I am fine, thanks--a joke on China Education

Long time no blog! :)

This post is not intended to be anything serious, as it is labeled as a "scribble", but hopefully, readers may think a little on the education of China.

Recently, I heard a joke: a Chinese student was driving in the US; suddenly he fell off a cliff and got badly injured. Fortunately, there came a policeman, who said:"How are you?" Without thinking, the student responded:" I am fine, thank you!" So the policeman left, and the poor student soon died because of loss of too much blood.

This joke may not make any sense to a native speaker, but probably many English learners in China (and maybe in other countries as well) may find it funny: in junior high schools, Chinese students, me included, were required to learn and recite a list of (rigid) daily English conversation. In this list, there was a typical one--as you may guess:
  --How are you?
  --I am fine, thanks/thank you, and you?
...
As a result, it is sometimes amusing to greet a Chinese, "How are you?"--you can expect the response.

Teaching style of other classes is usually non-different. I graduated from a stereotypical senior high school, which is a so-called 省级示范学校 (Province-level Exemplar School). The head of my class teaches physics. One of his motto was "多做题，做难题，规范做题！"("Do more exercise, solve difficult questions, and answer in a standard way!"). Under his instructions, my class always got better physics grades than any other classes did, but are those differences really worth the effort? No problem should ever have to be solved twice, and study is neither all about doing exercises, nor memorizing "I'm fine, thanks". Study ought to be fun, and contents ought to be useful.