Broadway Elementary in Venice launched the effort to boost enrollment. The plan worked so well the principal is concerned that dual-language learners will outnumber students in regular classes.
First-grader Charlotte Woodruff (on class pajama day) shows her science project to her dual-language class as Rae Cullen, who teaches in English, looks on at Broadway Elementary School in Venice. The students spend half the day with Cullen and half with a teacher whose instruction is in Mandarin. (Barbara Davidson, Los Angeles Times /December 16, 2011)
By Matt Stevens, Los Angeles TimesDecember 29, 2011, 8:28 p.m.
Twenty-four first-graders scrambled from their seats and plopped onto a rainbow-colored rug in “Wong laoshi’s” classroom. In a minute, they would begin a lesson on food groups. But first a quick exercise on water.
“Zhengfa!” teacher Kennis Wong said, using the Mandarin word for “evaporation,” and the students jumped to their feet.
“Ningjie!” Wong said next, giving the word for “condensation.” And like a forming raindrop, students hugged in small groups.
“Jiangyu!” she said finally, and the raindrops splashed to the floor, giggling the whole way down.
When we came to China 3 months ago, I knew our kids would have a different kind of education from the US. three months later, that assumption has become a reality.
First, the obvious difference is that teachers here do not praise kids often ( actually, so far, not at all). Unlike in the US where teachers often told me how my kids are the brightest and cutest, teachers here only communicate with me about my kids’ academic shortcomings. I actually like the fact that they pinpoint the issue to me clearly without much “smooching around” like what teachers in the US often did. I am also amazed at how promptly they respond to the issue they discover about each student. In the US, teachers often communicate with parents only if the student is far behind the rest of the class. Here in china, teachers communicate with parents before the “problem” becomes significant. It almost seems to me that teachers in the US see mentioning anything negative about the student as an educational mistake, something against their principle. Teachers in China, on the other hand, do not have that disposition.
Another major difference is the role of parents. In the urban setting public school where my kids attended in the US, parents were everywhere. They were organizing fundraising events; helping with school budgets; volunteering at all sorts of school events; keeping an eye on children during lunch recess. Here in China, parents do not come to school unless there is a specific reason. On a typical day, there is not a single parent on site. The only event where I was invited as a parent was a Sports Day event where kids played sports related games. Even then, the whole thing was organized by teachers and parents were invited simply to watch their children participate in the activities. One time, I stopped by the school thinking that I could talk to the teacher during recess. I was stopped at the door by the security and the guard had to call the teacher to let me in. The teacher was surprised that I stopped by and immediately I realized parents do not just pop in to their kids’ school like in the US. Interestingly, my kids’ teachers are extremely responsive to my phone calls and text messages. They always respond within half an hour. So the truth is that communication between parents and teachers work quite well in China regarding the specific child. The downside is that there is much less community building opportunity at the classroom level and the school level.
Another difference is that teachers in China do not hesitate to honor academic success in public. In my daughter’s homework assignment booklet, teachers often post the names of students who scored 90% or above. While they do not publicize names of students who do not do well, they often write notes such as “those who didn’t do well this time, please try harder!” or “many of you have not done your best lately, please catch up!”. Again, I just can’t imagine teachers doing this in the US while it is perfectly normal for Chinese teachers.
Academically, my 1st grade daughter has quickly adopted the Chinese way of Math learning. She is required to do about 60 addition or subtraction problems per day for homework assignment. At the beginning, she was using her fingers to count. By now, it has become an intuition and she can often finish the 60 problems within 15 minutes. For Chinese, she has memorized all the chapters she learned so far and recite them voluntarily to me. I noticed that she seems to enjoy the memorization process and often laughs and giggles while reciting what she learned. It is not at all painful or robot-like as westerners might assume. She also has learned the pinyin and can use it as a reading tool now. While the Chinese immersion program my daughter was in discourages teaching pin-yin for fear of over-reliance on it, children in China are trained to internalize pin-yin by 1st grade so they can read on their own.
I have not formed a judgment as to which way of education is better. I am only noticing the differences. Intuitively, I feel children in China are less equipped to think on their own since so much emphasis is around conforming to certain rules and standards. On the other hand, it is almost liberating since social justice isn’t at all part of the school’s agenda comparing to the US and all kids are expected to do their best. It is eerie thinking back that wanting the best for one’s child can almost be perceived as selfish or shameful since so many other children are behind in the public school setting. Instead of striving towards the best for all children, resources are devoted only to those who are falling below the curve in the US and children who do well often do not get any attention in the classrooms. Here in China, all children are expected to achieve their very best without any room for negotiation. One might think it’s too intense for children. From what I noticed though, my kids actually seem to enjoy the honest feedback they receive from their teachers around how they can do better. They are no longer the best or brightest, instead, they are just ordinary children who go to school to learn every day. For now, that’s not so bad.
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You can read Elaine’s bilingual blog about the move from the US to China here.
Deer Valley schools embrace Mandarin Chinese instruction
Language being taught at 3 Deer Valley campuses
10 comments by Kristena Hansen – Dec. 22, 2011 12:03 PM
The Arizona Republic
Think back to elementary school and imagine being taught for the first time how to multiply fractions, use the metric system and why seasons change, but in Chinese.
If it’s hard to envision, then just ask a small group of first-and second-grade students at Gavilan Peak Elementary School, whose math and science classes are taught completely in Mandarin Chinese.
The students spend only half of their school day speaking English and are the driving force behind Arizona’s first-ever partial immersion program for Mandarin in a public school.
The program launched three years ago at Gavilan Peak, an Anthem-based school in the Deer Valley Unified School District. The specialty program is open to any student through the district’s open enrollment.
Harvin Moore: Why immersing HISD pupils in Mandarin Chinese will enhance learning, global edge
First-grade classroom in San Diego’s Barnard Chinese Magnet Immersion School, showing both the use of physical activities and songs to reinforce learning, and also the diversity of the school, which is 38 percent Latino, 36 percent Anglo, 16 percent African-American, and 10 percent other.
About HISD’s Mandarin Chinese School
HISD’s first ever Mandarin Chinese Language Immersion Magnet School will open in time for the 2012-2013 school year, the Board of Education decided unanimously at its December monthly meeting.
The school will be located at the site of the former Holden Elementary School, 812 W. 28th St., and will initially serve students in the early elementary school grades, with additional grades to be added in subsequent years.
The school will serve youngsters from throughout the district, and transportation will be provided.
Admit it – at some point in the dark of the night you’ve thought “You know, the REAL way to get my kids to learn Mandarin would just be to move to China. What am I doing here in (San Francisco/Seattle/St. Paul/Denver/your-city-name-here) anyway? China’s the wave of the future. We should just MOVE.”
Well, San Francisco mom Kayla is doing what most of us only fantasize about – she’s picking up and moving to Beijing. In January. And she’s writing a blow-by-blow account of just how much work it takes on her blog (for which those of us who haven’t quite worked out how we’d do it are most grateful.)
Her first post is below. You can read the latest here. Start at the beginning and read until now. You might rethink your pie-in-the-sky plans to decamp to Beijing. Or you might buy a ticket tomorrow….
Last week I made the ultimate decision to quit my job and move me and my kid to Beijing. I have wanted to do it at least since spending the better part of last summer traveling around China. My daughter, LiLi, is in a public Mandarin Immersion school in San Francisco, CA. Her Mandarin is excellent and her accent sounds like a native, or so I’m told. But, I’m also told that learning Mandarin in the US, even at a good school, means that at the beginning of third grade she knows a few hundred characters; if we were in China by now she’d know around 2000.
We have some friends who moved to Central and South America so their kids could learn Spanish and I’ve long thought that that was a great idea. I’ve recently reconnected with them, read their blog, and been inspired by their courage and sense of adventure. I also met a family this past summer in Beijing who decided then that they’d move with their family of three young kids. The dad, from Ghana, said that Mandarin is going to be so important to our kids’ generation and that the place to learn it was right there, in Beijing. A couple of weeks later they went home, packed up their house, and moved. Since then I’ve hooked up with a whole cohort of expat families who have done the same thing for the same reason.
Since I have been telling friends and other school families about our plans, I’ve been asked how it feels. It feels: exciting; overwhelming; exhilarating. Mostly, it feels “right.” The last few days I’ve been reflecting on that, and the various considerations and pieces of the life-altering-changes puzzle. A big piece is Mandarin Immersion. What better place to immerse my daughter in the language? But there are other pieces too. There are professional considerations, mid-life crisis ones (move to Beijing or buy myself a black Jaguar E-type?), getting unstuck. Heritage is another big piece. My father was born in China and left during a Japanese invasion in the 1930s when many Mainlanders fled. He recalled running through a field as bombs were dropping. He was the youngest of four kids and remembered my grandmother pulling on his arm to run faster. He was about my daughter’s age when they left China for Malaysia, later coming to the US for college and medical school. So there’s a huge piece that feels a bit like I’m going home. It’s odd because though I’ve traveled in China a handful of times, I’ve never lived in China. Perhaps there is something to the fact that some hotels and the visa ap refer to US born Chinese (even half-Chinese/half-Caucasians like me) as “Overseas Chinese.”
We will move to Beijing in late January 2012. I intend to write here some of our experiences and welcome you to join us on this adventure. : )
Siblings Cassidy and Cormac Calcaterra in their uniforms at Yinghua Academy.
Chinese immersion schools growing in popularity
BY BRYNA GODAR
NORTHEAST PARK — At Yinghua Academy, children’s art lines the walls – thumbprint trees, traced hands, self-portraits. It looks like most elementary school hallways, but the kids have signed their artwork twice, once in English and once in Chinese characters.
Yinghua Academy, 1616 Buchanan St. NE, opened in 2006 as the first Chinese immersion charter public school in the Midwest. Students learn a curriculum ranging from history to math, all in Mandarin Chinese. Teachers instruct students completely in Chinese for kindergarten and first grade. In second grade one English class is added, and by sixth grade the curriculum is taught half in English and half in Chinese. Signs on classroom doors ask visitors to not speak English to the
teachers in front of students.
Many students don’t even know their teachers can speak English, said Karen Calcaterra, the grant administrator and a parent of two students at Yinghua. She and her husband believe in the value of bilingualism. They lived in China for a year on sabbatical while Craig Calcaterra, Karen’s husband, worked as a visiting math professor. Karen Calcaterra taught English to the freshmen. They enrolled their kids at Yinghua after returning to St. Paul, aiming to continue their Chinese education.
“It’s a pretty cool thing, I like it,” said her son Cormac Calcaterra, a fifth-grader at Yinghua. “It teaches you one of the most hardest languages to learn: Chinese.”
“For us, immersion provides multilingualism, proven cognitive benefits and flexibility, dynamic and engaging teaching methods, and opportunities for deep cultural connections and understandings,” Karen Calcaterra said.
We need your support to save our district’s funding and not allow the State Department of Education to approve a charter school application that would siphon money away from our school budget.
The Hua Mei Charter School, designed to be a Mandarin language immersion school for children in grades K – 2 located in Maplewood, will take $688,018 from the West Orange Public Schools its first year of operation, not including the cost of transportation that the district will incur for the children who attend it from West Orange. The amount the district will need to contribute to the charter school’s operation is expected to increase yearly as the school expands to grades K – 5 . Also, the amount the district needs to contribute to the school’s operation was set by the State Department of Education based on their projection that 52 West Orange children will attend the first year.
First-grader Charlotte Woodruff (on class pajama day) shows her science project to her dual-language class as Rae Cullen, who teaches in English, looks on at Broadway Elementary School in Venice. The students spend half the day with Cullen and half with a teacher whose instruction is in Mandarin. (Barbara Davidson, Los Angeles Times /December 16, 2011)
Mandarin Immersion Parents Council 