Chinese Students are Blowing in the Wind

Recently I asked a group of my joint education students to do a little listening practice with the embedded objective of taking their critical thinking for a spin. I had them do some impromptu song transcription of Bob Dylan's Blowing in the Wind. What follows is a few of their written answers to the question I posed: What does this song mean?

The song which called Blowing in the Wind tells us that nobody can explain what is life. Sometimes we think we have achieved what we should do, however, we still lose the focus of life. People always ignore the things which they are familiar. We should be concerned about the things which we already have and respect the truth to achieve our life goals. A person's lifetime is full of difficulties, so we should find out a lifestyle which we really want and necessary. -female 19

It tells that we should be concerned about the thing which we had already and do not argue for other things. -female 19

The song means to me: It just depends on yourself to take as many challenges you need to be successful. -male 20

In my opinion, Blowing in the Wind sounds like a confused and negative attitude about life. We must think about them and solve them by ourselves. -female 19

The songs means to me the answers are in the blowing wind, so people have difficulty to catch it, or the answers are unsure. -male 19

The song tells us that there is not a correct answer for each of life's question. It is very hard to change someone's mind. But the world is changing everyday, "How many roads must a man walk down before they call him a man?" I think it decide by what environment he is in, what he had done and how hard he works. Everyone has different thinking about something then maybe they will make different decides, do different things and so on. Everyone is common, because he is one of billions of people. Also everyone is special because he is only one. -female 19

Not bad for non native English speakers. The song is pretty ambiguous and virtually timeless so I thought it would be a good choice for this activity. I often tell the students that there are no wrong answers, just practice their English. Considering how test oriented the academic culture is in China, the students often find it refreshing to be given the permission and encouragement to explore their ideas.

For me, just another day at the office. Until then some random shots of our China life: