For Better or Worse, Vol. I

For my English Writing course, I gave my sophomore students a composition consisting of 3 parts:

A) Talk about the changes in your hometown during the past 10 years. New buildings have been built and the face of your hometown has changed, what about the views of the people? How have they changed? Are these changes for better or for worse?

B) Imagine your hometown 10 years from now. What has changed? Will these changes be for better or worse? Why?

C) Today's students are tomorrow's leaders. What CAN you do to make sure the changes are for better, rather than for worse? WILL you?

Here is a top essay from my one of my writing students. I'll post more later, without my comments or corrections to let them speak for themselves.

To See and Feel the Change - My View to the Development of China

In past 50 years, China has performed great achievement. Especially in the last two decades of reform and opening, its economy has developed as fast as other foriegn countries. The Chinese government system devotes its finance and energy to coping with the natural disasters, problems to modernization, urbanization, communication, transportation, education and science technology and makes tremendous success. To everyone's joy, the standard of people's life is improved and qualified. We can deeply see and feel this change day by day as things in china are moving at a speec it may be proud of. However, at the beginning of the new China's initiating, people still lived a hard life and how to deal with the domestic finance was the main difficulty. Take my parents for instance, they had to do the hard labor work to maintain the big families when they were teenagers. Because of the severe political situation in our country, most of the people, including my parents, lost the chance to recieve the futher education and were forced to work in some demote countryside. Their fates were totoally altered and accordingly they were assign to work in the factories. They have been worked for almost thirty years but they work hard to support not only my education but aslo the family. In spite of this, we lived together in harmony and happily. Compared to htme, I am very fortunate because I, with more and more young people, can fulfill the "college dreams" to recieve the higher education owing to the current education transform wich attributes to the our countries' development.

In my pinion, the development of my hometown is influenced by the economic progress of our country which is made by every Chinese. My hometown Panyu District, Guangzhou, centers on the tertiary industry and plays an important role in economic growth. Since the tertiary industry is the fundamental economic resource in local place, I think our hometown will keep on developming this major industry. Nevertheless, there is not to say everthing is perfect.

With the development of our country, the moral value is collapsed; the corruption of the government leaders is serious; the poverty-stricken areas are still poor and thus the children there cannot attend the school; the population is still increased while the birth control policy has been constituted for many years; the resolution to the pollution is far from easy at the cost of development

I believe it can be done, and I think the government is trying to solve these problems. For a developing country, these won't be corrected a day or a night but I see the future of my hometown and our country optimistically. Meanwhile, I hope that one day I can master English and other knowledge accomlishedly to present China to the Western world and let them know more about our country to show my sincere love and respect to her.

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(Sorry if these posts are long, but I think it best to preserve their inte-gritty.)