Weekly blogging assignment for students
March 2, 2007
This semester, I am giving the 2nd year students a weekly blog assignment. Here is the post on that. I am not entirely optimistic that this will be successful by any reasonable standard, but who said anything about being reasonable?
I just finished reading “The World is Flat” by Thomas Friedman. In it, he extols the virtues of the Asian education system, which produces far more doctoral and post-doctoral recipients in math and science than do western countries, the US in particular. In fact, many of these students are in the US. Friedman writes, “The quiet crisis is the product of three gaps now plaguing American society”: the “ambition gap” where Americans have gotten lazy and have a sense of entitlement; the “numbers gap” in that we are not producing enough engineers and scientists; and the “educational gap.”
I am really pissed. I have taught CALL to over 1500 students in the past 4 years and I am not getting any of these brilliant minds passing through my doors. The level of academic cooperation and Internet research savvy which is expected of American students is light years ahead of what I see around me. Take a look at this page. Students are expected to work in teams, research the rain forests of the world–each team with a very specific topic for example:
Team 1: Your presentation should be centered on recent scientific discoveries. Topics should include medicines, cures for diseases, discoveries of new species, etc.Team 2: Your presentation should be centered on the environmental issues concerning the rainforest. Topics to be covered include destruction, pollution, farming, etc.
Then they put together a Powerpoint presentation for the class. This is a grade 6 assignment, typical of grade school internet-based assignments. The Internet is chockfull of webquests
(”An inquiry-oriented activity in which most or all of the information used by students is online. By providing links necessary to complete the quest, the student is able to focus on the material rather than spend time looking for it. The five-part WebQuest (Introduction, Task, Resources, Process, Evaluation, and Conclusion) promotes critical thinking at the levels of analysis, synthesis and evaluation.) definition taken here
My grade 8 students don’t get that including a .gif animation of hello kittly or a photo of Kobe doing a slam dunk in a powerpoint presentation on acid rain is unacceptable. Maybe they just don’t take my class seriously, which is unacredited by the MOE (as are all classes taught by foreigners–except for P.E.). 70% is the lowest grade I am allowed to give…
This is turning into a rant, isn’t it? Ah well, at least my school has a CALL program. I am trying to make it worthwhile for me and the kids, but it’s not easy. Pushing the limits, keeping it moderately light, building trust based on students’ ability to self-dicipline–it’s a jig on a slippery slope.
Posted in commentary, rant, taiwan, teaching
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March 4th, 2007 at 1:05 am
I think that there is a certain mythos in the west (especially among conservatives) about Asian students. The idea of the hard working, bright, respectful student who does well in Math and Science. As opposed to the western student who is lazy, slow and disrespectful and drops out of Math and Science because they are too hard. I think that people like Friedman romanticize learning the 3Rs like when they were in school. Like some conservatives who always look backwards to find a way forward. Progressive changes in education (that may have gone to far) are to be thrown out and replaced by return to the other extreme.
I am not saying that one system is better than the other but I was blown away by my firend’s jr high school social studies classes back home. The level of analysis and understanding on a large variety of issues was awe inspiring. Classroom debates, structured essays and integrated technology were the norm not the exception.
I have faced many of the same problems as you. Like you I have trouble getting an opinion on a topic. I am always amazed the looks on students faces when I talk about structure and how a presentation about WWE wrestlers might not be the best CALL topic. Mind you there is more potential in that than Hello Kitty vs Snoopy stickers. I could really rant but it is getting late.
Ell
March 4th, 2007 at 1:06 am
I could also go on and on about some students I taught who went on to top post grad positions in the States. Bu ti will just get angry.
March 5th, 2007 at 12:53 am
Patrick and Elliot, you will be gratified by the Washington Post article below by the president of Duke University. I think Friedman overestimates East Asian education in his book because he reflexively lumps it in with Indian secondary and higher education, which he (probably rightfully) was dazzled by. I suspect a more careful analysis would convincingly show Indian secondary and higher eduation is superior to Chinese equivalents — and both are superior to Taiwanese, Japanese and Korean equivalents. Taiwanese education indeed does an abysmal job of preparing students for the demands of today’s developed-economy job markets.
The U.S. Edge In Education
By Richard H. Brodhead
Monday, September 4, 2006
Even as they welcome students back to campus, our country’s colleges and universities are deluded by their own historical excellence, and their many contributions to U.S. strength may be eroding. That, at least, is how a special commission of the U.S. Education Department sees it.
The critique by the Secretary of Education’s Commission on the Future of Higher Education was issued last month. It said that that while America’s colleges and universities have “been the envy of the world for many years,” they are no longer training the educated workforce needed to win in a global economy. In its unkindest cut, the report suggested that U.S. higher education may be — dread phrase! — a “mature enterprise”: risk-averse, self-satisfied, self-indulgently expensive, oblivious to smarter rivals overtaking us.
I don’t take such critiques lightly. But because they are often based on a view of Asia as our emerging competitive rival, let me share my own experience traveling to four Asian countries this summer.
What I encountered was not principally pride and rising confidence in Asia’s educational systems, though there is much to be proud of. Everywhere I went, I found these systems to be the objects of intense and complex anxieties. When I told my counterparts that Americans were worried about losing ground to Asia in educational accomplishment, they found it impossible to believe.
In Japan and Korea, I heard concern that falling birthrates mean there are now too many college places for the number of qualified applicants, threatening a reduction in student quality. In Taiwan, university leaders worried about how few international students choose to study there.
Everywhere, I ran into concerns that competition for college admission had reached unbearable levels. Americans who think they know the limits of college admission obsessive disorder would have a few things to learn from Asia, where parents plan vacations to be free to drill their children in advance of college entrance exams, and where air traffic is rerouted on exam days to prevent distracting noises.
I also encountered another widespread worry, most loudly voiced in China. This is the fear that Asian higher education is long on discipline but short on creativity and that the very strengths of their system may prevent the fostering of a versatile, innovative style of intelligence that will be the key to future economic advancement.
Here was the paradox: The things that Americans tend to look to as Asia’s overwhelming educational strengths — a deeply ingrained work ethic and disciplined training in the elements of knowledge — are linked in Asian minds with secret weakness. They, too, look to higher education to create the mysterious ingredient that will guarantee success for their society. But they worry that we, not they, have the secret advantage.
Anxiety about education, I’ve learned, is an inescapable byproduct of the contemporary aspiration to competitive success. The more countries want to thrive in the opportunity-rich but unstable dynamics of the new world economy, the more they look to higher education to give them the edge.
I don’t think that we’re wrong to worry about our system. If we want to train smarter people and tap into more talent in our population, we do need to look to the deficiencies in American education and candidly and courageously address them. This will inevitably mean improving in areas where Asia is strong: building stronger foundational skills in early grades, making sure more students persist in so-called STEM subjects (science, technology, engineering and math), supplying more good math and science teachers, and other steps.
But making ourselves over in the image of an imagined rival won’t be the formula for success. Even as we correct real deficiencies, we need to recognize and nurture the strengths that are so evident to others.
In particular, we need to promote everything in our system that breeds initiative, independence, resourcefulness and collaboration. One of these is the liberal arts model of education. The schooling that trains students in many different disciplines makes them more flexible at shifting among a range of challenges and approaches. It also equips them to bring different sets of tools to bear on complex problems, allowing them to improvise new solutions by making new connections.
At an even more basic level, we must build on a system whose founding values are very different from respect for authority. When we touch off real debate on serious, open questions and encourage students to have worthwhile thoughts of their own, we are developing an asset of the highest strategic as well as personal value: the habits of active, independent thought.
There is no shortcut solution for the problem of education. The country that will do the best is not the one that will find the magic fix. Rather, it will be the one that asks, in the deepest way, what education is for and what human traits it is meant to foster.
March 5th, 2007 at 1:14 am
But then again, Patrick, in light of your Watoto Choir blog-post review about a month ago, maybe you’re just a serial child-basher. To quote selectively from two of the comments in response to that earlier post of yours:
“You need to understand that you do not leave in a perfect world. If you think you are perfect, try walking on water and then you can have the right to criticize these kids… Gosh… you complain too much… Heartless individuals like you don’t deserve to be on this earth. Get a life!!!.”
And:
“I was quite discusted with your petty, ignorant blog… they were trying their darndest… They are fighting for their future. For the future of their brothers and sisters… For the future of their children. They have more foresight, gumption, and deterimination to make their world a better place than 99% of America… they understand the bigger picture obviously much better than yourself. You ought to be ashamed of yourself and imberrased for criticizing these hard-working, motivated children.”
March 5th, 2007 at 1:18 pm
I think there are valid reasons why so many people feel that way. During my third year at UCBoulder I took a job with the math department. During that time, I taught quite a few first year students (though not lectures, obviously). What I saw again and again was the Asian students had extremely strong backgrounds. Most of my Chinese students had already had a full year of single variable calculus, infinite sets, and series in high school; and some had already studied some linear algebra. Not even very good US students, some of whom had graduated from IB programs had that sort of background. Sadly, about half of my US students had problems with basic trigonometry, and just about any sort of abstract problems.
March 5th, 2007 at 4:23 pm
Maybe I just move in the wrong circles. It’s imberrasing, I know. I am deterimined to change all that.
Seriously though, is there some point where the creative light goes on–and I am just not around to witness it in my students? Are all the bright and creative kids in Taipei?
Comments from Taichung College Professors welcome (you know who you are).
@Mark
Your comment just validates my–our (Elliot and I)– frustration. “Classroom debates, structured essays and integrated technology were the norm not the exception.”
At what level, nay, in what school (international schools notwithstanding), does this statement apply?
(It sounds like a pointed rhetorical question, but it’s not. Honest.)
How about Taichung 1st High School, which is supposed to be the creme de la creme-any one of you have contacts or know students there?
March 5th, 2007 at 6:15 pm
Patrick
I did teach some students at Weidao (Viator) supposedly on par with Taichung 1st and they were great kids. They were creative when they had to be but smart enough to know that my tutoring didn’t really matter. They didn’t put in much effort but to be fair they were HS students getting ready for university entrance exams. They are all Engineering and Math majors now at NTU.
Mark, you are probably correct. The few people I know back home who teach Science and Math say the same things. I do wonder if the students being used to evaluate the educational systems of various asian countries may not be reflective of their countries educational systems. I have always wondered if the Asian students who can afford to study in the West are primarily elites in their country of origin. I imagine that the cost of tuition in Canada for International student’s would make it difficult for most asian students to afford studying in Canada.
March 6th, 2007 at 2:02 pm
To answer your question about Taichung Boys First, Patrick, three years ago, I had two TBF students in my cram school class during winter break. I peppered them with questions. Ninety percent of students ignore the teacher during class they told me, opting for doing homework, reading comic books or more serious diversionary material, spacing out, or, in some classes, listening to music on iPods. Why? “Because we’re good students; we’ve done our homework — and all the teachers are doing is repeating to us what we’ve already read in the assigned books.”
I don’t think this early use of iPods is what you had in mind when you referred to the matter of technology being integrated into the classroom.
I don’t think any of us doubt that East Asian students are, on average, far stronger than American students in STEM subjects. This strength by itself will only get your economy so far once it is developed, though. And Taiwan’s economy IS developed. And this STEM strength is one of the few strengths students here possess (unlike the case in India). For Taiwan to develop more own brands, a more diversified and better quality service sector, or a more nimble and capable financial sector, and to develop the CAPACITY FOR PLANNING that all of these require, the classroom debates and structured essays you ask about are essential.
The (to you) unwelcome appearance of Kitty and Kobe in what are meant to be serious assignments is simply a manifestation of the retardation of the maturation process that authoritarian education environments and an emphasis on testing to the exclusion of other means of prompting and measuring progress are certain to produce — and certain to more glaringly produce in young people who, unlike their parents, have never known want.
Authoritarianism and the utter lack of creative teaching methodology from junior high through high school are producing a fascinating anomoly here in Taiwan: universities where voiced intellectual inquiry is shunned and frowned on by undergraduates. Kobe and Kitty rule there, too. This is not to say Kobe and Kitty are what is preferred by all or even most undergaduate students (at better universities especially); those two boys I met from TBF were sharp-minded, read somewhat widely and probably have continued to do so since becoming university undergraduates. But where teachers once dampened the development of their obviously good potential, peers, who have internalized authoritarianism’s admonitions to follow rules and not ask questions, now no doubt continue to do so through injunctions such as “Don’t be so serious.”
I am astonished at how the least bit of intellectual inquiry with Fengchia students (I have many of them in my cram school classes) raises cries of “too serious.” And I’m astonished that so many — Westerners as well as Taiwanese — attribute this attitude primarily to the phenomenon of too many universities and consequent easy admission to tertiary study. Fengchia is actually a fairly decent university now by Taiwanese standards and the intellectual-wasteland conditions that prevail on campus there are no doubt largely prevalent on traditionally better-regarded campuses such as Tunghai’s, too. TaiDa? I don’t know, but I bet even there, undergraduate students resort more to largely parroting each other’s pro forma, common-”wisdom” social, political and business ideas rather than openly and widely voicing new ideas they have tumbled to themsleves — though no doubt some of them ARE occasionally discovering some new ideas.
This larger, more important phenomenon easily gets obscured when we focus on cross-culture STEM matters. But should it? Isn’t it, in the end, the most decisive matter for an already-developed economy? If I’m not mistaken, Patrick, you’re suggesting that it is. And suggesting that focusing on narrow, de-contextualized comparisons of STEM scores is misguided.
America is too lazy to produce enough native engineers — but it knows how to best use good engineers. Taiwan’s education system makes its graduates too lazy-minded to figure out how to best utilize the country’s ample number of good-enough (and often enough excellent) engineers. Graduates in other subjects are too often less than good-enough.
March 7th, 2007 at 1:05 am
can i type chinese in here? hello~
i am kevin’s student~
i will join here to write something about comment~
join blog~ just for fun
^____^
my blog rss feed
http://www.wretch.cc/blog/flylon02&rss20=1
March 8th, 2007 at 12:28 am
Hello, Kevin’s student. Of course you can write in chinese. you can write in whatever language you want! Choice–or the illusion of it–is Freedom personified. I’m all about freedom. Or the illusion of it, anyway. I may have one or two readers who could read what you write (in Chinese), but I am not one of them, sadly. If this is ok for you, be my guest.
BTW, are those Hello Kitty ears I see at the bottom of your comment? Hau ke ai!