Because my role at the university is teaching only and we’re in between terms, I spend most of my time at job number two these days. I toddled over to the university today as I do once a week or so to make sure that I’m still getting paid and they haven’t given my office away without telling me. I was talking a bit to the receptionist in the school office and noticed that she was working on the figure that you see above.

“What on earth is that?” I asked.

Nonplussed she replied, “Directions for the toilets.”

“Directions? Are you serious?”

“We’re having some trouble with some of the international students.”

“Why is he wearing a little hat?”

“It’s not a hat, it’s his hair. I’ve only got Word to work with!”

“Maybe you should make them anatomically correct. Just to clarify what bit goes where, I mean.”

“I did, but (The Head of School) made me cut it off.”

Now bear in mind gentle readers, that this is a proper university – not Boy Z’s day care. In fact, I’m pretty sure that they have similar signs in the toilets at the misspelt day care.

Apparently in many Asian countries the porcelain god rests a but further toward the earth than what we’re used to in the Western world. Our international students, rather than modifying their behavior when faced with a lofty Western commode, have  maintained the relief posture with which they’re familiar. When you think about it, if you’ve spent much time in public toilets this it’s actually not that bad an idea to get your delicates as far away from the toilet seat as possible. The problem, it seems is that our Western bogs aren’t  designed to be perched upon and toilets the university wide are collapsing under new international students. Bad for the loos, bad for the kids.

Beyond the problems with the crappers, I’ve heard a lot of complaints from my fellow lecturers about the international students – largely stemming from language issues. I don’t know about the university as a whole, but in the course that I taught about 40% of the students were international. I had kids from China, Malaysia, Thailand, Singapore, Indonesia, Vietnam, Sri Lanka, India, Iraq, Japan, Ethiopia, the Congo, Lebanon and Burma in my course last term. Sometimes it does take a bit longer to get points across to the internationals, but because my job is pretty light weight, I’ve got time to take. And in a lot of ways they’re a joy to teach. Australians are known for a lot of things, but a strong work ethic isn’t one of them. The international students are at our university because they really want to be and demonstrate this by working their asses off, a refreshing change from being greeted with a course of moans after declaring that Wikipedia isn’t a valid academic source and one might actually have to open a book. The international students often have great stories as well. Most of them are recent migrants, like your underwhelming correspondent. Some of them came here with their families as refugees. Some of them came here as refugees fleeing a war in their home that my country started. It was fascinating to talk to some of these kids and get snippets of the story of their lives.

Now if we could just teach them to use the john properly.

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