I Scribble, You Scribble, We All Scream for--- Oh, no, that doesn't work.

What is this? It was on virtually every sheet of scratch paper my students wrote on during the writing exam. I had an hour to walk around, watching nearly 100 students write about rubbish (Literally -- the prompt they were responding to was about how "rubbish" is contributing to the environmental problems plaguing China and the world, and what governments can do about it). That gave me time to develop theories. Actually, I had a theory within a minute of seeing the scribbles, but I kept thinking about my theory, and how the basis of my theory impacted various forms of intercultural exchange, but as soon as I start to say so, the story seems to lose its luster, so let's pretend I just said, "I had an hour to walk around..."
The theory: the students had purchased new pens for the test and were getting the juices flowing; or, regardless of whether the pens were new, they were checking to make sure they worked. However, I believe that the same phenomenon in the States would have produced many of the types of scribbles shown below:
My apologies for the poor rendering of the American scribble, but one can see a pretty significant difference between the two forms. (This tempts me to enter into a topological discussion about how very different these are if we consider the paper to be our 2D space, but how the two scribble forms are actually the same if we think of the paper as a 3D space with thickness and of the American scribble as a coil that can be stretched into a Chinese scribble, leaving no loops...)

I had many ways of entertaining myself during that hour: I tried to send a positive aura to my students as I walked by them; I giggled quietly at how cute it was that, when a student was telling me that she liked Japanese music, she lowered her voice to a conspiratorial whisper at the mention of "Japanese"; I tried to figure out how many students had taken off their shoes to maximize comfort during the exam; I wished I had a camera to take a picture of the girl who brought an old-fashioned alarm clock to the exam to keep track of time.
I just wanted to make sure no one was picturing an old grandfather clock. This is the kind my tester brought. (The image was acquired from a blog that Google found for me when I searched for alarm clock images. Not that anyone would mistake this as a product of my graphic skills... This is one of those things that would tip me off to plagiarism in a paper, for example. And it deeply, deeply pains me how much plagiarism I found in my students' work even after we had spent considerable amounts of time discussing the importance of citation, quotation, and erring on the side of over-citing/-quoting to avoid plagiarism... *sigh*).