I am a teacher. My parents are both teachers; I was raised on the campus of a school. My grandparents–on both sides–were teachers. Perhaps, then, it stands to reason that I spend a fair amount of time thinking about education.
Working in China, of course, exposes you to a variety of different educational philosophies. Students–and school–are different here, as I’ve touched on in previous posts. The ways are myriad, but today I’d like to get into two specific examples from my own experience here.
The first comes from my experience teaching college students at H.U.S.T. (哈尔滨理工大学). Although I am now teaching some regular courses there, many of the first classes I taught were one-time “speaking” classes. Essentially, I was given nothing but a classroom of students–as many as 60 students–and two hours to do whatever I could to help them practice their speaking. The students, for their part, seemed to be required to attend, but certainly hadn’t been encouraged to care much. One student walked into one of my classes and pulled out headphones and a PSP before I had even started talking.
I understand that with “resources” (i.e., foreigners) as limited as there are here in Harbin, large class sizes are probably unavoidable, but why are they paying me to teach students who don’t want to learn English? This is a waste of my time and the students’ time, not to mention the school’s money. At best, these students simply sleep; at worst, they are disruptive and make it even more difficult for other students to learn than it already is.
I didn’t know this, but apparently admission into a Chinese college virtually guarantees graduation. Parents want their money’s worth for tuition, so students who foreign teachers “fail” rarely actually receive Fs on their transcripts. Somewhere in the whole “red tape” process, the grades get cleaned up to make sure everyone passes. Not everyone passes with good grades, but apparently it’s pretty damn difficult, perhaps impossible, to fail out of college here. This makes sense from a financial standpoint, but not really from an educational one.
At the private school I do most of my teaching at–which I’m not going to name–similar rules apply. Because the school is a business, part of my salary (really just whether or not I receive a bonus) is decided by how my students review my class. This applies in all of my classes; thus, part of my salary is determined by how popular I am with a bunch of five year olds.
On the one hand, if the students don’t like the class, they stop coming and the school loses money. On the other hand, though, this system doesn’t take into account at all whether nor not the students have actually learned anything. A teacher who lets the kids run around and do what they like could theoretically get better reviews than a teacher who’s relatively strict so that the kids’ language skills actually progress. I’m not sure how common an occurrence that is, but I do think that generally, when evaluating teachers, how well they teach should be factored into the equation, whether they are popular should not.
Then again, it’s thanks to this sort of policy that I live in a giant apartment and collected a surprisingly significant paycheck today, so how much can I really complain? Teachers need to get paid. It’s just sad that the sacrifice educators make for economics is so often education itself.