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 About 100 Chinese teachers are expected to arrive at state schools in the United Kingdom (yes, that haven of foreign language education) by next year, but schools which have already employed some of those teachers in their classrooms (which they described as "lovely") have already found problems, such as the following:
- "Their lack of familiarity with the English system of discipline, target setting etc is a problem."
- "They also tend to have different, perhaps unrealistic, expectations of pupils."
- "Concerns are expressed about Chinese teachers' abilities to manage pupils, particularly whole classes or where there is a tendency for students to be disruptive."
- "You need skilled teachers who can cope with the negativity."
We don't know who these Chinese teachers are that are being sent to the UK and where they've taught in China to begin with, but we do know we shortened our life expectancy by at least a decade or two teaching rowdy Shanghainese kids. But then again, most of the kids we taught either didn't want to be there or had no personal interest in learning English, and were simply forced to take up the class by their parents (who were able to afford it). One wonders if the kids in the UK are given some degree of choice in which foreign language they want to take up? Maybe some of those kids would rather learn Esperanto instead? Or perhaps a language as useful as Latin?
Schools have also requested the exam boards to "make GCSEs in Mandarin easier because the language was seen as too difficult even for bright pupils". We don't know what this means for the world fifty years down the road, but one need only take a look at the armies of students that China is sending to the ends of the world, and the number of them that are coming back as interpretors and translators in French, German, Spanish, Italian, Arabic, etc. Just turn on CCTV on any given day and whenever you have a top Chinese politician or diplomat meeting his/her foreign counterpart, you will see that both interpretors sitting behind them will undoubtedly be Chinese. We could be wrong, but we don't recall seeing any foreign interpretors.
In his previous life, Shanghaiist was a Chinese-English translator. And we were informed by the big boss that in the early days of China's opening up, the translation market was mainly dominated by English-Chinese services as foreign enterprises rushed to China. In the last few years though, Chinese-English translation services have grown exponentially as the world suddenly realises it needs to understand China on a much deeper level.
We've also been told by friends in the human resources industry that as fat expatriate pay packages become a thing of the past, many American/European managers (who refuse to master Chinese) are getting replaced by bilingual/bicultural Singaporeans, Malaysians, Hong Kongers, Taiwanese, ABCs, BBCs etc., who eventually are replaced by local managers a few years down the road if they aren't able to continue bringing value to the company.
In the age of outsourcing and the internet, none of our jobs are for life. Any job can be packed and shipped to some other location, as Thomas Friedman, author of The World is Flat says. Now, good luck to anyone trying to tell that to British schoolchildren. But the real lesson for expatriates planning to stay on in China is this: Either be willing to gain more than a perfunctory ability in Chinese, OR prepare to ship out over the long run.
Related links
The Telegraph: Rowdy pupils disrupt schools Mandarin project
Richard Spencer: The tribulations of teaching Mandarin
Photo from H@r@ld
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 We've just spent an entertaining and enlightening weekend at the Learning2cn education technology conference at Concordia International School in Jinqiao.
The topics covered included podcasts, wikis, cyberbullying and making exciting lessons within a technology setting. Issues related to laptop schools may seem irrelevant to most of us, but the event is groundbreaking inasmuch as it is probably one of the largest and most significant English language technology conferences that has ever been held in China. It is the fruition of 18 months of planning between several technology coordinators at the Shanghai American School, Concordia and the Shanghai Community of International Schools.
Highlights included Alan November's seminar about learning the grammar of Internet searching to uncover agenda, filter out commercial spam and forge meaningful international relationships. We encouraged him to make his new student learning pack available in Mandarin. If you want to do your bit to foster critical thinking among net users then come forward and we'll hook you up.
It is easy to take it for granted that a room full of tech curious educators would embrace new Internet tools without equivocation, but a number of salient concerns emerged. Our new friend Jamie Mackenzie is worried that too much Internet content is nothing more than meaningless blather. Other speakers noted that schools are spending lots of money on new facilities without adapting their teaching and learning paradigms. Filtering and control issues were also prevalent throughout the conference.
The underlying sentiment was still upbeat. Will Richardson's final presentation on self directed learning was full of encouragement that our RSS feeds can be our teachers and libraries rolled into one.
We liked the event's efforts to make the sessions interactive by laying on an open wireless network giving delegates a channel to write collaborative notes, comments and questions on their Ning and Twitter sites. There were also 'unconferences' that were scheduled to allow us to participate in spontaneous sessions on a whim.
The growing pains of international schools may seem a million miles away from the needs of everyday Shanghainese school children. We would be keen to know about similar events and networks within the Chinese speaking community. We wrote about a local Barcamp in a previous Shanghaiist post.
Jon Zurfluh of SCIS spoke about wanting to keep the conference alive through the website long after this weekend has passed. Hopefully, there will be future opportunities for inter community projects and partnerships.
Flying in speakers from the US does not come cheap so there was a steep USD 300 (USD 200 for EARCOS or ACAMiS school members) fee, which is fine if you are part of an organisation that can foot the bill. If you were not able to attend, then you might like to go to Learning2cn to catch up with the presentation notes and podcasts. We are looking forward to next year's conference already.
Crossposted on
Disclaimer: The author is a Shanghai based international school tech teacher.
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 Time to take advantage of the start of the new academic year to learn something new at several upcoming events taking place here in Shanghai.
Kicking off the fall season on August 30 is Pecha Kucha, a night of creative talks guaranteed to pack a punch by sticking to a limit of "20 slides for 20 seconds each". This month's session takes place at the Shanghai Sculpture Space, with a pre-show by Spanish artist Angel de la Peña serving a "free Spanish cocktail" to each attendee. The short-list already includes talks on overlooked issues in Chinese urban planning, finding the best street food in Shanghai, making documentaries in the DPRK, and Australian rules rugby.
Next up is barCamp, a one-day free-spirited digital lifestyle un-conference, taking place on September 8. The schedule is drawn up on the day of, and usually consists of talks on topics like coding, setting up a tech business, digital photography... with a heavy emphasis on discussion and audience participation. The location is the same as last year's, the Tudou offices just off the Suzhou Creek, and if the Xinjiang lunch provided by Gulistan is as good as it was last year then the food alone will justify attending.
Batting clean-up hitter is the Learning 2.0 conference, a meeting of teachers from September 14 to 16 to discuss the reshaping of school to meet the needs of today's increasingly visually-oriented, technologically saavy, communicative and collaborative students. Featuring an impressive list of experienced speakers, talks will focus on topics like using Skype and podcasting to organize distributed learning projects, taking advantage of Web 2.0 tools to teach and learn, and teaching media literacy in an age of wikis, online video and photoshopping. The proceedings will take place at Concordia International School, and registration is a whopping USD 300.
On Upcoming:
Pecha Kucha Night Volume 7 at Shanghai Sculpture Space
BarCamp Shanghai 2007 at Tudou Offices
Learning 2.0 Conference at Concordia International School
Photo by keso.
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The principal of the 150-student Henan Child Prodigy School (河南神童学校), Zhang Xuexin (张学新) says he has devised a revolutionary method of training the right brain of children to make them child prodigies. His students can not only memorise their textbooks and ancient poetry, they can actually recite them backwards. Throughout the school and around classrooms, one sees banners such as “China's first school that teaches education of the total brain" (中国第一所全脑教育学校), “Today's child prodigy, tomorrow's talent" (今日东方神童，明日世纪天才) and "I am a child prodigy, I am a memory expert" (我是神童，我是记忆天才).
According to the principal,
“这些神童右脑得到开发，在看电视的时候，将整个电视屏幕上的内容同步印在右脑中，眼睛在看电视，注意力却集中在右脑。电视关闭后，右脑就像完全受到控制的录像机一样，可以按照顺序倒序完整回放，把电视剧中人物对白、面貌特征、瞬间表情，甚至举手投足都可以复述、表演出来，这就是录音录像。”
After these students have had their right brain trained, whenever they watch television, they can actually both watch the programme and simultaneously "write" the programme on their right brain. While their eyes are on the television, their focus is on the right brain. When you switch off the television, their right brain is like a tape recorder that is fully under control, and it can play back to you everything in order. They will be able to remember all details such as the dialogue, facial features, expressions, body language and be able to act all of these out. This is photographic memory.
Nevertheless, some of his unorthodox training methods such as getting children to absorb the sun's energy by staring into the sun and visualising other people's hearts, bones and veins, etc., have raised the eyebrows of educationists in the province who have lambasted him for his unscientific approach.
Despite some of the kids interviewed on this clip testifying otherwise, Shanghaiist thinks that all the children featured here look MISERABLE. To begin with, we don't really buy into the idea that the ability to recite any text forwards and backwards makes a kid a "child prodigy". Unfortunately, like so many other schools with suspicious methodologies around in China, we think this school will be around for a long time to come.
Related link
Zhejiang Online: 河南民办“神童学校”：沽名钓誉还是教育创新
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 Shanghai Jiaotong University (SJTU) has released its fifth annual Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU) which saw American universities take eight of the top ten spots. Harvard University emerged right on top, followed by Stanford University and University of California-Berkeley. Britain's Oxford and Cambridge -- the only two non-American universities to make it to the top ten -- secured the fourth and tenth positions respectively. The top university in Asia was the University of Tokyo, edging in at the twentieth spot.
Within the Greater China region, the National Taiwan University emerged tops at 161st position. This was followed by the mainland's Tsinghua University (167), Hong Kong's Chinese University, City University, and the Hong Kong University of Science & Technology. Surprisingly Nanjing University (226) came out two spots above Beijing's Peking University (228) - long hallowed as China's top educational institution.
The ARWU ranks universities according to several indicators of academic or research performance, including alumni and staff winning Nobel Prizes and Fields Medals, highly cited researchers, articles published in Nature and Science, articles indexed in major citation indices, and the per capita academic performance of an institution.
In explaining Peking University's dismal performance, a researcher with SJTU's Institute of Higher Education explained that because academic papers in sciences and engineering were much more easily published and cited than others, the ARWU's ranking methodology was somewhat biased against universities such as Peking University which was stronger in humanities. In response, a spokesperson from Peking University has explained that it normally does not react to news on various world rankings of top universities, preferring to concentrate on what it does best (“只想做好自己的事儿”).
SJTU's rankings was introduced for the first time five years ago and is not without its controversy. Anhui News columnist Cai Yijin questions: 一所中国内地的高校，本身就是其中的一员，有啥资格，或者说有啥权力给全球高校进行排名？它排名的权威性如何？作这个研究的目的意义何在？这一连串的问题弄得笔名一头雾水，百思不得其解。
What right and what authority does this mainland Chinese university have to rank the world's top universities since it itself is a member of the education sector? How authoritative can its rankings be? What is the significance of this research project? A whole host of questions like these cloud my mind, and I cannot make sense of it.
In a letter sent to the state-owned People's Daily, netizen Wang Qing had a few harsh words to say: 又一份大学排行榜新鲜出炉。不久前，中国科学评价研究中心发布“世界一流大学竞争力排行榜”，北京大学排在第192位，清华大学排在196位。而在美国《新闻周刊》最近为世界著名大学排名中，中国没有一所大学进入前百名。落后并不可怕，可怕的是差距背后的麻木、丧志、不以为然和我行我素的心理与状态...
Yet another set of rankings have appeared. Not too long ago, the Research Center for China Science Evaluation released its rankings of the world's most competitive universities which saw Peking Uni coming in at 192st position and Tsinghua Uni at 196st. In Newsweek's rankings, none of the Chinese universities appeared among the top 100. It is not a shame to be behind others, what is more frightening is our indifference, our lack of ambition and our obstinacy in doing things our way...
如果不是井坎之蛙、夜郎自大，我们不得不承认，中国即使是最著名的高校，和世界一流大学相比，还有相当大的差距。别说哈佛、斯坦福、耶鲁这些翘楚，就是日本东京大学、英国爱丁堡大学、德国慕尼黑大学我们也只能望其项背。中国高校缺的不是楼堂馆所，缺的不是仪器设备，甚至缺的也不是教授博士，而缺的是独立之精神，自由之思想，以及追求卓越之理念。
If we were not frogs in the well and if we were to lay down our pride, we cannot but admit that there is a considerable gap between the top Chinese universities and the world's premier educational institutions. Let's not even mention Harvard, Stanfard and Yale, we are unable to even hold a candle to the likes of Tokyo Uni, Edinburgh Uni and the University of Munich. What Chinese universities lack today isn't more fancy complexes and lecture halls, nor equipment and machinery, we don't even need more professors. What we need is an independent spirit, freedom of thought and a pursuit of excellence.
Related links
SJTU: Academic Ranking of World Universities
SJTU: ARWU 2007 rankings
SJTU: ARWU 2007 rankings for Natural Sciences and Mathematics ( SCI )
SJTU: ARWU 2007 rankings for Engineering / Technology and Computer Sciences ( ENG )
SJTU: ARWU 2007 rankings for Life and Agriculture Sciences ( LIFE )
SJTU: ARWU 2007 rankings for Clinical Medicine and Pharmacy ( MED )
SJTU: ARWU 2007 rankings for Social Sciences ( SOC )
Anhui News: 拷问上海交大给全球高校排名的意义
People's Daily: 王清：也谈清华北大名落“世界百强”之外
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 Harshing the mellows of college kids all over China, the Ministry of Education has announced a ban on off-campus student housing:
In a notice issued on Friday, the ministry instructed all universities to make the dormitories "another front for political and ideological education" to create "a good climate for the students' growth."
The ministry told the universities to strengthen the administration of dormitories, in what it says will ensure the safety of students and heighten communication between them.
It also ruled that students sharing dormitories should be classmates to make it easier for teachers to monitor behavior outside the classroom.
Such naughty behavior as late-night study sessions will be strictly prohibited: Zhang Ting, a student at Renmin University in Beijing, complained to the Beijing Morning Post about her university cutting the electricity off too early every night. In most universities, the lights go out at 11:30pm during the week.
"We know they just want us to have a good sleep ,but we need more time to study for exams," she said. "Universities should be more flexible towards the administration of dorms."
Sweet as Ms. Zhang's sentiment is, we consider her diplomatic argument evidence that extant "ideological" training is working pretty well; this girl needs a position in government public relations, stat. Most students-- speaking only on terms of anonymity-- expressed, uh, normal reasons for not wanting nightly bed checks: Some of the students rent houses for privacy rather than study, particularly if they live with a boyfriend or girlfriend. Students say it will be difficult for the universities to prevent this practice. Another Renmin University student, speaking anonymously, said one of her roommates never slept in the dormitory because she lived with her boyfriend in a rented apartment.
While the shift in regulations may not be optimal for sexually acti-- er, really studious-- college kids, netizens may rejoice the likelihood of more Back Dormitory Boys-like viral phenomena in coming years.
Shanghai Daily: Boycott Placed on Students Living off Varsity Grounds
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