I taught another professor's class yesterday as a favor and was interested to observe that when the students broke into small discussion groups, they actually worked hard at discussing their assigned questions the whole time.

In the US, those of you non-teachers might not know, the "small group discussion" can be synonymous (though not always) with the "total waste of class time." Here, the work ethic is much stronger, no doubt about that.

It was also interesting to learn that the TAs here, following Confuician tradition, take role according to age rank rather than alphabetically.

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