Day +93

I am fine today. Let me continue to talk about children learning.

My wife and two of my sisters are primary Chinese school teachers. They all believed that the Chinese school children are given too much extra workbooks other than the one specified by the education department. Teachers have to rush in order to complete these workbooks. This leaves teachers less time to drill the children on the subjects sufficiently. Of course some children can handle this, but many other children cannot. The intention to let them learn more is good, but in the end they learn nothing :-) Learning nothing is still not a big problem, losing interest in learning and self confidence is surely a big issue for our children. The big and heavy school bag is a burden, going to school is a burden, doing exercises is a burden, exam is a burden… What a burden to be a student!

The other problem that Chinese school faced is big class. Due to limited number of Chinese school, it is very common to squeeze in more than 50 children into a class. And we know that each child is different and the way they learn varies very much too. So there is no way to teach such as big group of children effectively.

I watched a series of video in Chinese called “The Key to Successful Children Education” The video can be streamed from here. The speakers have four children who entered university at ages between 9 to 12 years old. She said parents have to respect the way their children learn. When they failed to learn well, it is parents’ responsibility to find out how they learn. In other words, if our children do not learn well, it is not because they are stupid, it is parents’ problem of not being able to discover how they learn.

See you next post :-).