One year, a vice principal at the high school where I worked pulled me aside and in confidence urged me to lower my standards so more students would pass my classes.
The the failure rate in my classroom sometimes reached 50% and was often hovering around 30%. Few earned ‘As’. Many earned ‘Ds’ and barely scrapped by. While I was being tough on grades and demanding of my students, many of my colleagues were not.
The reason why standards were low among most teachers was due to pressure from admisntration and parents who wanted their children to feel good about themselves—which means boosting self-esteem artificially.
What the narrator leaves out is that the self-esteem movement started outside of the schools and spread to the schools like a virus. The schools were forced to comply or else. Source: Free RepublicandSelf-Esteem
When I graded the lowest failing grades with a minus ( – ) sign showing that a student had done next to no work in class and no homework, I was called into the office by one of the other vice principals.
She ordered me with the threat of administrative action to drop the minus sign behind the failing grades, which I did.
She said, “They (the students) feel bad enough as it is. Why do you have to make it worse?”
Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too.
If you want to subscribe to this Blog, there is a “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar.
This series on education is a rant. I’m angry at something I watched on ABC news and I’ve included that news clip in Part 1. If you don’t want to hear what I have to say about education in America, avoid reading this series.
Although I worked with students from the low end of the socio-economic strata, the district said that my students, on average, improved annually.
At the end of this ABC segment on YouTube, Marie Meyer, a parent, says, “If my child is getting an ‘F’, and I know that he is able to do ‘A’ quality work, then it has to reflect on the teacher.”
In fact, the responsibility for a child FAILING in school rightfully belongs to the parents and students, who are shirking his or her duties.
If most Asian students can succeed in the same classroom, so can non Asians. It was my experience that Asian parents were the toughest and their children usually earned high grades.
Teachers cannot teach by themselves. It takes a community to teach a child. The most important element of the community is the parents, students and teachers and cooperation is the key.
Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too.
If you want to subscribe to this Blog, there is a “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar.
Unlike India, China’s one party political system allows for quick decisions that often benefit the country.
Another important factor to remember is that China is still a collectivist nation as India is.
Due to this fact, China and India have more in common than India and America.
It does not matter that India is considered the world’s largest democracy, because to counter that, India also has a large bureaucracy that makes it difficult to get things done.
However, in India, the bureaucracy has a reputation for being tremendously arrogant. It is a truism that Indian bureaucrats are generally smug and supercilious… source: Open India
Indian bureaucracy has often been criticized for being cumbersome and stretching procedures to sanction projects. Source: Meri News
Unlike India, China’s one party political system allows for quick decisions that often benefit the country.
Another important factor to remember is that China is still a collectivist nation as India is.
Due to this fact, China and India have more in common than India and America.
It does not matter that India is considered the world’s largest democracy, because to counter that, India also has a large bureaucracy that makes it difficult to get things done.
However, in India, the bureaucracy has a reputation for being tremendously arrogant. It is a truism that Indian bureaucrats are generally smug and supercilious… source: Open India
Indian bureaucracy has often been criticized for being cumbersome and stretching procedures to sanction projects. Source: Meri News
A friend, Tom Carter, while shooting his next book in India, discovered that it was easier to travel and stay in China than India.
A study of Individualist and collectivist orientations across occupational groups in India by Anjali Ghosh where he refers to a study by Sinha & Verma (1994) … that master’s-level students express more idiocentric (individualist) orientations than allocentric (collectivist) due to Western influence, immediate life concerns and exposure to mass media.
However, Verma & Triandis (1999) observed that Indian students were more vertical collectivist than U.S. students were.
Another fact is that China and India both have ancient civilizations more than 5,000 years old and they are next-door neighbors as Canada and the US are.
A friend, Tom Carter, while shooting his next book in India, discovered that it was easier to travel and stay in China than India.
A study of Individualist and collectivist orientations across occupational groups in India by Anjali Ghosh where he refers to a study by Sinha & Verma (1994) … that master’s-level students express more idiocentric (individualist) orientations than allocentric (collectivist) due to Western influence, immediate life concerns and exposure to mass media.
However, Verma & Triandis (1999) observed that Indian students were more vertical collectivist than U.S. students were.
Another fact is that China and India both have ancient civilizations more than 5,000 years old and they are next-door neighbors as Canada and the US are.
Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.
Subscribe to “iLook China” Sign up for an E-mail Subscription at the top of this page.
A new comment appeared on my Blog linked to another Blog, A Modern Lei Feng, which is also about China but seems to focus mostly on what happens in modern Beijing.
I followed that link back to see whom or what had left tracks to my Blog, which I often do.
I only read the one post that complained about my Blog, so I cannot pass judgment on the rest of the content.
What I discovered was interesting—an opinion that disagreed with an opinion I wrote in Changing Names.
I clicked the “About” link to discover who the Blog master was behind A Modern Lei Feng and learned that he was a “young guy” living in Beijing who knows a little something about China and is willing to freelance on that topic but not for free.
Since I couldn’t find a name, I will call him “Lei Feng”.
I asked my father-in-law, who lived in Shanghai when the Japanese invaded China, what “A Modern Lei Feng” might mean.
My father-in-law, who is Chinese, doesn’t speak English fluently, but he did what he could to translate what “Lei Feng” might mean.
He said there were many translations but this one might refer to a young solder in the PLO that Mao praised to the nation in the 1960s. This soldier’s name was Lei Feng. Mao said everyone must learn from him because he is an excellent role model.
It seems that Lei Feng helped everyone else for free instead of helping himself.
The modern Lei Feng said in his post, “I’m no tech genius, but I’d imagine it wouldn’t be that hard to add the character to a word processor and input program, especially considering the government sent out a circular last year to strictly recognize such names, though it appears this one was left off the list.”
My response, Since I took a class in HTML, program my Websites, and know a professional programmer who made his money (he is retired now) programming for the U.S. defense department and commercial airlines, I know a little bit about what it takes to update software and it isn’t as easy as it sounds.
The programming part would probably be easier than implementing it. The difficulty comes when one program is replaced with another. To do that often means shutting down security systems, loading in the new program and rebooting the computer then turning the security back on. Then, as sometimes happens, the new program might cause the system to crash, and I’m talking about one computer.
In China, we are talking about several hundred million computers, which might operate on different systems. Each system would need another program and a different update.
Besides government computer systems, which may not all be linked since China’s government is decentralized more than most foreigners know, there are more than four hundred million personal computers linked to the internet in China.
I suspect that the decision not to go back and add the Chinese character for this family name that represents 200 people was due to the scope of the project to fix the error and the time it would take.
If it was easy and cheap, why not do it?
However, the issue isn’t over yet. If enough people in China Blog about this and express opinions that the government should make the change, it might still happen, although I doubt it.
China’s central government doesn’t care much about what foreigners think, but they do listen carefully to the people even if they do not always do what “most” of the people want.
In China, small groups do not have as much power as a majority of the population does.
Why there shouldn’t be an “American with Disabilities Act”
As for the Americans with Disabilities Act, I used that as an example to show how expensive it is to cater to a small segment of the population at the tax payers’ expense.
Lei Feng mentions that new buildings in Beijing offer ease of access to people with disabilities.
That’s understandable.
In recent years, most Chinese cities were rebuilt and many new cities mushroomed across China.
During the construction phase, it isn’t that expensive to add a ramp or a wider door but it is labor intensive and expensive to go back and fix something like that after construction ends just as fixing that Chinese language computer program for a nation of 1.3 billion might be too expensive and fraught with problems.
Although I agree with Thomas Paine about Social Security and a few other limited social safety nets that help people survive during hard times, America has a HUGE deficit threatening the nation’s economy and any expensive, unnecessary program should be examined carefully and cut or shrunk.
Idealistically, doing all we can as a nation to help as many people as possible is a good thing but realistically idealism doesn’t always work.
Lei Feng also quoted a phrase from The Declaration of Independence to support his opinion. He said, that there was a promise in the U.S. Declaration of Independence that “all men are created equally” and that we all have the right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”.
In fact, the United States Declaration of Independence is a statement adopted by the Continental Congress on July 4th, 1776, which announced that the thirteen American Colonies were at war with Great Britain. That is all it was.
The (first) law of the United States was the Articles of Confederation. This document was so weak that in May 1787, a Constitutional Convention was held in Philadelphia to present a new Constitution that was sent to the States for ratification later that year, which is the law of the U.S. today—not the Declaration of Independence.
Nowhere in the Constitution of the United States does that document say that the government and the taxpayers are responsible to pay for the “life, liberty and pursuit of happiness” of other citizens who cannot afford to pay for his or her dreams or easy access to cross a street in a wheelchair.
Adding more ramps to make it easier for people in wheel chairs to cross intersections might be a nice thing to do, and I wonder of Lei Feng would like to chip in and donate enough money to build a few and help reduce the U.S. deficit.
I’m sorry to say, I cannot afford to do that. My taxes are too high.
______________
Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too.
Imagine a diplomat in China who will influence future generations to love America and see it as a peaceful fun nation to be friends with. That’s what is happening and Walt Disney is doing it.
The Financial Times says that Disney Publishing Worldwide is opening English language schools in China and plans to have 148 schools in the country by 2015 earning well over $100 million.
The curriculum features Donald Duck, Mickey Mouse, the Little Mermaid and other Disney characters.
Enrolling children in this privately funded Disney language school is not cheap. It costs between $1,800 and $2,200 annually depending on which publication you read.
The Economist in Middle Kingdom meets Magic Kingdom pegged the price at $1,800, and says, “(Disney) has ten schools in Shanghai, five in Beijing and plans to double that number in the next year, slowly extending from China’s two largest cities to surrounding areas.”
I’ve written before about how important an education is to Chinese parents so it shouldn’t be a surprise to learn that Disney isn’t having problems finding students. The challenge is to find enough qualified teachers. Each classroom has “a local and a Western instructor.”
Disney’s language schools are where the West truly meets the East without the bully tactics of real politicans.
Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too.
Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse 
iLook China 