Getting Kids Needed Academic Help.
Investing on private tutors makes sense because the quest for a better future becomes tougher each year. These professionals help teens cope, manage, and prepare for vital tests like the SAT to prepare them for college and other difficult pursuits. Listed below are pointers moms and dads should think over.
Paid or Peer
The popularity of peer tutoring in many high schools and colleges has many disregarding the need for a private tutor, as they think the setup is already perfect. Kids can get other smarter kids to teach them at no-cost making it a budget savvy move for parents. Children with special needs, like attention deficit disorder (ADD), may especially gain advantage from this tutoring setup since other kids can help them stay focused.
Those who tutor also gain something as they get to enrich their knowledge and experience. Many who engage in tutorial activities can gain better understanding as they teach topics to others. This also builds self-confidence and inspires better time management.
While all these may be true, the case is only one phase of the issue. Other phases such as scheduling and teaching ability will still come to play. Peer tutors are still students and often, they also need to meet deadlines for homework, reports, and so on. Some also engage in other extra-curricular activities making teaching far more difficult.
Many schools also question their staff's availability to monitor, supervise, and train volunteers to become better at the task. There's also the issue of matching student personalities to facilitate better learning. Students matched with peer tutors who are their exact opposites may not work well together. Once it happens, frustrations occur and both students may abandon the idea.
Tutor Misconceptions
Although many think SAT tutors, for example, will only matter if the child is failing, this case may be a prime example of getting help a little too late. Finding help during such periods may be useful, but may have been a better idea if done earlier. Early involvement is best so the student will not question his or her abilities. You have to remember that some children may underperform after getting low grades thinking they could not do any better. The frustration can also result to reduced self-esteem, which may later cause more harm on their mental and emotional state. Hiring a tutor even when the kids are doing well may help avoid these cases and encourage them to further improve their study habits.
Many tutors can also steer your child towards advance topics. This may especially be useful to anticipate any difficulties later. Capable ones additionally give useful advice on essay topics to prepare teens in entering college. They can share perspectives on subjects worth studying to help students qualify for highly rated degrees.
Realities
Whether you're hiring an SAT tutor or others for your child, make sure to find one from reliable service providers. Search online for companies offering tutoring services in your area. Compare packages, schedules, and price offers to see which ones fit your budget and needs. Doing these steps may help your child as they study for a good future ahead.
Read more at http://ezinearticles.com/?Getting-Kids-Needed-Academic-Help&id=7175446
http://www.languagecorpsasia.com
Showing posts with label Children. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Children. Show all posts
Tuesday, July 24, 2012
Sunday, July 15, 2012
Two Children in Every Classroom Go Hungry
Two Children in Every Classroom Go Hungry as Neglect Takes its Toll.
Two children in every school class are going hungry because their parents fail to provide proper meals, according to new research.
An estimated one million children in the UK now live in homes without enough to eat, according to the study by the parenting website Netmums and the child welfare charity Kids Company.
The charity has reported a rise of 233 per cent in the last 12 months in children using its services for their only meal of the day. Those children have an average age of just 10.
Camila Batmanghelidjh, the founder of Kids Company, said: "We are seeing a lot more children struggling to get hold of food. We have kids who were so starving they stole frozen meat from a flat they visited and they ate it raw. We're seeing effectively responsible parents who are just not managing to have food in the house.
"Children don't have a public voice so they can't tell us. We have a collective responsibility to make sure every child has enough to eat.
This is something as a society we can solve if we want to and change children's future for the better."
Almost a quarter of parents (24 per cent) reported knowing of children in their local area who do not have enough to eat. Just under a third (29 per cent) said they had seen an increase in children going hungry over the last two years.
The problem is most severe in inner cities but children all around the UK are struggling to get enough to eat because of chaotic parenting and chronic neglect. Three in five (62 per cent) parents know local families where children are going hungry because their parents cannot afford to buy all the food they need, while more than half (56 per cent) are aware of parents whose abuse of drugs or alcohol means they are not feeding their children.
In some areas 88 per cent of head teachers surveyed said poor nutrition was having a damaging impact in their school. One in four inner city schools said three-quarters of all pupils were affected by lack of food.
The study also found that children from homes that were short of food were now missing almost half their weekly meals.
On average, children from such homes eat just 10 meals a week – rather than the 21 meals a week that they need to stay healthy.
The Netmums survey questioned 1,116 people between June 18 and 22.
Read more at http://www.independent.co.uk/news/education/education-news/two-children-in-every-classroom-go-hungry-as-neglect-takes-its-toll-7912679.html
http://www.languagecorpsasia.com
Two children in every school class are going hungry because their parents fail to provide proper meals, according to new research.
An estimated one million children in the UK now live in homes without enough to eat, according to the study by the parenting website Netmums and the child welfare charity Kids Company.
The charity has reported a rise of 233 per cent in the last 12 months in children using its services for their only meal of the day. Those children have an average age of just 10.
Camila Batmanghelidjh, the founder of Kids Company, said: "We are seeing a lot more children struggling to get hold of food. We have kids who were so starving they stole frozen meat from a flat they visited and they ate it raw. We're seeing effectively responsible parents who are just not managing to have food in the house.
"Children don't have a public voice so they can't tell us. We have a collective responsibility to make sure every child has enough to eat.
This is something as a society we can solve if we want to and change children's future for the better."
Almost a quarter of parents (24 per cent) reported knowing of children in their local area who do not have enough to eat. Just under a third (29 per cent) said they had seen an increase in children going hungry over the last two years.
The problem is most severe in inner cities but children all around the UK are struggling to get enough to eat because of chaotic parenting and chronic neglect. Three in five (62 per cent) parents know local families where children are going hungry because their parents cannot afford to buy all the food they need, while more than half (56 per cent) are aware of parents whose abuse of drugs or alcohol means they are not feeding their children.
In some areas 88 per cent of head teachers surveyed said poor nutrition was having a damaging impact in their school. One in four inner city schools said three-quarters of all pupils were affected by lack of food.
The study also found that children from homes that were short of food were now missing almost half their weekly meals.
On average, children from such homes eat just 10 meals a week – rather than the 21 meals a week that they need to stay healthy.
The Netmums survey questioned 1,116 people between June 18 and 22.
Read more at http://www.independent.co.uk/news/education/education-news/two-children-in-every-classroom-go-hungry-as-neglect-takes-its-toll-7912679.html
http://www.languagecorpsasia.com
Saturday, July 14, 2012
The Power of Routine PART 2- Classroom Management Tricks that Work with Young Learners
The Power of Routine Part 2: Classroom Management Tricks that Work with Young Learners.
Quiet, please
Reprimanding the students who misbehave is essential but it isn’t motivational. You may say one name a hundred times during the lesson and nothing happens. You do it automatically, the child may not even notice, there is no improvement and there are no consequences.
* I-know-when-to-be-quiet kite works on the basis of the rule Catch Them Being Good. Prepare with your students a colourful kite and write there “I know when to be quiet”. Make a long tail of that kite and decorate it with paper bows, each with a student’s name. During the lesson look for students whose behaviour is exceptional. Instead of just saying “well done” appreciate them by decorating their bow with a sticker or a marker stamp. Make sure students know the moment when they are rewarded. Such a kite helps you to monitor the overall class behaviour, it is also a visual sign for parents how their child behaves during English lessons.
* Wooden clothes pegs might help you to manage your class noise level. Prepare a large circle divided into three parts: green – “I am quiet”, yellow – “Please, be quiet”, red – “You are too loud” and hang it in a visible place in the classroom. Take a black marker and write students’ names on the clothes peg. Start by placing all the pegs on the green area and then during the lesson reprimand the noisy students and place their pegs first on yellow and then, if there is no improvement, on red parts of the circle. Write down all the names of the students whose pegs remain on the red area when the lesson finishes. Think of appropriate consequences if the situation repeats, for example a note to parents or a minus at the end of the notebook.
* Defeat the creature is a technique to make everyone quiet without saying “be quiet” all the time. On the board draw a monster or a strange creature resembling a caterpillar with a head and five body parts. Explain the rules: if the class work quietly, you will secretly erase one body part but if they are rowdy you will add a body part. If all the body parts are erased and only the body is left then the class can choose an activity they would like to do at the beginning of the next lesson.
Choosing students
I teach over 60 students aged 6 to 10. It’s a lot but I know there are teachers who teach many more. All these children want special treatment and appreciation for their efforts and my memory isn’t good enough for all that. Sometimes I need one student to help me distribute a copy of an exercise and they all look at me imploringly. I choose one person and half of them are always disappointed and ask “Can it be me next time?” and I just say “Yes”, and during the next lesson I am not able to remember who it should be. And nothing is worse than broken promises.
These are a few hints that may help you deal with that problem:
* Use counting rhymes such as
Eeny, meeny, miny, moe,
Catch a tiger by the toe.
If he hollers let him go,
Eeny, meeny, miny, moe
Bubblegum, bubblegum,
In a dish,
How many pieces,
Do you wish?
Mickey mouse built a house.
How many bricks did he use?
The child who you point when saying “use” or “wish” in the two last rhymes says a number. Then count in any direction or count every second person. This eliminates a situation when students try to calculate to be chosen.
* Prepare one set of popsicle sticks or wooden spatulas (used by doctors to examine the throat) for every class you teach. Write students’ names on them and place them in a plastic cup or a jar. Whenever you need one person just take a popsicle stick out of the cup. To make it fair set apart the popsicle sticks of children who have already been chosen. It gives everyone a chance to be picked by the teacher.
* Who will clean the board? Who will distribute photocopied exercises? Who will sit next to the teacher in the circle? Picking one student means hurting five others. Class jobs chart eliminates such dilemmas. Think of all the jobs that are important for you during the lesson such as:
- Circle Buddy (two students who sit next to the teacher in the circle)
- Team Leader (two or three students who will be the leaders of the teams in a game)
- Paper Passer (distributes the photocopies)
- Board Eraser (cleans the board)
- Assistant (does the job of someone who is absent)
- On Holiday (has no job)
It’s best to have as many jobs as there are students in the class. One job such as a Circle Buddy should be always done by two students. Prepare a big poster with little paper pockets for each job. Then cut out the outlines of people (you can find them on the Internet) and on each one write a student’s name. Place student’s templates in the job chart’s pockets and rotate them every week.
* Picking somebody from the reward board works both as a motivator for better behaviour and as a help in choosing students. Prepare a big sign “Reward board” and hang it always in the same part of the board. When you notice a student working well write their name there. You might add the same student’s name a few times during one lesson. Later when you need a student for a special task just pick one name from that list.
Homework checking
Checking homework is time consuming no matter if you read at home 25 essays or just have a quick look at students’ workbooks during the lesson. Nevertheless, I believe in assigning homework and even more in checking it.
* If I give homework it must be done. If they forget to do it they should show it to me during the next lesson. Simple? But not in practice. How to remember who hasn’t done it previously? Write notes and then lose them? To avoid problems with homework checking try this: Each student has their own name written on the popsicle stick (a different set than for choosing students, can be marked with a different colour) and there are three plastic cups labelled: Homework, I’ve done homework and I haven’t done homework. At the beginning all the names are in the “homework” cup, then students at the beginning of the lesson place their popsicle stick in the proper cup depending whether or not they have done their homework. Those who are absent are left in the “homework” cup. Start the next lesson with the outstanding homework and then proceed with the new homework checking. If someone hasn’t done the same homework twice write a short note for parents or information in their notebooks “Please do your homework!”.
* Squeezing between the desks to have a look at the workbooks is complicated and you lose eye contact with the whole class. Sit at the teacher’s desk and ask students to come to you, stand in a line and wait with their notebooks or workbooks. Call them row by row as it eliminates long queues. Plan what the rest should do at that time. They might open the book and read or look at a picture story, they might revise words in pairs by naming pictures which hang on the board, they might listen to a story or a song from the previous lesson.
Secret worker, secret walker, secret singer
To make sure everyone cares and does their best I choose a secret worker – one person for a week. I never tell my class who it is. I only say I will observe this student all the time and if s/he works well s/he will get a ‘certificate of secret worker’ at the end of the week. You can find great ready-made certificates such as award ribbons at http://www.123certificates.com/ or www.senteacher.org/wk/certificates.php.
I also use other secret helpers such as ‘secret singer’ – when we sing a song I pick one person and observe him/ her singing. I am also responsible for taking my students downstairs after the end of lessons. It’s extremely hard for me to manage them walking in pairs, quietly without jumping or pushing. So every time I do that I say that I choose a secret walker and will watch that person going downstairs. They never know who it is so they all try to walk slowly and quietly. At the end I reveal the secret walker who scores a plus for his/her team if s/he walked calmly.
Rewards
* Place an empty jar in a visible place in the classroom and have a bag full of glass marbles ready. When you see your students work hard place a marble in the jar. A full jar means a special prize for the whole class. My third graders are collecting marbles and when their jar is full we will make a film or a photo story with Lego bricks. They just can’t wait to do it!
* Instead of marbles you may fill up the jar with sweets. When it’s full you can eat them all together.
* At the beginning of the week write the word SURPRISE on the board if you see kids misbehave during the class, walk to the board and without a word erase the first letter. If their behaviour improves add the letter again. If the class has the whole word at the end of the week they get a surprise at the first lesson in the new week, for example we play a game. Similarly, write the letter B on the board and when they work well or are quiet add letters to make BRAVO. If they get the whole word on one lesson or in one week they can choose a game to play.
* Hang a one-meter long piece of string in the class. On one side of the string attach a picture of a hedgehog with a clothes peg. On the other side attach a blown-up red balloon and a picture of an apple. Inside the balloon place a surprise – a piece of paper with the class favourite activity. Lesson after lesson, if the students behave and work well, the hedgehog moves closer to the apple. When it finally reaches it, pop the balloon to see what prize is waiting for us.
* To appreciate students’ efforts to speak English during the lesson, prepare a picture of an apple tree full of apples. If you notice a student trying to ask you or a friend about something in English write their name on one of the apples. The moment the tree is full of apples with names organise an English party in the class with cake and quizzes. Don’t forget to praise the children whose names appear most often on the tree. You might even send a note to the parents appreciating their child’s efforts.
* If you notice a praiseworthy behaviour, write that student’s name on a small piece of paper and place it a box. At the end of the week pick one slip of paper from that box. The name of the chosen student will hang on the special place of board for the whole week.
Classroom management doesn’t have to be boring, it might be entertaining, motivating and enjoyable. But it requires time so be prepared that you won’t change everything in one lesson. You won’t also be able to improve your students’ behaviour if you fail to be consistent. However, if you devote some of your time, energy and patience to establishing routines miracles will happen!
Read more at http://promo.oupe.es/oxfordprimarymagazine/2012/05/01/the-power-of-routine-part-2-classroom-management-tricks-that-work-with-young-learners/
http://www.languagecorpsasia.com
Quiet, please
Reprimanding the students who misbehave is essential but it isn’t motivational. You may say one name a hundred times during the lesson and nothing happens. You do it automatically, the child may not even notice, there is no improvement and there are no consequences.
* I-know-when-to-be-quiet kite works on the basis of the rule Catch Them Being Good. Prepare with your students a colourful kite and write there “I know when to be quiet”. Make a long tail of that kite and decorate it with paper bows, each with a student’s name. During the lesson look for students whose behaviour is exceptional. Instead of just saying “well done” appreciate them by decorating their bow with a sticker or a marker stamp. Make sure students know the moment when they are rewarded. Such a kite helps you to monitor the overall class behaviour, it is also a visual sign for parents how their child behaves during English lessons.
* Wooden clothes pegs might help you to manage your class noise level. Prepare a large circle divided into three parts: green – “I am quiet”, yellow – “Please, be quiet”, red – “You are too loud” and hang it in a visible place in the classroom. Take a black marker and write students’ names on the clothes peg. Start by placing all the pegs on the green area and then during the lesson reprimand the noisy students and place their pegs first on yellow and then, if there is no improvement, on red parts of the circle. Write down all the names of the students whose pegs remain on the red area when the lesson finishes. Think of appropriate consequences if the situation repeats, for example a note to parents or a minus at the end of the notebook.
* Defeat the creature is a technique to make everyone quiet without saying “be quiet” all the time. On the board draw a monster or a strange creature resembling a caterpillar with a head and five body parts. Explain the rules: if the class work quietly, you will secretly erase one body part but if they are rowdy you will add a body part. If all the body parts are erased and only the body is left then the class can choose an activity they would like to do at the beginning of the next lesson.
Choosing students
I teach over 60 students aged 6 to 10. It’s a lot but I know there are teachers who teach many more. All these children want special treatment and appreciation for their efforts and my memory isn’t good enough for all that. Sometimes I need one student to help me distribute a copy of an exercise and they all look at me imploringly. I choose one person and half of them are always disappointed and ask “Can it be me next time?” and I just say “Yes”, and during the next lesson I am not able to remember who it should be. And nothing is worse than broken promises.
These are a few hints that may help you deal with that problem:
* Use counting rhymes such as
Eeny, meeny, miny, moe,
Catch a tiger by the toe.
If he hollers let him go,
Eeny, meeny, miny, moe
Bubblegum, bubblegum,
In a dish,
How many pieces,
Do you wish?
Mickey mouse built a house.
How many bricks did he use?
The child who you point when saying “use” or “wish” in the two last rhymes says a number. Then count in any direction or count every second person. This eliminates a situation when students try to calculate to be chosen.
* Prepare one set of popsicle sticks or wooden spatulas (used by doctors to examine the throat) for every class you teach. Write students’ names on them and place them in a plastic cup or a jar. Whenever you need one person just take a popsicle stick out of the cup. To make it fair set apart the popsicle sticks of children who have already been chosen. It gives everyone a chance to be picked by the teacher.
* Who will clean the board? Who will distribute photocopied exercises? Who will sit next to the teacher in the circle? Picking one student means hurting five others. Class jobs chart eliminates such dilemmas. Think of all the jobs that are important for you during the lesson such as:
- Circle Buddy (two students who sit next to the teacher in the circle)
- Team Leader (two or three students who will be the leaders of the teams in a game)
- Paper Passer (distributes the photocopies)
- Board Eraser (cleans the board)
- Assistant (does the job of someone who is absent)
- On Holiday (has no job)
It’s best to have as many jobs as there are students in the class. One job such as a Circle Buddy should be always done by two students. Prepare a big poster with little paper pockets for each job. Then cut out the outlines of people (you can find them on the Internet) and on each one write a student’s name. Place student’s templates in the job chart’s pockets and rotate them every week.
* Picking somebody from the reward board works both as a motivator for better behaviour and as a help in choosing students. Prepare a big sign “Reward board” and hang it always in the same part of the board. When you notice a student working well write their name there. You might add the same student’s name a few times during one lesson. Later when you need a student for a special task just pick one name from that list.
Homework checking
Checking homework is time consuming no matter if you read at home 25 essays or just have a quick look at students’ workbooks during the lesson. Nevertheless, I believe in assigning homework and even more in checking it.
* If I give homework it must be done. If they forget to do it they should show it to me during the next lesson. Simple? But not in practice. How to remember who hasn’t done it previously? Write notes and then lose them? To avoid problems with homework checking try this: Each student has their own name written on the popsicle stick (a different set than for choosing students, can be marked with a different colour) and there are three plastic cups labelled: Homework, I’ve done homework and I haven’t done homework. At the beginning all the names are in the “homework” cup, then students at the beginning of the lesson place their popsicle stick in the proper cup depending whether or not they have done their homework. Those who are absent are left in the “homework” cup. Start the next lesson with the outstanding homework and then proceed with the new homework checking. If someone hasn’t done the same homework twice write a short note for parents or information in their notebooks “Please do your homework!”.
* Squeezing between the desks to have a look at the workbooks is complicated and you lose eye contact with the whole class. Sit at the teacher’s desk and ask students to come to you, stand in a line and wait with their notebooks or workbooks. Call them row by row as it eliminates long queues. Plan what the rest should do at that time. They might open the book and read or look at a picture story, they might revise words in pairs by naming pictures which hang on the board, they might listen to a story or a song from the previous lesson.
Secret worker, secret walker, secret singer
To make sure everyone cares and does their best I choose a secret worker – one person for a week. I never tell my class who it is. I only say I will observe this student all the time and if s/he works well s/he will get a ‘certificate of secret worker’ at the end of the week. You can find great ready-made certificates such as award ribbons at http://www.123certificates.com/ or www.senteacher.org/wk/certificates.php.
I also use other secret helpers such as ‘secret singer’ – when we sing a song I pick one person and observe him/ her singing. I am also responsible for taking my students downstairs after the end of lessons. It’s extremely hard for me to manage them walking in pairs, quietly without jumping or pushing. So every time I do that I say that I choose a secret walker and will watch that person going downstairs. They never know who it is so they all try to walk slowly and quietly. At the end I reveal the secret walker who scores a plus for his/her team if s/he walked calmly.
Rewards
* Place an empty jar in a visible place in the classroom and have a bag full of glass marbles ready. When you see your students work hard place a marble in the jar. A full jar means a special prize for the whole class. My third graders are collecting marbles and when their jar is full we will make a film or a photo story with Lego bricks. They just can’t wait to do it!
* Instead of marbles you may fill up the jar with sweets. When it’s full you can eat them all together.
* At the beginning of the week write the word SURPRISE on the board if you see kids misbehave during the class, walk to the board and without a word erase the first letter. If their behaviour improves add the letter again. If the class has the whole word at the end of the week they get a surprise at the first lesson in the new week, for example we play a game. Similarly, write the letter B on the board and when they work well or are quiet add letters to make BRAVO. If they get the whole word on one lesson or in one week they can choose a game to play.
* Hang a one-meter long piece of string in the class. On one side of the string attach a picture of a hedgehog with a clothes peg. On the other side attach a blown-up red balloon and a picture of an apple. Inside the balloon place a surprise – a piece of paper with the class favourite activity. Lesson after lesson, if the students behave and work well, the hedgehog moves closer to the apple. When it finally reaches it, pop the balloon to see what prize is waiting for us.
* To appreciate students’ efforts to speak English during the lesson, prepare a picture of an apple tree full of apples. If you notice a student trying to ask you or a friend about something in English write their name on one of the apples. The moment the tree is full of apples with names organise an English party in the class with cake and quizzes. Don’t forget to praise the children whose names appear most often on the tree. You might even send a note to the parents appreciating their child’s efforts.
* If you notice a praiseworthy behaviour, write that student’s name on a small piece of paper and place it a box. At the end of the week pick one slip of paper from that box. The name of the chosen student will hang on the special place of board for the whole week.
Classroom management doesn’t have to be boring, it might be entertaining, motivating and enjoyable. But it requires time so be prepared that you won’t change everything in one lesson. You won’t also be able to improve your students’ behaviour if you fail to be consistent. However, if you devote some of your time, energy and patience to establishing routines miracles will happen!
Read more at http://promo.oupe.es/oxfordprimarymagazine/2012/05/01/the-power-of-routine-part-2-classroom-management-tricks-that-work-with-young-learners/
http://www.languagecorpsasia.com
Friday, July 13, 2012
The Power of Routine PART 1- Classroom Management Tricks that Work with Young Learners
The Power of Routine PART 1: Classroom Management Tricks that Work with Young Learners.
Have you ever thought about an ideal class of young learners? Let’s get carried away and imagine what it could be like…
* Students try to speak English during the lesson
* Their desks are clean and neatly organised
* They never get distracted by the surrounding objects or people: they don’t play with toys or stationeries, they don’t talk to their friends
* They pay attention and listen to instructions
* There are no fights or tears when you choose one person to answer the question
* They work quietly
* They remember to go to the toilet before the lesson starts
* They always do their homework and never forget to bring their books
* They are motivated and willing to participate
Teachers working with kindergarten or primary children often express their feeling of dissatisfaction. Although they are well-prepared and full of ideas their lessons fall into pieces. Why? Maybe because teaching children means facing a reality where they tend to behave just the opposite to the list presented above. Unsurprisingly, successful lessons with young learners require getting them into classroom routines first. Only then can you follow with “Hello, what’s your name?” So spend as much time as you need to drill the behaviour patterns to make the dream of an ideal class come true (or almost true).
The first steps of classroom management
Effective classroom management takes time and requires consistence. It’s a process which needs to be well-planned to bring expected, or nearly expected, results. So before you rush into the classroom with your new vision sit down, have a cup of tea/coffee, analyse, reflect and draw conclusions.
1. Think what bothers you – it might be the noise level, the lack of attention, uncooperative behaviour.
2. Picture in your mind what change in behaviour you expect. Visualise in detail how the class should behave or what your lesson and the classroom should look like.
3. Choose one of the methods and decide how to use it in your classroom. Buy necessary gadgets, prepare posters or pictures. Make it work like a system: think of the consequences for breaking the rules and rewards for following them.
4. Explain the rules in the class: make it clear what you expect, show what it means if you stick to or disregard the new rules. Then drill them, rehearse them, play with them.
5. Apply the new routines daily, with every minute of your lesson. Be prepared to sacrifice a lot of your valuable teaching time at first. Gradually you will notice the benefits they bring and how automatic they have become.
Classroom management with young learner can and even should be creative, colourful and interesting. The best way to motivate children to change their behaviour is to treat the routine as another fun activity. These are a few ideas how to deal with the most common classroom management problems.
Train Carriages Race
The easiest way to start fresh with classroom routines is to introduce a comprehensive system. A system which has clear rules, explains rewards and consequences and leaves no room for exceptions. It will help you to solve or minimalise all the problems at the same time.
Step one: before the lesson
Prepare a list of labelled laminated images representing the key issues in the classroom, for example:
1. quite
2. clean desk
3. listen to teacher
4. work hard
5. change places / tasks quickly
6. homework
7. helpful and friendly
Step two: during the first lesson
Divide the class into three – four teams according to the rows they sit in. Assign a colour for each team and give them a train carriage in their colour. You can use colouring pages from the Internet such as http://www.coloring-pages-book-for-kids-boys.com/train-coloring-sheet.html. Then ask students to cut it out and write their names on the carriage.
Step three: during every lesson
At the beginning of every lesson attach these laminated pictures to the board. Prepare chalk/markers in the colours representing each team. Whenever you see they work nicely put a plus in their colour next to appropriate picture. Make sure you give points for keeping desks clean, sitting on the carpet without elbowing and quarrels who will sit next to the teacher. If, on the other hand, you spot they are rowdy or break the rules don’t say anything, just walk towards the board with the chalk and wait a second or two. If it doesn’t help add minuses.
Step four: at the end of each lesson
Finish the lesson two minutes earlier and spend this time summing up their behaviour. Count up all the pluses and minuses. And then rearrange the train carriages on the classroom display. The team with most pluses is the first followed by carriages with fewer pluses.
Step five: benefits
The system will only work well if it is tempting enough. That is why I use an extended version. If a team gets five pluses during one lesson I make a decorative hole (with a special punch) in their train carriage. Even if they later lose their first position the special hole is there forever and anyone visiting the classroom can see how they work during the lessons. When the team has two holes on their carriage I write a short note of praise for parents. Collecting five holes means that the whole team can choose a fun activity for the last 15 minutes of the lesson.
Keeping desks clean
Keeping a clean desk in a primary school is a serious issue as children spend half of their day in the same classroom. So when an English lesson starts at quarter to twelve you can’t believe your eyes: open fold out pencil cases with all the precious things lying around in a nice disarrangement, half eaten sandwiches, bottles of juice, projects, pictures, enormous soft toys, collections of Pet Shop toys or Lego Star Wars bricks, books on all subjects. And English books are still in the school bag! The problem is not so much in having all those things on the desk but in children being constantly engaged in touching, playing with or showing them to friends. Start waging a war against cluttered desks and in a split second you will be pleasantly surprised that a few tricks may work like magic.
* The train system is a constant reminder to keep everything clean and organised. Check the desks a few times during the lesson and give pluses or minuses.
* Start a lesson with a clean-up song. It’s best to have something energetic and catchy. A good choice is Indiana Jones theme or 2010 FIFA World Cup anthem “Wavin flag” by K’naan. Play the song and it will be the signal to get organised, take out their English books, put unnecessary things away, place everything in one corner of the desk and close the pencil cases (in the first or second grade I strongly oppose to keeping pencil cases open because they are the temptation children can’t resist!).
* A clean desk fairy might unexpectedly pay a visit and reward the neatly organised desks with a sweet or her own picture (find suitable stickers or images on the Internet) which children stick at the end of their English notebook.
* Sometimes these are not the desks that are the problem but the general mess: school bags in the middle of the class, pieces of paper or tissues on the floor. Think of a place in the classroom which looks messy or disorganised, for example an apple core lying on the floor by the bin. Play the song and say “There is a “mystery spot” which needs to be clean again”. Children start cleaning and whoever finds the mystery spot gets a plus/point for his/her team.
Attention getters
I used to believe my voice is strong enough to make the whole class quiet. During the first lesson I realised that the more I raised my voice the louder they were. Actually it’s not the power of voice that counts (though it is helpful) but the routines which get their attention and make them concentrate.
Use a variety of objects which instantly make everyone quiet such as whistles, wooden castanets, bells, tambourines, rattles, maracas. Most of these can be bought at school supply stores or music shops and are relatively cheap. They are easily heard and you may create the whole system, for example one bell ring means look at me, listen and don’t move, two bell rings: close your books and organise your desks, three bell rings: sit on the carpet.
You may also use chants which are extremely useful and effective as they keep the kids engaged.
Teacher: Hands on top (children raise their hands and put them on their heads)Students: Everybody stopThis chant works like magic because putting hands up means that you can’t hold crayons, pens, pencils, toys etc at the same time.T: If you’re listening clap your handsSs: (clap their hands)T: If you’re listening touch your nose Ss (touch your nose)It’s not a chant but it works in the same stimulus – response way. You can clearly see when children join in with the actions. You can add more actions or repeat the previous ones until you are absolutely sure you have everyone’s attention. That activity works really well as children feel a natural desire to join in when something is happening.T: One, two, three eyes one meSs: One, two eyes on you
T: One, two
Ss: Eyes on you
T: Three, four
Ss: Talk no more
T: Ready to rock
Ss: Ready to roll
T: Hocus Pocus, everybody
Ss: Focus
T: Macaroni and Cheese, everybody
Ss: Freeze
You might try a technique introduced by Harry K. Wong called “Give me Five” where each finger represents a desired type of behaviour starting with the pinky: eyes on speaker, mouth quiet, body still, hands free, listen. Prepare a poster with a hand and pictures illustrating what type of behaviour each finger represents and hang in the classroom. Students might also trace the shape of their hands and decorate the fingers with pictures symbolising each rule. When you want to get students’ attention say Give me Five and go finger by finger saying One – eyes on speaker and so on. After every finger, make a short pause and check if students actually perform the action. When children are more familiar with the technique it’s enough to say Give me five 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 making sure they behave properly.
Read more at http://promo.oupe.es/oxfordprimarymagazine/2012/03/30/the-power-of-routine-part-1-classroom-management-tricks-that-work-with-young-learners/
http://www.languagecorpsasia.com
Have you ever thought about an ideal class of young learners? Let’s get carried away and imagine what it could be like…
* Students try to speak English during the lesson
* Their desks are clean and neatly organised
* They never get distracted by the surrounding objects or people: they don’t play with toys or stationeries, they don’t talk to their friends
* They pay attention and listen to instructions
* There are no fights or tears when you choose one person to answer the question
* They work quietly
* They remember to go to the toilet before the lesson starts
* They always do their homework and never forget to bring their books
* They are motivated and willing to participate
Teachers working with kindergarten or primary children often express their feeling of dissatisfaction. Although they are well-prepared and full of ideas their lessons fall into pieces. Why? Maybe because teaching children means facing a reality where they tend to behave just the opposite to the list presented above. Unsurprisingly, successful lessons with young learners require getting them into classroom routines first. Only then can you follow with “Hello, what’s your name?” So spend as much time as you need to drill the behaviour patterns to make the dream of an ideal class come true (or almost true).
The first steps of classroom management
Effective classroom management takes time and requires consistence. It’s a process which needs to be well-planned to bring expected, or nearly expected, results. So before you rush into the classroom with your new vision sit down, have a cup of tea/coffee, analyse, reflect and draw conclusions.
1. Think what bothers you – it might be the noise level, the lack of attention, uncooperative behaviour.
2. Picture in your mind what change in behaviour you expect. Visualise in detail how the class should behave or what your lesson and the classroom should look like.
3. Choose one of the methods and decide how to use it in your classroom. Buy necessary gadgets, prepare posters or pictures. Make it work like a system: think of the consequences for breaking the rules and rewards for following them.
4. Explain the rules in the class: make it clear what you expect, show what it means if you stick to or disregard the new rules. Then drill them, rehearse them, play with them.
5. Apply the new routines daily, with every minute of your lesson. Be prepared to sacrifice a lot of your valuable teaching time at first. Gradually you will notice the benefits they bring and how automatic they have become.
Classroom management with young learner can and even should be creative, colourful and interesting. The best way to motivate children to change their behaviour is to treat the routine as another fun activity. These are a few ideas how to deal with the most common classroom management problems.
Train Carriages Race
The easiest way to start fresh with classroom routines is to introduce a comprehensive system. A system which has clear rules, explains rewards and consequences and leaves no room for exceptions. It will help you to solve or minimalise all the problems at the same time.
Step one: before the lesson
Prepare a list of labelled laminated images representing the key issues in the classroom, for example:
1. quite
2. clean desk
3. listen to teacher
4. work hard
5. change places / tasks quickly
6. homework
7. helpful and friendly
Step two: during the first lesson
Divide the class into three – four teams according to the rows they sit in. Assign a colour for each team and give them a train carriage in their colour. You can use colouring pages from the Internet such as http://www.coloring-pages-book-for-kids-boys.com/train-coloring-sheet.html. Then ask students to cut it out and write their names on the carriage.
Step three: during every lesson
At the beginning of every lesson attach these laminated pictures to the board. Prepare chalk/markers in the colours representing each team. Whenever you see they work nicely put a plus in their colour next to appropriate picture. Make sure you give points for keeping desks clean, sitting on the carpet without elbowing and quarrels who will sit next to the teacher. If, on the other hand, you spot they are rowdy or break the rules don’t say anything, just walk towards the board with the chalk and wait a second or two. If it doesn’t help add minuses.
Step four: at the end of each lesson
Finish the lesson two minutes earlier and spend this time summing up their behaviour. Count up all the pluses and minuses. And then rearrange the train carriages on the classroom display. The team with most pluses is the first followed by carriages with fewer pluses.
Step five: benefits
The system will only work well if it is tempting enough. That is why I use an extended version. If a team gets five pluses during one lesson I make a decorative hole (with a special punch) in their train carriage. Even if they later lose their first position the special hole is there forever and anyone visiting the classroom can see how they work during the lessons. When the team has two holes on their carriage I write a short note of praise for parents. Collecting five holes means that the whole team can choose a fun activity for the last 15 minutes of the lesson.
Keeping desks clean
Keeping a clean desk in a primary school is a serious issue as children spend half of their day in the same classroom. So when an English lesson starts at quarter to twelve you can’t believe your eyes: open fold out pencil cases with all the precious things lying around in a nice disarrangement, half eaten sandwiches, bottles of juice, projects, pictures, enormous soft toys, collections of Pet Shop toys or Lego Star Wars bricks, books on all subjects. And English books are still in the school bag! The problem is not so much in having all those things on the desk but in children being constantly engaged in touching, playing with or showing them to friends. Start waging a war against cluttered desks and in a split second you will be pleasantly surprised that a few tricks may work like magic.
* The train system is a constant reminder to keep everything clean and organised. Check the desks a few times during the lesson and give pluses or minuses.
* Start a lesson with a clean-up song. It’s best to have something energetic and catchy. A good choice is Indiana Jones theme or 2010 FIFA World Cup anthem “Wavin flag” by K’naan. Play the song and it will be the signal to get organised, take out their English books, put unnecessary things away, place everything in one corner of the desk and close the pencil cases (in the first or second grade I strongly oppose to keeping pencil cases open because they are the temptation children can’t resist!).
* A clean desk fairy might unexpectedly pay a visit and reward the neatly organised desks with a sweet or her own picture (find suitable stickers or images on the Internet) which children stick at the end of their English notebook.
* Sometimes these are not the desks that are the problem but the general mess: school bags in the middle of the class, pieces of paper or tissues on the floor. Think of a place in the classroom which looks messy or disorganised, for example an apple core lying on the floor by the bin. Play the song and say “There is a “mystery spot” which needs to be clean again”. Children start cleaning and whoever finds the mystery spot gets a plus/point for his/her team.
Attention getters
I used to believe my voice is strong enough to make the whole class quiet. During the first lesson I realised that the more I raised my voice the louder they were. Actually it’s not the power of voice that counts (though it is helpful) but the routines which get their attention and make them concentrate.
Use a variety of objects which instantly make everyone quiet such as whistles, wooden castanets, bells, tambourines, rattles, maracas. Most of these can be bought at school supply stores or music shops and are relatively cheap. They are easily heard and you may create the whole system, for example one bell ring means look at me, listen and don’t move, two bell rings: close your books and organise your desks, three bell rings: sit on the carpet.
You may also use chants which are extremely useful and effective as they keep the kids engaged.
Teacher: Hands on top (children raise their hands and put them on their heads)Students: Everybody stopThis chant works like magic because putting hands up means that you can’t hold crayons, pens, pencils, toys etc at the same time.T: If you’re listening clap your handsSs: (clap their hands)T: If you’re listening touch your nose Ss (touch your nose)It’s not a chant but it works in the same stimulus – response way. You can clearly see when children join in with the actions. You can add more actions or repeat the previous ones until you are absolutely sure you have everyone’s attention. That activity works really well as children feel a natural desire to join in when something is happening.T: One, two, three eyes one meSs: One, two eyes on you
T: One, two
Ss: Eyes on you
T: Three, four
Ss: Talk no more
T: Ready to rock
Ss: Ready to roll
T: Hocus Pocus, everybody
Ss: Focus
T: Macaroni and Cheese, everybody
Ss: Freeze
You might try a technique introduced by Harry K. Wong called “Give me Five” where each finger represents a desired type of behaviour starting with the pinky: eyes on speaker, mouth quiet, body still, hands free, listen. Prepare a poster with a hand and pictures illustrating what type of behaviour each finger represents and hang in the classroom. Students might also trace the shape of their hands and decorate the fingers with pictures symbolising each rule. When you want to get students’ attention say Give me Five and go finger by finger saying One – eyes on speaker and so on. After every finger, make a short pause and check if students actually perform the action. When children are more familiar with the technique it’s enough to say Give me five 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 making sure they behave properly.
Read more at http://promo.oupe.es/oxfordprimarymagazine/2012/03/30/the-power-of-routine-part-1-classroom-management-tricks-that-work-with-young-learners/
http://www.languagecorpsasia.com
Thursday, June 21, 2012
How China is Winning the School Race
How China is Winning the School Race.
China's education performance - at least in cities such as Shanghai and Hong Kong - seems to be as spectacular as the country's breakneck economic expansion, outperforming many more advanced countries.
But what is behind this success?
Eyebrows were raised when the results of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development's international maths, science and reading tests - the Programme for International Student Assessment (Pisa) tests - were published.
Shanghai, taking part for the first time, came top in all three subjects.
Meanwhile, Hong Kong which was performing well in the last decade of British rule, has gone from good to great. In this global ranking, it came fourth in reading, second in maths and third in science.
These two Chinese cities - there was no national ranking for China - had outstripped leading education systems around the world.
The results for Beijing, not yet released, are not quite as spectacular. "But they are still high," says Andreas Schleicher, the OECD's head of education statistics and indicators.
Cheng Kai-Ming, Professor of Education at Hong Kong University, and closely involved in the Hong Kong and Shanghai tests, puts the results down to "a devotion to education not shared by some other cultures".
Competitive Exams
More than 80% of Shanghai's older secondary students attend after-school tutoring. They may spend another three to four hours each day on homework under close parental supervision.
Such diligence also reflects the ferociously competitive university entrance examinations.
"Not all Chinese parents are 'tiger mothers'," insists Prof Cheng. "But certainly they are devoted to their children's education."
Certainly both these open and outward-looking cities set great store by education, willing to adopt the best educational practices from around the world to ensure success. In Hong Kong, education accounts for more than one-fifth of entire government spending every year.
"Shanghai and Hong Kong are small education systems, virtually city states, with a concentration of ideas, manpower and resources for education," says Prof Cheng.
The innovation in these cities is not shared by other parts of China - not even Beijing, he says.
Under the banner "First class city, first class education", Shanghai set about systematically re-equipping classrooms, upgrading schools and revamping the curriculum in the last decade.
It got rid of the "key schools" system which concentrated resources only on top students and elite schools. Instead staff were trained in more interactive teaching methods and computers were brought in.
Showcase Schools
The city's schools are now a showcase for the country. About 80% of Shanghai school leavers go to university compared to an overall average of 24% in China.
Meanwhile, dynamic Hong Kong was forced into educational improvements as its industries moved to cheaper mainland Chinese areas in the 1990s. Its survival as a service and management hub for China depended on upgrading knowledge and skills.
In the last decade Hong Kong has concentrated on raising the bar and closing the gap or "lifting the floor" for all students, says a report by McKinsey management consultants.
The report, How the World's Most Improved School Systems Keep Getting Better, rated Hong Kong's education system among the best in the world.
But Hong Kong schools are undergoing another huge reform, lopping off the final year of secondary school and instead moving towards four-year university degrees from 2012 to align it with China.
Abandoning the old British model is a gamble and no-one knows how it will play out in terms of quality.
Top Teachers
However, Hong Kong believes it has laid solid, unshakeable foundations.
"In the late 1990s we moved to all-graduate [teachers]. If we want to have high achievement, subject expertise is very important for secondary schools," said Catherine KK Chan, deputy secretary for education in the Hong Kong government.
Hong Kong, like Singapore, now recruits teachers from the top 30% of the graduate cohort. By contrast, according to the OECD, the US recruits from the bottom third.
Shanghai recruits teachers more broadly. But it is already a select group.
Shanghai controls who lives and works in the city through China's notorious "houkou" or permanent residency system, allowing only the best and the brightest to become residents with access to jobs and schools.
"For over 50 years Shanghai has been accumulating talent, the cream of the cream in China. That gives it an incredible advantage," says Ruth Heyhoe, former head of the Hong Kong Institute of Education, now at the University of Toronto.
Migrant Children
The OECD's Mr Schleicher believes teacher training has played a part in Shanghai's success, with higher-performing teachers mentoring teachers from lower-performing schools, to raise standards across the board.
"What is striking about Shanghai is that there is quite a large socio-economic variability in the student population, but it does not play out in terms of its Pisa results," said Mr Schleicher.
"Some people have even suggested we did not include Shanghai's fairly large immigration population. Around 5.1% of the population are migrants from rural areas. Their children are definitely included," he said.
Last year Shanghai claimed to be the first Chinese city to provide free schooling for all migrant children. This year migrants outnumbered Shanghai-born children for the first time in state primary schools, making up 54% of the intake.
Prof Cheng agrees the Pisa results reflect a broad cross section. However the majority of migrant children are below 15 - the age at which the tests for international comparisons are taken. It is also the age of transfer to senior secondaries.
"If they were allowed to attend senior secondary schools in the city, the results would be very different," said Prof Cheng.
Even now "to some extent, where people are born largely determines their chances of educational success", said Gu Jun, a professor of sociology at Shanghai university.
Their societies are changing rapidly and for both Shanghai and Hong Kong, being top might prove to be easier than staying there.
Read more at http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-14812822
http://www.languagecorpsasia.com
China's education performance - at least in cities such as Shanghai and Hong Kong - seems to be as spectacular as the country's breakneck economic expansion, outperforming many more advanced countries.
But what is behind this success?
Eyebrows were raised when the results of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development's international maths, science and reading tests - the Programme for International Student Assessment (Pisa) tests - were published.
Shanghai, taking part for the first time, came top in all three subjects.
Meanwhile, Hong Kong which was performing well in the last decade of British rule, has gone from good to great. In this global ranking, it came fourth in reading, second in maths and third in science.
These two Chinese cities - there was no national ranking for China - had outstripped leading education systems around the world.
The results for Beijing, not yet released, are not quite as spectacular. "But they are still high," says Andreas Schleicher, the OECD's head of education statistics and indicators.
Cheng Kai-Ming, Professor of Education at Hong Kong University, and closely involved in the Hong Kong and Shanghai tests, puts the results down to "a devotion to education not shared by some other cultures".
Competitive Exams
More than 80% of Shanghai's older secondary students attend after-school tutoring. They may spend another three to four hours each day on homework under close parental supervision.
Such diligence also reflects the ferociously competitive university entrance examinations.
"Not all Chinese parents are 'tiger mothers'," insists Prof Cheng. "But certainly they are devoted to their children's education."
Certainly both these open and outward-looking cities set great store by education, willing to adopt the best educational practices from around the world to ensure success. In Hong Kong, education accounts for more than one-fifth of entire government spending every year.
"Shanghai and Hong Kong are small education systems, virtually city states, with a concentration of ideas, manpower and resources for education," says Prof Cheng.
The innovation in these cities is not shared by other parts of China - not even Beijing, he says.
Under the banner "First class city, first class education", Shanghai set about systematically re-equipping classrooms, upgrading schools and revamping the curriculum in the last decade.
It got rid of the "key schools" system which concentrated resources only on top students and elite schools. Instead staff were trained in more interactive teaching methods and computers were brought in.
Showcase Schools
The city's schools are now a showcase for the country. About 80% of Shanghai school leavers go to university compared to an overall average of 24% in China.
Meanwhile, dynamic Hong Kong was forced into educational improvements as its industries moved to cheaper mainland Chinese areas in the 1990s. Its survival as a service and management hub for China depended on upgrading knowledge and skills.
In the last decade Hong Kong has concentrated on raising the bar and closing the gap or "lifting the floor" for all students, says a report by McKinsey management consultants.
The report, How the World's Most Improved School Systems Keep Getting Better, rated Hong Kong's education system among the best in the world.
But Hong Kong schools are undergoing another huge reform, lopping off the final year of secondary school and instead moving towards four-year university degrees from 2012 to align it with China.
Abandoning the old British model is a gamble and no-one knows how it will play out in terms of quality.
Top Teachers
However, Hong Kong believes it has laid solid, unshakeable foundations.
"In the late 1990s we moved to all-graduate [teachers]. If we want to have high achievement, subject expertise is very important for secondary schools," said Catherine KK Chan, deputy secretary for education in the Hong Kong government.
Hong Kong, like Singapore, now recruits teachers from the top 30% of the graduate cohort. By contrast, according to the OECD, the US recruits from the bottom third.
Shanghai recruits teachers more broadly. But it is already a select group.
Shanghai controls who lives and works in the city through China's notorious "houkou" or permanent residency system, allowing only the best and the brightest to become residents with access to jobs and schools.
"For over 50 years Shanghai has been accumulating talent, the cream of the cream in China. That gives it an incredible advantage," says Ruth Heyhoe, former head of the Hong Kong Institute of Education, now at the University of Toronto.
Migrant Children
The OECD's Mr Schleicher believes teacher training has played a part in Shanghai's success, with higher-performing teachers mentoring teachers from lower-performing schools, to raise standards across the board.
"What is striking about Shanghai is that there is quite a large socio-economic variability in the student population, but it does not play out in terms of its Pisa results," said Mr Schleicher.
"Some people have even suggested we did not include Shanghai's fairly large immigration population. Around 5.1% of the population are migrants from rural areas. Their children are definitely included," he said.
Last year Shanghai claimed to be the first Chinese city to provide free schooling for all migrant children. This year migrants outnumbered Shanghai-born children for the first time in state primary schools, making up 54% of the intake.
Prof Cheng agrees the Pisa results reflect a broad cross section. However the majority of migrant children are below 15 - the age at which the tests for international comparisons are taken. It is also the age of transfer to senior secondaries.
"If they were allowed to attend senior secondary schools in the city, the results would be very different," said Prof Cheng.
Even now "to some extent, where people are born largely determines their chances of educational success", said Gu Jun, a professor of sociology at Shanghai university.
Their societies are changing rapidly and for both Shanghai and Hong Kong, being top might prove to be easier than staying there.
Read more at http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-14812822
http://www.languagecorpsasia.com
Saturday, May 19, 2012
Why Your Kid Is Not Creative
Why Your Kid Isn't Creative.
Most parents want their kids to be inventive and clever -- perhaps even the next Steve Jobs. But parents also want their kids to perform well by the standard measures of success. Prioritizing one of those pathways, it turns out, may close off the other.
In the new bestseller Imagine: How Creativity Works, journalist Jonah Lehrer synthesizes the latest scientific research into creativity and offers tips for how ordinary people can become more creative. It's a timely subject. Businesses increasingly value workers who can devise customized solutions to complex problems. And improvisation is a key skill for people who want a career of their own design, instead of one dictated by an increasingly cutthroat corporate sector.
The good news is that most people start out with healthy creative instincts, and virtually anybody can improve their creativity if they want to. The bad news is that our education system and social mores discourage creativity. "We're very good at killing creativity in kids," Lehrer told me in an interview. "We kill it with ruthless efficiency. The schools have twelve years to sculpt your mind, and they end up convincing kids that they're not creative."
There's nothing new about the way pragmatic concerns and conformity displace playfulness and originality as kids mature. "Every child is an artist," Pablo Picasso once said. "The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up."
What is new is the emphasis schools place on rote learning, memorization, and especially standardized tests, which generate a kind of assembly-line uniformity to what kids learn in school. Creativity, by contrast, requires qualities that schools tend to discourage, such as daydreaming, uninhibited curiosity, hands-on experimentation and an unstructured, permissive environment.
Lehrer profiles one highly successful school, the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts, where there are no textbooks or lectures, and kids spend most of their time working with music, art, theater or whatever their vocation is. Most schools don't operate that way, of course. It's also worth pointing out that many parents would be uncomfortable sending their kids to such an unorthodox place.
Lehrer also highlights one important theme I came across while researching my own book, Rebounders: How Winners Pivot from Setback to Success: the importance of letting kids fail. He describes a phenomenon known as the "fourth-grade slump," a point at which students suddenly start to censor their creative impulses. What happens is kids become more self-aware as they mature, and more eager to conform to social norms. They'd rather avoid something difficult than risk the embarrassment that might come from failing at it. They start to regard improvising as risky, suppressing their creativity. "This is why it's so important to practice letting ourselves go," Lehrer writes.
There are solutions, of course. Many parents instinctively want to "fix" the schools so that they do everything well: Teach the skills that society values most, while also teaching the creativity that will let kids stand out as adults. But that's not realistic. Most schools are appendages of a bureaucracy that serves many interests. They're capable of doing some things competently, but expecting excellence for all is a stretch.
This might be one job parents should handle themselves, instead of outsourcing it to the schools. We can start by tolerating, even encouraging, the kind of daydreaming and intellectual meandering that we too readily label attention-deficit disorder, as if it's a defect. Sometimes it's not. Parents who don't feel they're personally creative can find creative mentors for their kids outside the schools - -writers or artists or designers who seem to have an inventive knack. And exposing kids to many different things is crucially important, since creativity often happens when people connect seemingly disparate ideas, the way the Wright Brothers got the idea for an airplane by wondering if a bicycle could fly.
Lehrer invokes a maxim popularized by psychologist Angela Duckworth: Choose easy, work hard. That means giving kids the freedom to discover something they truly love, while making sure they know it takes diligence and grit to succeed at their passion. "It's going to involve failure," says Lehrer. "You have to be able to put in the work." The rewards may be well worth it.
Read more at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rick-newman/creativity_b_1451850.html?ref=education&ir=Education
http://www.languagecorpsasia.com
Most parents want their kids to be inventive and clever -- perhaps even the next Steve Jobs. But parents also want their kids to perform well by the standard measures of success. Prioritizing one of those pathways, it turns out, may close off the other.
In the new bestseller Imagine: How Creativity Works, journalist Jonah Lehrer synthesizes the latest scientific research into creativity and offers tips for how ordinary people can become more creative. It's a timely subject. Businesses increasingly value workers who can devise customized solutions to complex problems. And improvisation is a key skill for people who want a career of their own design, instead of one dictated by an increasingly cutthroat corporate sector.
The good news is that most people start out with healthy creative instincts, and virtually anybody can improve their creativity if they want to. The bad news is that our education system and social mores discourage creativity. "We're very good at killing creativity in kids," Lehrer told me in an interview. "We kill it with ruthless efficiency. The schools have twelve years to sculpt your mind, and they end up convincing kids that they're not creative."
There's nothing new about the way pragmatic concerns and conformity displace playfulness and originality as kids mature. "Every child is an artist," Pablo Picasso once said. "The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up."
What is new is the emphasis schools place on rote learning, memorization, and especially standardized tests, which generate a kind of assembly-line uniformity to what kids learn in school. Creativity, by contrast, requires qualities that schools tend to discourage, such as daydreaming, uninhibited curiosity, hands-on experimentation and an unstructured, permissive environment.
Lehrer profiles one highly successful school, the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts, where there are no textbooks or lectures, and kids spend most of their time working with music, art, theater or whatever their vocation is. Most schools don't operate that way, of course. It's also worth pointing out that many parents would be uncomfortable sending their kids to such an unorthodox place.
Lehrer also highlights one important theme I came across while researching my own book, Rebounders: How Winners Pivot from Setback to Success: the importance of letting kids fail. He describes a phenomenon known as the "fourth-grade slump," a point at which students suddenly start to censor their creative impulses. What happens is kids become more self-aware as they mature, and more eager to conform to social norms. They'd rather avoid something difficult than risk the embarrassment that might come from failing at it. They start to regard improvising as risky, suppressing their creativity. "This is why it's so important to practice letting ourselves go," Lehrer writes.
There are solutions, of course. Many parents instinctively want to "fix" the schools so that they do everything well: Teach the skills that society values most, while also teaching the creativity that will let kids stand out as adults. But that's not realistic. Most schools are appendages of a bureaucracy that serves many interests. They're capable of doing some things competently, but expecting excellence for all is a stretch.
This might be one job parents should handle themselves, instead of outsourcing it to the schools. We can start by tolerating, even encouraging, the kind of daydreaming and intellectual meandering that we too readily label attention-deficit disorder, as if it's a defect. Sometimes it's not. Parents who don't feel they're personally creative can find creative mentors for their kids outside the schools - -writers or artists or designers who seem to have an inventive knack. And exposing kids to many different things is crucially important, since creativity often happens when people connect seemingly disparate ideas, the way the Wright Brothers got the idea for an airplane by wondering if a bicycle could fly.
Lehrer invokes a maxim popularized by psychologist Angela Duckworth: Choose easy, work hard. That means giving kids the freedom to discover something they truly love, while making sure they know it takes diligence and grit to succeed at their passion. "It's going to involve failure," says Lehrer. "You have to be able to put in the work." The rewards may be well worth it.
Read more at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rick-newman/creativity_b_1451850.html?ref=education&ir=Education
http://www.languagecorpsasia.com
Friday, April 20, 2012
Dance Training Helps Rural Chinese Children's Development
Dance training helps rural Chinese children's development.
Rural students rarely get access to dance training, due to lack of teachers and facilities. But in a rural school in Tongling County of Anhui Province, children are chasing their dancing dream thanks to a "Rural Dance Classroom" recently set up there. It is hoped that dance training can give the rural children a chance for greater overall development.
The Shun'an Town Central Elementary School of Tongling County is one of several rural schools in Anhui province that have created a "dance training classroom". Students here are rehearsing their newly learned routine, a dance piece with the theme of the Chinese classic "Three Character Primer". Yin Zi, whose parents are working away from home, hopes she can give them a surprise when they come back.
Yin Zi, student, said, "I will study hard, and when my parents come back home I can present my beautiful dance to them."
Like Yin, all the students here are experiencing the enjoyment of dance.
Cui Kelin, student, said, "I like to dance. And I will learn dance here as long as I can."
This school is among the first batch of Chinese rural schools to set up the "dance training classroom", a project aimed at improving art education among rural students. The China Dancers' Association and the Literature and Arts Association of Anhui province along with the local government have joined forces to put the initiative into practice.
Jiang Jianxin, principal of Shun'an Town Elementary School, said, "We will use this opportunity to improve our facilities and train our teachers, to give our students a better environment to develop comprehensively."
The Dance Training Classroom has also been set up in two mountainous villages in Tongling County.
Wu Xiaohe, director of Dancers Assoc. of Tongling, said, "We will train more rural teachers to let more rural students receive dance training."
Initiated by the China Dancers' Association, the rural dance training project also includes 15 dance pieces that are suitable to children's physical and psychological traits.
Read more at http://www.china.org.cn/video/2012-03/16/content_24915490.htm
http://www.languagecorpsasia.com
Rural students rarely get access to dance training, due to lack of teachers and facilities. But in a rural school in Tongling County of Anhui Province, children are chasing their dancing dream thanks to a "Rural Dance Classroom" recently set up there. It is hoped that dance training can give the rural children a chance for greater overall development.
The Shun'an Town Central Elementary School of Tongling County is one of several rural schools in Anhui province that have created a "dance training classroom". Students here are rehearsing their newly learned routine, a dance piece with the theme of the Chinese classic "Three Character Primer". Yin Zi, whose parents are working away from home, hopes she can give them a surprise when they come back.
Yin Zi, student, said, "I will study hard, and when my parents come back home I can present my beautiful dance to them."
Like Yin, all the students here are experiencing the enjoyment of dance.
Cui Kelin, student, said, "I like to dance. And I will learn dance here as long as I can."
This school is among the first batch of Chinese rural schools to set up the "dance training classroom", a project aimed at improving art education among rural students. The China Dancers' Association and the Literature and Arts Association of Anhui province along with the local government have joined forces to put the initiative into practice.
Jiang Jianxin, principal of Shun'an Town Elementary School, said, "We will use this opportunity to improve our facilities and train our teachers, to give our students a better environment to develop comprehensively."
The Dance Training Classroom has also been set up in two mountainous villages in Tongling County.
Wu Xiaohe, director of Dancers Assoc. of Tongling, said, "We will train more rural teachers to let more rural students receive dance training."
Initiated by the China Dancers' Association, the rural dance training project also includes 15 dance pieces that are suitable to children's physical and psychological traits.
Read more at http://www.china.org.cn/video/2012-03/16/content_24915490.htm
http://www.languagecorpsasia.com
Thursday, March 22, 2012
Children of China's Future Part II
Children of China's Future – Part II
Aging population and poverty require stronger investment in China’s rural youth.
DINGXI PREFECTURE: Wang Hongli, 8 years old, lives in a remote rural village on the Loess Plateau in one of China’s poorest and most agricultural provinces, Gansu. His prospects for living the good life are as bleak as the landscape. He is not on track to become part of China’s emerging middle class, the free-spending, computer-savvy, person-of-the-world often featured in the western media.
Hongli is a pseudonym. His parents work in a faraway industrial zone, coming home for only three weeks at Chinese New Year. His grandmother takes care of him and his siblings on the weekends, and during the week he lives in a dorm, three to a bed with 36 other students in an unheated room 4 by 4 meters.
Hongli suffers from iron-deficient anemia, but neither his family nor his teacher knows he is sick. Even if his anemia is discovered and treated by the researchers who have documented 30 percent anemia among children in poor rural areas, it likely will recur after he finishes the study, with furnished dietary supplements. Despite educational pamphlets, he’ll likely revert to a diet of staple grains and bits of pickled vegetables.
Unsurprisingly, Hongli’s grades are not good. In China’s competitive school system, he has only a slight chance of attending high school, much less college. In China’s future high-wage economy, all Hongli can hope for is a menial job in the provincial capital, Lanzhou, or as a temporary migrant elsewhere. Without urban permanent residency, hukou, he will have limited access to urban social services. He may suffer chronic unemployment, or resort to the gray economy or crime. He also may never marry – one of the millions of “forced bachelors” created by China’s large gender imbalance.
Hongli is not alone. In fact, he’s one of 50 million school-age youth in China’s vast poor rural hinterlands. Recent studies by Stanford and Chinese collaborators show that 39 percent of fourth-grade students in Shaanxi Province are anemic, with similarly high rates elsewhere in the northwest; up to 40 percent of rural children in the poor southwest regions, e.g., Guizhou, are infected with intestinal worms. Millions of poor rural students throughout China are nearsighted, but do not wear glasses.
Because China’s urbanites have fewer children, poor rural kids like Hongli represent almost a third of China’s school-aged children, a large share of the future labor force. These young people must be healthy, educated and productive if China is to have any chance of increasing labor productivity to offset the shrinking size of its aging workforce.
Many observers presume that China’s growth will continue unabated, drawing upon a vast reservoir of rural labor to staff manufacturing plants for the world. In fact, to a considerable extent, China’s rural areas have already been emptied out, leaving many villages with only the old and the very young. The growth of wages for unskilled workers exceeds GDP growth.
Better pay should be good news for poverty alleviation. However, rising wages push up the opportunity cost of staying in school – especially since high school fees, even at rural public schools, are among the highest in the world.
It’s myopic to allow rural students to drop out of junior high and high school – mitigating the current labor shortage, but mortgaging their futures. Recent studies demonstrate that eliminating high school tuition – or reducing the financial burden on poor households – improves junior high achievement and significantly increases continuation on to high school. Yet unlike many other developing countries, China does not use incentives to keep children in school, such as conditional cash transfers. The public health and educational bureaucracies also do not proactively cooperate to remedy nutritional and medical problems – including mental health – that school-based interventions could address cost effectively.
The educational system, based on rote memory and drill, doesn’t teach children how to learn. The vocational education system is ineffective. Instead, China’s schools tend to focus resources on elite students. Tracking starts early, and test scores are often the sole criterion for success. A recent comparative study documents that China’s digital divide, with lower access to computers in poor rural areas, is among the widest in the world.
China’s government is increasing expenditures for school facilities and raising teacher salaries. However, these steps are far from adequate. During South Korea’s high growth, almost all Korean students finished high school. Today, less than half of youth in China’s poor rural areas go to academic high school, and the percent going to college remains in the single digits.
Greater investment in public health and education for the young people in China’s poor rural areas is urgent. If the government waits 10 years, it may be too late to avert risks for China’s stability and sustained economic growth.
Surely China could easily address this problem? A third of Chinese were illiterate in the early 1960s; now, fewer than 5 percent are. By 2010, about 120 million Chinese had completed a college degree. Chinese also enjoy a relatively long life expectancy compared to India and many other developing countries, and basic health insurance coverage is almost universal.
But the pace of change and citizens’ expectations are higher as well. Most Chinese assume that basic nutritional problems and intestinal worms were eradicated in the Mao era. China’s mortality halved in the 1950s; fertility halved in the 1970s. As a result, China will get old before it gets rich. Population aging, rapid urbanization and a large gender imbalance represent intertwined demographic challenges to social and economic governance. The policy options are complicated, the constraints significant, the risks of missteps real and ever-present.
Timely policy response is complicated by competition for resources – pensions, long-term care, medical care for the elderly and more – as well as significant governance challenges arising from a countryside drained of young people. The well-intentioned programs for what government regards a “harmonious society” create large unfunded mandates for local authorities. Attempts to relocate rural residents to new, denser communities provoke anger at being uprooted and skepticism that local authorities simply want to expropriate land for development.
Millions of migrant workers – like Wang Hongli’s parents – return to their rural homes during economic downturns. Urbanization weakens this capacity to absorb future economic fluctuations. Government efforts at “social management” – strengthening regulatory control of informal social groups and strategies for diffusing social tensions – expand the bureaucratic state, a central target of popular discontent.
Premier Wen Jiabao’s announcement of a 7.5 percent growth target – the lowest in two decades – has been expected. Future economic growth will moderate partly because of demographics, but mostly because productivity gains slow as an economy runs out of surplus rural labor and converges on the technological frontier. Costly upgrading of industrial structure will squeeze the government’s ability to deliver on its promise of a better future for all, stoking social tensions.
China’s stability and prosperity, and that of the region and the globe, depends on how well today’s youth master the knowledge and skills that enable them to thrive in the technology-driven globalized world of the mid-21st century. Resilient public and private sector leaders of the future must be able to think creatively. Therefore, China’s government should respond to population aging by acting now to invest more in the health and education of youth, especially the rural poor.
Karen Eggleston, Jean Oi, Scott Rozelle, Ang Sun, Xueguang Zhou
YaleGlobal, 14 March 2012
2012 Yale Center for the Study of Globalization
Read more at http://yaleglobal.yale.edu/content/children-chinas-future-part-ii
http://www.languagecorpsasia.com
Aging population and poverty require stronger investment in China’s rural youth.
DINGXI PREFECTURE: Wang Hongli, 8 years old, lives in a remote rural village on the Loess Plateau in one of China’s poorest and most agricultural provinces, Gansu. His prospects for living the good life are as bleak as the landscape. He is not on track to become part of China’s emerging middle class, the free-spending, computer-savvy, person-of-the-world often featured in the western media.
Hongli is a pseudonym. His parents work in a faraway industrial zone, coming home for only three weeks at Chinese New Year. His grandmother takes care of him and his siblings on the weekends, and during the week he lives in a dorm, three to a bed with 36 other students in an unheated room 4 by 4 meters.
Hongli suffers from iron-deficient anemia, but neither his family nor his teacher knows he is sick. Even if his anemia is discovered and treated by the researchers who have documented 30 percent anemia among children in poor rural areas, it likely will recur after he finishes the study, with furnished dietary supplements. Despite educational pamphlets, he’ll likely revert to a diet of staple grains and bits of pickled vegetables.
Unsurprisingly, Hongli’s grades are not good. In China’s competitive school system, he has only a slight chance of attending high school, much less college. In China’s future high-wage economy, all Hongli can hope for is a menial job in the provincial capital, Lanzhou, or as a temporary migrant elsewhere. Without urban permanent residency, hukou, he will have limited access to urban social services. He may suffer chronic unemployment, or resort to the gray economy or crime. He also may never marry – one of the millions of “forced bachelors” created by China’s large gender imbalance.
Hongli is not alone. In fact, he’s one of 50 million school-age youth in China’s vast poor rural hinterlands. Recent studies by Stanford and Chinese collaborators show that 39 percent of fourth-grade students in Shaanxi Province are anemic, with similarly high rates elsewhere in the northwest; up to 40 percent of rural children in the poor southwest regions, e.g., Guizhou, are infected with intestinal worms. Millions of poor rural students throughout China are nearsighted, but do not wear glasses.
Because China’s urbanites have fewer children, poor rural kids like Hongli represent almost a third of China’s school-aged children, a large share of the future labor force. These young people must be healthy, educated and productive if China is to have any chance of increasing labor productivity to offset the shrinking size of its aging workforce.
Many observers presume that China’s growth will continue unabated, drawing upon a vast reservoir of rural labor to staff manufacturing plants for the world. In fact, to a considerable extent, China’s rural areas have already been emptied out, leaving many villages with only the old and the very young. The growth of wages for unskilled workers exceeds GDP growth.
Better pay should be good news for poverty alleviation. However, rising wages push up the opportunity cost of staying in school – especially since high school fees, even at rural public schools, are among the highest in the world.
It’s myopic to allow rural students to drop out of junior high and high school – mitigating the current labor shortage, but mortgaging their futures. Recent studies demonstrate that eliminating high school tuition – or reducing the financial burden on poor households – improves junior high achievement and significantly increases continuation on to high school. Yet unlike many other developing countries, China does not use incentives to keep children in school, such as conditional cash transfers. The public health and educational bureaucracies also do not proactively cooperate to remedy nutritional and medical problems – including mental health – that school-based interventions could address cost effectively.
The educational system, based on rote memory and drill, doesn’t teach children how to learn. The vocational education system is ineffective. Instead, China’s schools tend to focus resources on elite students. Tracking starts early, and test scores are often the sole criterion for success. A recent comparative study documents that China’s digital divide, with lower access to computers in poor rural areas, is among the widest in the world.
China’s government is increasing expenditures for school facilities and raising teacher salaries. However, these steps are far from adequate. During South Korea’s high growth, almost all Korean students finished high school. Today, less than half of youth in China’s poor rural areas go to academic high school, and the percent going to college remains in the single digits.
Greater investment in public health and education for the young people in China’s poor rural areas is urgent. If the government waits 10 years, it may be too late to avert risks for China’s stability and sustained economic growth.
Surely China could easily address this problem? A third of Chinese were illiterate in the early 1960s; now, fewer than 5 percent are. By 2010, about 120 million Chinese had completed a college degree. Chinese also enjoy a relatively long life expectancy compared to India and many other developing countries, and basic health insurance coverage is almost universal.
But the pace of change and citizens’ expectations are higher as well. Most Chinese assume that basic nutritional problems and intestinal worms were eradicated in the Mao era. China’s mortality halved in the 1950s; fertility halved in the 1970s. As a result, China will get old before it gets rich. Population aging, rapid urbanization and a large gender imbalance represent intertwined demographic challenges to social and economic governance. The policy options are complicated, the constraints significant, the risks of missteps real and ever-present.
Timely policy response is complicated by competition for resources – pensions, long-term care, medical care for the elderly and more – as well as significant governance challenges arising from a countryside drained of young people. The well-intentioned programs for what government regards a “harmonious society” create large unfunded mandates for local authorities. Attempts to relocate rural residents to new, denser communities provoke anger at being uprooted and skepticism that local authorities simply want to expropriate land for development.
Millions of migrant workers – like Wang Hongli’s parents – return to their rural homes during economic downturns. Urbanization weakens this capacity to absorb future economic fluctuations. Government efforts at “social management” – strengthening regulatory control of informal social groups and strategies for diffusing social tensions – expand the bureaucratic state, a central target of popular discontent.
Premier Wen Jiabao’s announcement of a 7.5 percent growth target – the lowest in two decades – has been expected. Future economic growth will moderate partly because of demographics, but mostly because productivity gains slow as an economy runs out of surplus rural labor and converges on the technological frontier. Costly upgrading of industrial structure will squeeze the government’s ability to deliver on its promise of a better future for all, stoking social tensions.
China’s stability and prosperity, and that of the region and the globe, depends on how well today’s youth master the knowledge and skills that enable them to thrive in the technology-driven globalized world of the mid-21st century. Resilient public and private sector leaders of the future must be able to think creatively. Therefore, China’s government should respond to population aging by acting now to invest more in the health and education of youth, especially the rural poor.
Karen Eggleston, Jean Oi, Scott Rozelle, Ang Sun, Xueguang Zhou
YaleGlobal, 14 March 2012
2012 Yale Center for the Study of Globalization
Read more at http://yaleglobal.yale.edu/content/children-chinas-future-part-ii
http://www.languagecorpsasia.com
Wednesday, March 21, 2012
Children of China's Future Part I
Children of China's Future – Part I
On tour in Europe, China’s privileged children reflect inequality and self-confidence.
BRUSSELS: On a blustery February evening in the Tyrolean town of Kufstein, pandemonium reigned inside the usually lugubrious Thaler Hotel. Gaggles of Chinese children swarmed the corridors. “Hi!” one called out. My Chinese was rusty, but adequate. “Ni hao,” I replied. “Have you had a fun day?” Nonplussed, the boy fell momentarily silent.
“Are you Chinese?” asked another bespectacled child with braces flashing silver across his teeth. “Do I look Chinese?” I countered.
“You speak Chinese,” he parried. A girl with bobbed hair and grownup expression sighed. “Don’t you know?” she said with a frown. “These days it’s normal for foreigners to speak Chinese. It’s no big deal.”
And it’s also increasingly normal to see hoards of Chinese children hitting Europe’s ski slopes, shopping malls and chocolate shops. If it’s school-vacation holiday in China, then it’s study-tour time in Europe.
I joined one of six groups of children visiting Europe for the Chinese New Year break in late January, a trip arranged by a German company, ECS Tours. Run by a young couple – German lawyer Rudolf Reiet and Xing Li – ECS is a new player in the lucrative market for Chinese study groups in Europe.
In a country where many workers earn an annual income of around $1,500, parents paid up to RMB 60,000, or US$9,500, to send their children on whirlwind tours of the continent’s sights. In addition to holiday photos, the children were expected to bring home skills like eating with a fork and knife and learning the appropriate time to clap at a classical music concert.
Chinese tourists, some 3 million of whom visited Western Europe in 2010, have already remade the traditional European Grand Tour according to their own tastes and consumer culture. Typical stops include Paris for romance and Louis Vuitton; Switzerland for mountains and chocolates; German towns like Trier, the birthplace of Karl Marx; and Metzingen, home to several factory outlets and the headquarters of Hugo Boss.
Chinese travelers have also emerged as the travel industry’s knights in shining armor, riding to the rescue of Europe’s industries suffering the effects of stagnant economic growth. In 2011, Chinese travelers accounted for 62 percent of Europe’s luxury goods sales according to one estimate.
The 35 children in my group were from a primary School in Chongqing and receive a truncated version of the new Chinese Grand Tour with a few days each in Germany, Switzerland and Austria. Talking with them offered a glimpse into the attitudes and aspirations of the country’s future workforce. These children were born in 2000 amid anticipation of China’s imminent rise to superpowerdom, an idea that would have seemed improbable even a decade earlier.
Collectively, the children provide a snapshot of China’s new elite. Many are sons and daughters of officials of China’s ruling Communist Party. “They talk just like little lingdao [leaders], ready to launch into a politically correct speech at the asking,” Reiet said. Others are children of entrepreneurs. Reiet smiled, recalling a child who had brought along packets of instant noodles to sell to classmates bored with European fare at the inflated price of €5 each.
Over dinner, the conversation at our table was about money. One jolly, plump 11-year-old grinned and pointed to her friend: “Do you know how much cash her father gave her for this trip?”
“Stop it, stop it!” gasped Xue, trying to put a hand over her friend’s mouth.
“€4000!” the girl exclaimed, undeterred. “Can you believe it?” Fan then happily explained that her father had given her €2,000. The children were comfortable talking about money, but ask a question about politics, even something as basic as whether their parents were party members, and they immediately went quiet.
Another girl at our table had looked on, disapproving of the conversation, and when others demanded to know how much spending money she carried, she refused to tell. I asked what her father did. Reluctant to answer, she finally confided that he was a bank executive. One girl let out a whoop. “You must be really rolling in it!” she laughed.
China’s per capita GDP might still be about a sixth that of the United States, but these are China’s children of privilege. The West would not automatically associate the professions of some parents– including policemen, municipal government officials, army officers and investment bureau bureaucrats – with wealth.
Despite decades of economic reform, China’s state-led capitalism has created a murky, often corrupt world, where the line between government officials and entrepreneurs is blurred. Local officials still have power to dispense patronage and lubricate business deals.
The result is scenes as when the scrawny 11-year-old daughter of a police officer waved a platinum credit card a Swarovski Crystal shop. She had picked out a crystal-encrusted watch that cost €2,800 and explained she was buying it for an auntie. Over the course of the next hour she spent a total of €4,200 on gifts for her family.
Another son of a policeman joined children snapping up crystals like candy and held up his crystal dog. “You know what I like about this?” he said. “It’s not ‘made in China!’”
Half the staff at the Swarovski shop were Chinese, and some of the local Austrian clerks had even learned basic Mandarin. Most of the children took this in stride. And for children of an emerging superpower, first impressions of Europe only confirmed their childlike sense of cultural superiority. There was a distinct touch of condescension when I asked the children how they had enjoyed Europe thus far.
“The hotel rooms are rather small here,” said the bank executive’s daughter. Another 11-year-old girl was critical of the traffic. “So many rules to follow on the road. I’m not sure who gets right of way. It must be scary to drive here!”
Another girl, whose father is an engineer and mother a housewife, dissed the breakfasts. “All that ham,” she muttered darkly, missing the typical morning fare for Chinese, hot buns stuffed with pork or a rich bowl of congee, rice porridge. “But,” she continued, “it’s a lot more peaceful out here than in China. Quiet.”
I thought about the children’s hometown, Chongqing, a municipality in China’s southwest and one of the largest urban centers in the world – home to 32 million people, four times that of Austria’s population.
What I remembered most from my own visit to Chongqing in 2008, was the ceaseless aural assault: churning cement mixers, sizzling spicy noodles at roadside stands, spluttering exhaust pipes and heavy thudding of wrecking balls. Everywhere were sounds of trade and movement, the old giving way to the new.
“You mean it’s a lot more boring out here,” giggled another girl. Both grinned in agreement.
For a vast, emerging country like China, defined by continuous change and a headlong rush towards trade and infrastructure development, Old World Europe could understandably appear a tad dull. And while the children did accomplish their mission of learning proper use of fork and knife and filling cameras with pretty pictures, they took away more – a conviction that China is more developed and urban than Europe, though Europe is cleaner, quieter, with plenty of expensive crystals and watches to buy. And yes, foreigners speaking Chinese is normal.
Pallavi Aiyar
YaleGlobal, 12 March 2012
2012 Yale Center for the Study of Globalization
Read more at http://yaleglobal.yale.edu/content/children-chinas-future-part-i
http://www.languagecorpsasia.com
On tour in Europe, China’s privileged children reflect inequality and self-confidence.
BRUSSELS: On a blustery February evening in the Tyrolean town of Kufstein, pandemonium reigned inside the usually lugubrious Thaler Hotel. Gaggles of Chinese children swarmed the corridors. “Hi!” one called out. My Chinese was rusty, but adequate. “Ni hao,” I replied. “Have you had a fun day?” Nonplussed, the boy fell momentarily silent.
“Are you Chinese?” asked another bespectacled child with braces flashing silver across his teeth. “Do I look Chinese?” I countered.
“You speak Chinese,” he parried. A girl with bobbed hair and grownup expression sighed. “Don’t you know?” she said with a frown. “These days it’s normal for foreigners to speak Chinese. It’s no big deal.”
And it’s also increasingly normal to see hoards of Chinese children hitting Europe’s ski slopes, shopping malls and chocolate shops. If it’s school-vacation holiday in China, then it’s study-tour time in Europe.
I joined one of six groups of children visiting Europe for the Chinese New Year break in late January, a trip arranged by a German company, ECS Tours. Run by a young couple – German lawyer Rudolf Reiet and Xing Li – ECS is a new player in the lucrative market for Chinese study groups in Europe.
In a country where many workers earn an annual income of around $1,500, parents paid up to RMB 60,000, or US$9,500, to send their children on whirlwind tours of the continent’s sights. In addition to holiday photos, the children were expected to bring home skills like eating with a fork and knife and learning the appropriate time to clap at a classical music concert.
Chinese tourists, some 3 million of whom visited Western Europe in 2010, have already remade the traditional European Grand Tour according to their own tastes and consumer culture. Typical stops include Paris for romance and Louis Vuitton; Switzerland for mountains and chocolates; German towns like Trier, the birthplace of Karl Marx; and Metzingen, home to several factory outlets and the headquarters of Hugo Boss.
Chinese travelers have also emerged as the travel industry’s knights in shining armor, riding to the rescue of Europe’s industries suffering the effects of stagnant economic growth. In 2011, Chinese travelers accounted for 62 percent of Europe’s luxury goods sales according to one estimate.
The 35 children in my group were from a primary School in Chongqing and receive a truncated version of the new Chinese Grand Tour with a few days each in Germany, Switzerland and Austria. Talking with them offered a glimpse into the attitudes and aspirations of the country’s future workforce. These children were born in 2000 amid anticipation of China’s imminent rise to superpowerdom, an idea that would have seemed improbable even a decade earlier.
Collectively, the children provide a snapshot of China’s new elite. Many are sons and daughters of officials of China’s ruling Communist Party. “They talk just like little lingdao [leaders], ready to launch into a politically correct speech at the asking,” Reiet said. Others are children of entrepreneurs. Reiet smiled, recalling a child who had brought along packets of instant noodles to sell to classmates bored with European fare at the inflated price of €5 each.
Over dinner, the conversation at our table was about money. One jolly, plump 11-year-old grinned and pointed to her friend: “Do you know how much cash her father gave her for this trip?”
“Stop it, stop it!” gasped Xue, trying to put a hand over her friend’s mouth.
“€4000!” the girl exclaimed, undeterred. “Can you believe it?” Fan then happily explained that her father had given her €2,000. The children were comfortable talking about money, but ask a question about politics, even something as basic as whether their parents were party members, and they immediately went quiet.
Another girl at our table had looked on, disapproving of the conversation, and when others demanded to know how much spending money she carried, she refused to tell. I asked what her father did. Reluctant to answer, she finally confided that he was a bank executive. One girl let out a whoop. “You must be really rolling in it!” she laughed.
China’s per capita GDP might still be about a sixth that of the United States, but these are China’s children of privilege. The West would not automatically associate the professions of some parents– including policemen, municipal government officials, army officers and investment bureau bureaucrats – with wealth.
Despite decades of economic reform, China’s state-led capitalism has created a murky, often corrupt world, where the line between government officials and entrepreneurs is blurred. Local officials still have power to dispense patronage and lubricate business deals.
The result is scenes as when the scrawny 11-year-old daughter of a police officer waved a platinum credit card a Swarovski Crystal shop. She had picked out a crystal-encrusted watch that cost €2,800 and explained she was buying it for an auntie. Over the course of the next hour she spent a total of €4,200 on gifts for her family.
Another son of a policeman joined children snapping up crystals like candy and held up his crystal dog. “You know what I like about this?” he said. “It’s not ‘made in China!’”
Half the staff at the Swarovski shop were Chinese, and some of the local Austrian clerks had even learned basic Mandarin. Most of the children took this in stride. And for children of an emerging superpower, first impressions of Europe only confirmed their childlike sense of cultural superiority. There was a distinct touch of condescension when I asked the children how they had enjoyed Europe thus far.
“The hotel rooms are rather small here,” said the bank executive’s daughter. Another 11-year-old girl was critical of the traffic. “So many rules to follow on the road. I’m not sure who gets right of way. It must be scary to drive here!”
Another girl, whose father is an engineer and mother a housewife, dissed the breakfasts. “All that ham,” she muttered darkly, missing the typical morning fare for Chinese, hot buns stuffed with pork or a rich bowl of congee, rice porridge. “But,” she continued, “it’s a lot more peaceful out here than in China. Quiet.”
I thought about the children’s hometown, Chongqing, a municipality in China’s southwest and one of the largest urban centers in the world – home to 32 million people, four times that of Austria’s population.
What I remembered most from my own visit to Chongqing in 2008, was the ceaseless aural assault: churning cement mixers, sizzling spicy noodles at roadside stands, spluttering exhaust pipes and heavy thudding of wrecking balls. Everywhere were sounds of trade and movement, the old giving way to the new.
“You mean it’s a lot more boring out here,” giggled another girl. Both grinned in agreement.
For a vast, emerging country like China, defined by continuous change and a headlong rush towards trade and infrastructure development, Old World Europe could understandably appear a tad dull. And while the children did accomplish their mission of learning proper use of fork and knife and filling cameras with pretty pictures, they took away more – a conviction that China is more developed and urban than Europe, though Europe is cleaner, quieter, with plenty of expensive crystals and watches to buy. And yes, foreigners speaking Chinese is normal.
Pallavi Aiyar
YaleGlobal, 12 March 2012
2012 Yale Center for the Study of Globalization
Read more at http://yaleglobal.yale.edu/content/children-chinas-future-part-i
http://www.languagecorpsasia.com
Sunday, March 4, 2012
Vietnam Boosts Education for Ethnic Minority Children
Vietnam boosts education for ethnic minority children.
For more than a decade, Nguyen Thi Quyen's ethnic minority students in Lao Chai village primary school would stare at her blankly, unable to respond to her questions. As the school year wore on, they dropped out to tend farm animals or hawk knick-knacks to the tourists.
Quyen was teaching in Vietnamese, the language of the majority Kinh, but ethnic minorities in the country's northern hills speak Mong.
"Before, when I was teaching all subjects in Vietnamese, the children could understand only about 60 percent of what I was saying," Quyen told IRIN. "The children did not enjoy school. They did not like to come."
With Vietnamese the official language for education, school remains inaccessible for many ethnic minorities, who comprise 13 percent of the population and are among the country's most impoverished.
Lagging behind
The Mong are one of Vietnam's 53 ethnic minority groups that have fallen behind although the country boasts one of the world's fastest growing economies, with GDP up by 7.3 percent annually from 1995 to 2005, and per capita income increasing from US$260 in 1995 to $835 in 2007.
Yet more than half the ethnic minorities live in poverty, versus only 10 percent of Kinh. Ethnic minorities account for 11 million of Vietnam's 87 million people, but constitute 44.4 percent of the poor.
"Looking at all the development and positive change that has taken place in Vietnam, minority children are one or several steps behind all the time," Lotta Sylwander, country representative for the UN Children's Fund (UNICEF), told IRIN.
"Many of them live in hard-to-reach areas. Some of them speak languages that no one else speaks... Ethnic minority children are more likely to live in a poor household than the Kinh majority because their parents are uneducated."
According to UNICEF, three out of five ethnic minority children complete primary school, against more than four out of five Kinh.
Mother tongue-based education
In 2008, Quyen's primary school began teaching its youngest students in Mong, as part of a UNICEF-supported government initiative to boost academic performance.
The program has been implemented for Jrai ethnic minorities in central Gia Lai province, Khmer in southern Tra Vinh, and Mong in northern Lao Cai, where Lao Chai village is located.
Children begin school in their native language and in grade three, start learning in Vietnamese as well. By grade five, they are bilingual, according to research by UNICEF and the government.
"Now that I teach in the local language, the students can understand 100 percent. Now they'll stand up and answer any question," said Quyen, who has spent 16 years teaching in Lao Chai, located in a valley below the popular tourist town of Sapa.
"Since I started teaching in the Mong language, the children are much happier, and they really enjoy school. A lot of children come to school now, and some children from different communities even come here to learn," Quyen said.
Teaching challenge
One challenge, however, is finding qualified teachers.
"It was difficult to start the bilingual education program because of the need to have good bilingual teachers," said Truong Kim Minh, director of the Lao Cai Department of Education and Training.
"At that time, we had only a limited number of teachers coming from those ethnic minority groups. In the beginning, we chose good people in the community to become teachers' assistants."
Teachers who do not come from ethnic communities are increasingly required to learn the local language of the region where they will teach.
The province now trains 100 ethnic minority teachers each year for pre-school and primary school, which will help expand the bilingual education program, Minh said.
Meanwhile, as children played on the Lao Chai school grounds one Saturday afternoon, Quyen interrupted a student, eight-year-old Mang, during a game of marbles to ask him to read a sign written in Mong on a pillar at the school entrance.
Looking up at the colorful sign, Mang slowly pronounced one word at a time: "Dear friends, let's come to school."
Read more at http://www.thanhniennews.com/2010/pages/20111221-vietnam-boosts-education-for-ethnic-minority-children.aspx
http://www.languagecorpsasia.com
For more than a decade, Nguyen Thi Quyen's ethnic minority students in Lao Chai village primary school would stare at her blankly, unable to respond to her questions. As the school year wore on, they dropped out to tend farm animals or hawk knick-knacks to the tourists.
Quyen was teaching in Vietnamese, the language of the majority Kinh, but ethnic minorities in the country's northern hills speak Mong.
"Before, when I was teaching all subjects in Vietnamese, the children could understand only about 60 percent of what I was saying," Quyen told IRIN. "The children did not enjoy school. They did not like to come."
With Vietnamese the official language for education, school remains inaccessible for many ethnic minorities, who comprise 13 percent of the population and are among the country's most impoverished.
Lagging behind
The Mong are one of Vietnam's 53 ethnic minority groups that have fallen behind although the country boasts one of the world's fastest growing economies, with GDP up by 7.3 percent annually from 1995 to 2005, and per capita income increasing from US$260 in 1995 to $835 in 2007.
Yet more than half the ethnic minorities live in poverty, versus only 10 percent of Kinh. Ethnic minorities account for 11 million of Vietnam's 87 million people, but constitute 44.4 percent of the poor.
"Looking at all the development and positive change that has taken place in Vietnam, minority children are one or several steps behind all the time," Lotta Sylwander, country representative for the UN Children's Fund (UNICEF), told IRIN.
"Many of them live in hard-to-reach areas. Some of them speak languages that no one else speaks... Ethnic minority children are more likely to live in a poor household than the Kinh majority because their parents are uneducated."
According to UNICEF, three out of five ethnic minority children complete primary school, against more than four out of five Kinh.
Mother tongue-based education
In 2008, Quyen's primary school began teaching its youngest students in Mong, as part of a UNICEF-supported government initiative to boost academic performance.
The program has been implemented for Jrai ethnic minorities in central Gia Lai province, Khmer in southern Tra Vinh, and Mong in northern Lao Cai, where Lao Chai village is located.
Children begin school in their native language and in grade three, start learning in Vietnamese as well. By grade five, they are bilingual, according to research by UNICEF and the government.
"Now that I teach in the local language, the students can understand 100 percent. Now they'll stand up and answer any question," said Quyen, who has spent 16 years teaching in Lao Chai, located in a valley below the popular tourist town of Sapa.
"Since I started teaching in the Mong language, the children are much happier, and they really enjoy school. A lot of children come to school now, and some children from different communities even come here to learn," Quyen said.
Teaching challenge
One challenge, however, is finding qualified teachers.
"It was difficult to start the bilingual education program because of the need to have good bilingual teachers," said Truong Kim Minh, director of the Lao Cai Department of Education and Training.
"At that time, we had only a limited number of teachers coming from those ethnic minority groups. In the beginning, we chose good people in the community to become teachers' assistants."
Teachers who do not come from ethnic communities are increasingly required to learn the local language of the region where they will teach.
The province now trains 100 ethnic minority teachers each year for pre-school and primary school, which will help expand the bilingual education program, Minh said.
Meanwhile, as children played on the Lao Chai school grounds one Saturday afternoon, Quyen interrupted a student, eight-year-old Mang, during a game of marbles to ask him to read a sign written in Mong on a pillar at the school entrance.
Looking up at the colorful sign, Mang slowly pronounced one word at a time: "Dear friends, let's come to school."
Read more at http://www.thanhniennews.com/2010/pages/20111221-vietnam-boosts-education-for-ethnic-minority-children.aspx
http://www.languagecorpsasia.com
Wednesday, January 4, 2012
LanguageCorps Asia Partnership with Cambodian Children’s Fund to Provide Staff Training
LanguageCorps Asia Partnership with Cambodian Children’s Fund to Provide Staff Training.
LanguageCorps Asia, a leader in providing TEFL/TESOL (Teaching English as a Foreign Language/Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages) programs across the globe, will be providing free TESOL training and certification for staff of Cambodia Children’s Fund. LanguageCorps, a Massachusetts-based company offers a variety of certification programs for talented people interested in travel, internationalism, and teaching abroad; empowering them to thrive as professionals while living in, working in, and learning about a different culture.
Cambodian Children’s Fund, founded by Hollywood film executive Scott Neeson, serves the needs of Phnom Penh’s most impoverished children...
Read more at http://languagecorps.bizbuzzweekly.com/2010/10/04/languagecorps-partnership-with-cambodian-children%e2%80%99s-fund-to-provide-staff-training/
http://www.languagecorpsasia.com
LanguageCorps Asia, a leader in providing TEFL/TESOL (Teaching English as a Foreign Language/Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages) programs across the globe, will be providing free TESOL training and certification for staff of Cambodia Children’s Fund. LanguageCorps, a Massachusetts-based company offers a variety of certification programs for talented people interested in travel, internationalism, and teaching abroad; empowering them to thrive as professionals while living in, working in, and learning about a different culture.
Cambodian Children’s Fund, founded by Hollywood film executive Scott Neeson, serves the needs of Phnom Penh’s most impoverished children...
Read more at http://languagecorps.bizbuzzweekly.com/2010/10/04/languagecorps-partnership-with-cambodian-children%e2%80%99s-fund-to-provide-staff-training/
http://www.languagecorpsasia.com
Monday, October 31, 2011
Highdown Ride for Children in Cambodia
Highdown Ride for Children in Cambodia.
Teachers at an Emmer Green secondary school are swapping the classroom for the open road as they pedal their way to raising cash for charity.
Highdown School and Sixth Form Centre headteacher Tim Royle is one of 18 people connected with the school taking part in the 450km cycle ride from Vietnam to Cambodia next month.
He said: “We are raising money for HopeAsia which supports about 50 to 60 children in an orphanage in Cambodia.”
The charity was set up to fund the orphanage and provide food, water, clothing, medical care, education and a safe home for the children.
Mr Royle said: “So far we have raised £31,655 but I think £150,000 is what we should be aiming for.
Read more at http://www.getreading.co.uk/news/education/s/2063978_highdown_ride_for_children_in_cambodia
By Laura Herbert
http://www.languagecorpsasia.com
Teachers at an Emmer Green secondary school are swapping the classroom for the open road as they pedal their way to raising cash for charity.
Highdown School and Sixth Form Centre headteacher Tim Royle is one of 18 people connected with the school taking part in the 450km cycle ride from Vietnam to Cambodia next month.
He said: “We are raising money for HopeAsia which supports about 50 to 60 children in an orphanage in Cambodia.”
The charity was set up to fund the orphanage and provide food, water, clothing, medical care, education and a safe home for the children.
Mr Royle said: “So far we have raised £31,655 but I think £150,000 is what we should be aiming for.
Read more at http://www.getreading.co.uk/news/education/s/2063978_highdown_ride_for_children_in_cambodia
By Laura Herbert
http://www.languagecorpsasia.com
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