Chinese Education

The China Expat wrote up a longish take on his perceptions of Chinese education. I agree with almost all of it. My own experience is limited to a school that's a lot more progressive than most so I have a more favorable take on Chinese education than he does. The core of his complaints are thus:

* Too many students in one class
* Teachers with too many meetings and too few classes

He's right. Chinese teachers do about half the workload I did in America. He attributes it to meetings, but I haven't seen that many. I just think staff is cheap, so like everywhere companies that can hire too much. There aren't enough classrooms to fit all the teachers they've hired, so they trade a lighter workload for massive hours. Teachers are at school all day. Longer, less productive workdays seem the norm in most white-collarish work environments in China. Why should it be different at schools for different reasons.

In some ways, it sure as hell beats my schedule in America. From 8 am to 2pm I never stopped having to watch and discipline children. I get two and a half hours for lunch here. In America I got 30 minutes and microwave to share with 12 kids that I also had to closely watch... loose hands, fights, threats... you get it. I got my 30 minute break and then was theoretically out by 3.

With only fifteen classes, adding five more for every teacher can make for 25% smaller classes without a significant strain on the teachers if done right. The big step would be to design new schools to have smaller classrooms.

* The military-like environment of many Chinese schools

Not saying it doesn't exist, but I haven't seen it at my school - other than the creepy calisthenics routines in the morning and Wear Camo to School Wednesdays, of course. Quite the opposite, I was stopped very early from being the disciplinarian I was in America. I was pretty surprised to find the only real discipline technique was calling the parents. No ISS, no OSS, no detention. Not that those really work in America, but...

I'm still surprised by the relaxed nature of my school. Kids run around, horseplay, and even fight without there being much in the way of adult intervention. Childish behavior is perfectly OK between classes. I think it comes from not having the same overwhelming threat of lawsuits from parents that American schools face.

I have seen the berating insults of some teachers to entire classes though.

* Class division according to overall, as opposed to subject-specific, test scores
* Overworked students - No time for anything but studying
* Overly high emphasis on memorization
* The joke called English education

I have some deep concerns that foreign teachers aren't being utilized efficiently. I also have deep concerns over the English abilities of many Chinese English teachers. On the surface, it feels like 70% of the reason we're there is image. Parents want foreign teachers, so better schools need to have them to compete with each other. Public schools aren't free. It's a marketplace. Reagan once commented that it'd be much more efficient to just hire a white guys and gals to stand at the gate and greet and play with the little tykes when they come through the gates in the morning and be back at the end.

The other 30% is to make up for the strong oral deficits of the Chinese teachers. Sure, they can teach grammar and spelling well enough, but asking "Where is class 5, grade 6?" is akin to asking a Wal Mart stocker where the Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors are. So we're given 40 minutes a week with 40 - 50 students to make up for this.

It seems to me that working with the best English students in an all-English environment several times a week and with the English teachers will have a much more significant impact than what we're doing now. It feels like we're sitting with a mutli-million dollar fire truck shooting the foam cannon at the flames high above the gas leak - the hundreds of kids passing through each Chinese English teacher every year. Turn the leak off, help the Chinese English teachers more and watch your returns expand. Build their confidence, work on their grammar, and help their pronunciation such that every hour you spend with them is helping those hundreds of kids.

The parents subscribe to the Magic Pixie Dust Theory, which basically says that having a hairy rich foreigner stand in front of their kids long enough will make them think like the white man in all the important ways, i.e. business. This is why the idea of a Filipino with 10 years experience teaching and perfect English just isn't an option. They don't have the Dust, man, where's the Pixie Dust of Development? I have to turn them down every day in favor of the inexperienced college kids that the schools want. Mix the weird ideas of what they think Western education is, no real pedagogy for a oral English class with 40+ kids, discipline issues 'cause at least 10 kids don't understand anything that's being said and you get schools that are pretty clueless about what to do with these big, expensive, walking billboards.

So we're clowns, most of the time. Sometimes ninjas. Once a robot. It can be rewarding, sure, but it can be so much better. Too bad there's the...

* Inability to change the status quo

Music

We had just gotten out of the subway at Luo Hu and had come into an area of "shadow" taxis, as Cody named them, to drive us far away to an investment house on the beach. It was Tom's new bosses place. We hustled the first cab, no luck. Second cab, no luck. They were wanting the equivalent of fifteen USD to drive four of us an hour. A taxi pimp arranged a third for us at a ten percent discount, but he kicked us after I showed him the exact location. He wanted even more than the others.

Standing on the curb, trying to hail a new cab The Revelation hit me. We were in front of a small clothing shop, the kind that always blares that 500 beat-per-minute Mickey Mouse techno. It was doing it's own blaring, drawing customers like bees powerless in front of flowers, and it hit me then, and right then, that Chinese people actually like this music.

That's a big thing to wrap your head around. I endlessly make fun of other people for their musical taste while clinging to my own taste as an example of the perfect example of thoughtful, unique, fun, diverse, quirky, and enjoyable library. Actually, all personality traits I'd like to assign myself. That means something.

I mean I knew they prefered it, but I always had it in the back of my head that as soon as someone drops in a better CD at a dance club they'd get a little red face and not want to mention putting Alvin, Simon, and Theodore behind the DJ booth.

Right now I'm listing to the new Mofro album, a song called "Circles" about fighting in a relationship with some shadowy and ancient emotional baggage as the culprit. The band is from the backswamps of Jacksonville and the theme and language used to describe it is something I can deeply identify with. The sound of the music itself, the drawly vocals and that Hammond organ, remind me of marshes of my childhood and blistering midnights of my college days. It's something that hits the essence of my being without even trying. Music just kinda does that. That's why we make mix tapes as young lovers, trying to have Alanis Morissette or Jim Morrison say what you really mean. Some how John Lennon or Maynard Keenan says it better than we can.

For some strange reason, my boss loves mixing up Mary J Blige and Mofro to impress foreign passengers in his VW wagon. It's strange to me that he likes it. I expect him not to. I think, perhaps, it's easier to understand "tastes are different" and perhaps people don't all like what you like. The hard part, and The Revelation to boot, is that other people like different things. Not just prefer them, no just are used to them, but truly, genuinely like and enjoy and thrive off them.

This chipmunk techno that surrounds my daily existence and feels like a long-running inside joke really is the product of artists making things that The People enjoy. The sappy MandoPop and CantoPop is the soundtrack to millions of rising and falling lovers. And you know what? Those ridiculous poofy dresses the girls wear with the pseudo-punk hair or tapered pants... that's really hot to some Chinemen dudes. I mean really hot.

It's a hard thing to wrap your really wrap your head around and realize all your tastes, something you could never do without, are inversely ridiculous to someone else. And that, in a word, is culture. Oh, and your favorite band sucks (to someone out there).

Update: Two More Years in China

Dear People Who Read Treyopia,

Last week I applied for a Master of Education from Hong Kong University. They have a specialism in International and Comparative Education and Development that seems right up my ally, mixing politics and education perfectly. It's two days a week for two years and is about a two commute for me in Shenzhen. Despite initial positive feedback from HKU faculty, I was worried that my less-than-stellar academic record from UNF was going to be an issue getting into the 33rd best university in the world. I've been keeping this on the down-low until I received an acceptance letter.

I was given provisional placement today, the only holdup being the official transcripts making their way across the pond. I think I can say with certainty that I'll be a student there in September.

The plan now is to stay in Shenzhen at least through the first semester to see if the commute is too much of a hassle. It's quite a distance and I'll be passing through an international border on the way to classes. I'd prefer to stay on the mainland side because my job is going well, cost of living is low, and my Chinese is getting better everyday. Hong Kong is a great place, but it comes with all the pros and cons of living in the most densely populated city in the world. We'll see what the future holds though.

Stay well and stay in touch,
- "Master" Trey Menefee
Dear People I Mass E-mailed,

Last week I applied for a Master of Education from Hong Kong University. They have a specialism in International and Comparative Education and Development that seems right up my ally, mixing politics and education perfectly. It's two days a week for two years and is about a two commute for me in Shenzhen. Despite initial positive feedback from HKU faculty, I was worried that my less-than-stellar academic record from UNF was going to be an issue getting into the 33rd best university in the world. I've been keeping this on the down-low until I received an acceptance letter.

I was given provisional placement today, the only holdup being the official transcripts making their way across the pond. I think I can say with certainty that I'll be a student there in September.

The plan now is to stay in Shenzhen at least through the first semester to see if the commute is too much of a hassle. It's quite a distance and I'll be passing through an international border on the way to classes. I'd prefer to stay on the mainland side because my job is going well, cost of living is low, and my Chinese is getting better everyday. Hong Kong is a great place, but it comes with all the pros and cons of living in the most densely populated city in the world. We'll see what the future holds though.

Stay well and stay in touch,
- "Master" Trey Menefee

P.S. - The tickets aren't bought yet, but it looks like I'll be home the last two weeks of July.

P.S.S. - (904) 302-7336 calls me in China and it's dirt cheap. I'm 12 hours ahead of EST.

The Art of Dumbing Down

An anonymous comment left on my "Teaching" post a few weeks back:

As a teacher of English, don't you think that you have a responsibility to teach PROPER English [instead of rewarding them for merely speaking]?

In a classroom you visit once a week with 30-40 five to twelve year olds with only basic skills, priorities change quickly. I've made the case to school administrators and people in my own company that schools are wasting a LOT of money by putting us into these situations. What a foreign teacher is best at - fine-tuning grammar and pronunciation - is pretty worthless when dealing with the demographic we do. In most cases, I don't feel like there's much I can do that a normal Chinese English teacher can't do. I can't change the whole system, so I do the best I can.

My first priority is effective communication. Use what you know. My Chinese is horrible, but I use it rather effectively and with the help of body language there's almost nothing I can't do. I find our jobs here to be well-suited for that: communicate with the foreigner using what you know. I teach/demonstrate that the average foreigner is not going to understand most of the Chinese you use, so use the English you do know to convey your message. Be comfortable with the language enough to actually speak it and guesstimate grammar in a creative, if stressful, environment. It's much better than locking up trying to remember finer grammar points or more difficult vocab.

For what it's worth, I almost always repeat student statements and questions loudly and in proper English so the whole class can hear and the student can make notes on where they went wrong. When playing games I help them say what they want correctly before giving them points. What it seems you are suggesting would force me, more or less, to make a fool of anyone who dared raise their hand to speak.

In one-to-one environments, I encourage students (typically adults in high-ranking positions) to not be afraid of dumbing down. You always see good speakers getting stuck on one word, trying to remember something the learned ten years ago. I always tell them there's likely four or five easy words that they do know that say almost the same thing as the big word and if used, the conversation won't grind to a halt.

Only my ideas... what do others think? Comment!