class like a drill instructor. We currently spend most of class reciting Chinese phonetics and characters. Whenever there is a break in the action, you can tell that most people are pretty bewildered.