The need for creativity . . .

I am finally home and it feels great. I will share more of my China experience in the next few days.

On the visit to the No. 1 Zhangjiakou Senior Middle School (no web page) I was asked if I thought the students were being creative on multiple occasions. They are very focused on trying to make the shift from simply learning and acquiring information to being able to apply that information in creative ways to solve problems and create new products and ways of living. They realize that for all the recognition they get for high test scores, those scores are not resulting in increasing the number of patents that are issued annually. They are learning that this shift is not easy.

I honestly don’t have enough information to know if they are making strides in this area. As with the primary school, the visit was very structured and limited. The No. 1 high school is just that. For the first time here and in other places in China, they take the students scoring highest on the middle school tests and place them in a boarding high school for three years with the best rated teachers. Yes, teachers as well as students are rated. In our country there is a reverse trend with an intentional attempt to attract “better” teachers to work in inner city schools that have some of the greatest needs. Of course, in our country there is also no process for rating teachers.

No. 1 High School has 4000 of Hebei’s gifted students in three grades. It is a boarding school with even those that live in the city spending six nights a week at the school. The purpose of the school is to prepare these students for university where most aspire to qualify for Peking University, the most prestigious school in China. The school has a new section with one grade level and an older section housing the upper two grades. We visited the new section.

Classes range in size from 40 to sixty students in hot and humid classrooms. Unfortunately, we only saw two classrooms so I know very little about what it really looks and sounds like in their schools. The hallways were huge, yet I didn’t see one student in them during my visit. The students go to school for about four hours in the morning, have a two hour lunch/nap break, and then another afternoon session. They use continuous placement with the teachers staying with the same students for their three high school years. The students also stay in a room and the teachers move from classroom to classroom.

From a student I sat with on our return to Beijing it was verified by her that they study until about 11:00 pm every evening. Her parents are both teachers at her school and she feels great pressure to achieve at a high level so that she can achieve her goals and please her parents. Her aspiration is to become a translator and she believes that this requires four years of university work. I actually learned more from her about the school than I did on the visit. As an aside, she really likes McDonald's strawberry shakes and French fries, but her parents thought she was gaining too much weight so they made her stop going. She was very thin by our standards.

At the school we were greeted with students doing their daily “exercise” session. Since the building is new and the track area is not complete (I forgot to include at the primary school they have a synthetic track) they all trotted around the school in groups for about fifteen minutes. They did this in formations and with chants to keep them in step. It was not to military precision, but it was impressive. They do this every day regardless of the weather. On this day I was sweating just watching and they return to class directly from the activity.

We then were given a short concert by this grade’s choir. They are an award winning group and it was easy to see why. They were wonderful. They are also among the best in the province. What was different than in our schools was the inclusion of three teachers in the performance. They each sang long solo parts. The performance was followed by an English class that took the rest of the time before closure with food and conversation with the principal and the English teachers.

The English class was similar to what I described in the primary school visit except that the lesson had a group work component. Only English was used during the entire lesson for these students who were in their sixth year of learning English. Textbooks are used and in this lesson one of the goals was for the students to create a theme park. The teacher gave them ten minutes to work in groups to create their park before each group would meet with us and then present their park to the class.

When we met with a group it was clear that they had already spent time as the park had been designed. We were shown the design and asked to assist them in naming the park. The group included ten students. In the conversation with us, three students engaged at a high level. The others could not follow the conversation if it deviated from the theme and the vocabulary words used in the lesson. Our questions would be repeated by a peer in Chinese and even then they had difficulty contributing. The groups presented their park using the Elmo to show their drawings. Again, two to three students did the talking for the group, no questions were taken.

A couple of the groups showed creativity in the theme they picked to design their park, but the layouts were similar and consisted of rides, toilets, and restaurants. I also think that the structure of the lesson provided considerable guidance and parameters within which the designs were created. I answered the creativity questions with diplomacy, but not with the same positive language used by some of my colleagues. It was clear that our hosts wanted positive affirmation that the kids were being creative.

I would have preferred the opportunity to visit more classrooms to see how other core content areas are taught and to watch the interaction between teachers and students. It was obvious that these English lessons were staged for show. This was confirmed for me the next day through a middle school principal. With ours being the first school visit by any delegation to Zhangjiakou they wanted to impress us and to have us leave feeling positive about our experience with them. Since they are very open about these being the best and brightest students and the best teachers it could have been much more informative. The closing conversations with the principal and English teachers were actually the best part of each visit.

In the English class I kept asking myself what it would be like in our schools with students in their sixth or seventh year of Chinese. Though I have no experience or context for comparison, I believe that more students would be able to actively engage than was my experience in these classrooms. I base this on just a few observations in third year Spanish classes over time. Would this be because our program is elective and theirs is required? I don’t have the answer, but believe that this would be a part of the difference. With 250 million Chinese youth taking English lessons even if only 20% end up being literate that puts 50 million young and very competent Chinese youth in the world ready and eager to influence the stature and position of their country. It is certainly something to think about. Will knowing our language and our culture place them in an advantageous position? If we can duplicate this on the same level will it influence our ability to work collaboratively with them?

So many questions with perhaps the most important being; should we be looking at establishing a Chinese language program in our schools? Your thoughts?