After five months of teaching it’s hard to say what my opinion is of the Chinese school system or education system in general. The Chinese seem to stress test taking, and by stress I mean 70% of all students’ grades are taken from the midterm and the final. I always find it interesting to hear how the American education system is failing it students, some of it true, but I’d actually like to see the students that these figures are taken from.
The topic of teaching philosophy and theory is a constant topic amongst the expat teachers here. Eastern teaching philosophy tends to emphasis memorization and sticking to what the experts says. Most of my students who grew up in the East have very good memorization skills and are generally the better behaved students. Where most of these students fall short is critical thinking and creativity. I had my 9th grade students write me an essay on the Opium War and half the student copied from the textbook and the other half of the class barely wrote a page. What all of the papers had in common was that none of them had any idea on how to structure an essay. I had kids restating the question as their thesis statement, using only one paragraph for their body and introducing completely off-topic ideas in their conclusion. When I asked the students why they had no idea how to properly structure an essay most of them said they were taught that the purpose of an essay was to show how much you knew about a given topic and that most of the ideas about essay writing I was introducing to them were foreign to them. I don’t think one has to focus all their time learning how to write an argumentative essay but to be absolutely deficient in that area is inexcusable. I don’t blame the students because they can’t learn what you don’t teach them and I really blame their previous teacher because most of them have to teach to the test. What it really comes down to is that my school has done a poor job of implementing a good system for learning. The administration is so concerned with getting more money and the image of the school that they don’t realize how far behind most of these students are compared to students in the West. Another thing that the administration is very flippant about is cheating. I haven’t had any cases but one of the expat teachers caught his student with the answers to a test on his hand but since some of the answers were wrong it was not considered cheating in the eyes of the administration and nothing happened to the kid. It was later learned that the kid had very influential parents and to cause their child to lose ‘face’ would have meant a lot of problems for the school. So now I’m kind of in limbo about my long-term stay at this school. I really can’t support an administration that is willing to forgo a students education in order have a bigger bank account.
