Around the first of May, Xander was sworn into the Young Pioneers, which means more or less that he's in the Honor Roll, except with the added bonus that he could also be on track to join the Communist Party of China. The main thing is that he gets to wear a red scarf every day to school, and he gets a nifty plastic pin with a red star on it. Xander, externally motivated student that he is, was crushed last fall when he didn't get a red scarf like the "good kids" in the class, and thought for a while that he was a Bad Student, so now he's been officially recognized.
And yes, teachers in China (well, at least in Xander's school) are very up front about separating the sheep from the goats in that way. Good students often get to sit up front close to the teacher, with the bad kids towards the back. For a couple of days, Xander refused to play with a friend of his because the teacher had mentioned that she hadn't done her math homework well enough. Yeah, we had to have a talk with him about that one...
Turns out that he hadn't gotten his red scarf last fall because, understandably, his teachers weren't quite sure what we as parents would think. We said fine, as long as they ignored all of the reports to the Central Committee that he was sure to make on us (joke!), and so he got his scarf in an all school awards ceremony, complete with an honor guard, a speech to the gathered parents from a vice president of the university, and, of course, synchronized dance performances.
The music that was playing while they were being led up to the stage? The theme song from the 1960 American Western The Magnificent Seven. (Which was itself a copy of Kurasawa's Seven Samurai.)
Of course.
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