Many schools take corporal punishments for granted. A teacher may slap a student with his or her hand or a ruler for some fault. The more distant and simple the school is, the more this kind of punishment occurs. My Chinese friend told me that they were given a certain amount of time to learn English words at school, and for every unlearned word they got beaten with a stick.
Teachers beat their students with a stick sword or just slap or kick them. When the education is finished, though, parents see a disciplined young man or woman with a right to teach kung fu and a fair chance of having a career. Most well-known masters of kung fu went through this very school of life.
Wherever Chinese kids may study, be it a kung fu school or an ordinary one, they adopt three principal traits from early childhood: the skill of working hard, discipline, and respect to those above them in age or position.
They are taught from a young age that they should be the best at whatever they do. Competition with Europeans, who grow up in a much milder environment, is actually no competition for them because we are not used to studying for ten hours a day, every day, for many years. Children in school uniform, sports suits, at a lesson dedicated to Earth Day. Liaocheng, April Those that lag behind are often punished. In gym class the slowest person in each group in running races has to do an extra lap.
Many kids take entrance exam to get into good middle school. Shenzhen middle school Elementary school report cards are 30 pages long. On them are measurements of weight, height, eyesight, hearing, lung capacity accompanied by information on where one fits in with the national average. Teachers give grades, but parents and other students are encouraged to add their assessments, usually pointing out some fault or weakness. Your thinking is very nimble and the teacher and the other students all admire you.
But only if cleverness is combined with hard work will you have improvement. Students are swamped with after school classes: music lesson, English, art and martial arts. All these activities are very competitive and rank students. English is graded on five levels. More than half of preteens take outside lessons. If a kid is bullied and his parents are politically influentially they can pressure to have the bully transferred to another school.
There are also stories of students getting into schools without taking entrance exams because their parents had a cousin who knew someone in the education bureau.
When students are studying for major exams, parents switch television on mute so hey can study better. Elementary school class Children have traditionally learned by rote, memorizing material without asking questions. Many topics are banned. A great amount of time is spent learning numerous Chinese characters, which are basically memorized.
There are often 40 to 50 students in a classroom and can be up to 60 kids in a class. Students sit in rows and are often expected to sit upright with serious expressions on their faces. Having some many students encourages rote learning rather than student-driven activities and discussions. Class activities generally features students dressed exactly the sameboys in blue tracks suits and girls in red onesperforming the same kind of banner-waving drills or marches.
Reforms include using a wide variety of textbooks, removing dense passages from textbooks, reducing class size, using groups and partners and more hands-on learning, encouraging students to figure out problems themselves and emphasizing project-based learning.
Private schools are at the forefront of these reforms. They often have many clubs and activities outside of school. The main thing that holds these kinds of reforms back is that there are not enough teachers trained in such methods. But other subjects often developed into scattered facts that careen between traditional and modern, Chinese and foreign. I was amazed by the stuff Wei Kia learnedthe most incredible assortment of de-systemized knowledge that had even been crammed into a child in the forth grade.
When children learn to write they began with specific strokes and copy them over rand over. They then combines these into characters and copy them over and over. Among the things that the students learned were that Google was started by a brother and sister in America, that the Buddha in Leshan was 70 meters tall. Singing and skipping in the dizzying southern Chinese humidity, these students have been given 45 minutes a day to frolic under the sun while peers across the nation remain indoors, hunched over books or squinting at blackboards.
By forcing youngsters to put down their pencils and expose their eyes to natural light, researchers think they can stem an explosion of nearsightedness in China. That's about three times the rate among U.
Even more troubling is the severity of the Chinese cases. Between 10 percent and 20 percent of nearsighted Chinese children are expected to develop "high myopia," which is largely untreatable and may lead to blindness. In , several provinces banned public preschools from instructing 3-year-olds to memorize 10 Chinese characters a day.
It's not uncommon for children in China to study four hours a day at home on top of a full day of school as well as attend several hours of tutoring on weekends. According to the story, Kong Rong, later a politician in late Han Dynasty, picked the smallest of all pears and let his brothers choose the rest that were bigger, despite being only 4-year-old and the youngest in the family at the time.
It is heatedly discussed on Sina Weibo, as netizens debate if educators should enforce values onto students, and if honest expression of unorthodox opinion should be encouraged. The child is in Grade 1 at an elementary school in the city of Shanghai. He said that his son was pretty confident in the answer and refused to correct it, at least not until he got an explanation from the teacher. He understands the significance of sharing. He passes food to me, his mother and his grandma at the table every day.
In an online survey on Sina Weibo, In China, teachers have traditionally been strict and formal in their character and appearance and rarely make jokes. Students are expected to be obedient, let the teacher teach and address their teacher in formal terms.
There is a notion that the teacher is always right. Students are reluctant to ask questions for fear of exposing the teacher as ignorant. In any case there is so much material to cover there is little time to ask questions anyway. In the Mao era, teachers were fairly well paid and held in high esteem and received good health care and other benefits.
Eevn today teachers are regarded as advocates of the Communist Party line first and teachers of the subjects second. Students at teacher's college are required to take courses on Marxism-Leninism and Building Chinese Socialism. Chinese teachers are not known for encouraging their students. In Asia, it is common for parents to give money to teachers and for students to give any prizes they have won to their teachers.
Parent-teacher conference tend to be group affairs in which the teacher talks to all the parents at once. If a child is doing poorly everyone finds out. This form of humiliation is expect to pressure parents to keep their kids in line.
There is a lot of pressure on teachers. Many are studying English and taking other classes to improve themselves. Teachers are usually exhausted by the overcrowded classes and insufficient facilities. In the poor rural provinces many teachers rely on the charity of farmers for food and sometimes go hungry because they go months without getting paid.
Some teachers live in rat-infested dormitories at the school, which have no running water or electricity and try to keep warm in winter by sleeping under piles of thick quilts. In the mid s, as part of an effort to modernize schools and raise their quality, some barefoot teachers lost their jobs, even some well-respected ones with numerous years of experience and awards. Even weekends and holidays have the equivalent of one day of homework for each day they're not in school.
As I write this, it's early August and my son is still putting in two hours a day doing homework and studying his second grade textbooks. Parents have to attend meetings and lectures, and then write reports on what they learned several times each year!
Besides that, we have to check the daily homework and have our son make corrections before signing off on it. Schools have unpredictable schedules. Coming from a country where schools put out tentative schedules two to three years in advance, and generally stick to them, it's still hard for me to get used to the unpredictable schedules that schools in China operate on.
We're never quite sure when the term will end and the next will start. Once when they did tell us in advance, they were off by two weeks. The daily schedule is also unreliable. Or even within a half hour of that time. Although, I've heard this isn't as much a problem in top-tier cities where schedules tend to be more Western and don't allow for a two-hour midday rest. Besides not being able to know for sure when school will start and end, you also have to account for the craziness that is the Chinese holiday schedule system.
In America, many holidays are observed on a Monday even if the official holiday happens on the weekend. China, however, celebrates holidays on the exact day, which can be confusing. To allow people to have a longer holiday weekend, if a one-day holiday falls on a Thursday, kids will have Thursday, Friday, and Saturday off. But they start school on Sunday to make up for having Friday off! I wish I could give you a step-by-step guide, but while talking with others, I've found that there's no cut and dry path to follow.
We live in a small community, and by virtue of his birth in the country, my son is seen as a Chinese citizen. So enrolling was as simple as taking his passport to the school on registration day and filling out the paperwork like everyone else. We paid the minimal fees for books and uniforms and we were good to go. I've heard others say that there are tests to ensure that the kids have good speaking and listening skills that are necessary for them to keep up. See situations where gift giving is actually appropriate.
If their students fail, this also could be seen as a loss of face. However, the Gao Kao is much more comprehensive and difficult than US standardized testing.
More than attendance, extracurricular activities, or even grades, the tests decide what universities and majors will be available to the student in the future. The students have a break lasting up to two hours in the middle of the day so they can go home or stay at school to eat and perhaps take a nap.
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