Trust Issues

One thing I've noticed is that the Chinese are paranoid. People (including me) like to make jokes about how Americans are scared of everything, but those same gags could fly here as well. It's not the bars on first-floor windows in relatively nice neighborhoods that convinced me of this, nor was it the electronic controlled-access gates in front of every school. It's this: fingerprint scanners so that school administrators know when the teachers arrive and leave. Talk about lack of trust.

What gets me about things like this is that none of the teachers I've worked with have been particularly dishonest. Anytime I've been lied to, it hasn't been the rank-and-file doing the lying. But then, a quick trip through the archives here will verify that.