My colleague Professor Jim Dvorak once came back from his classroom asking: “Did you hear any loud explosion in the classroom?” Seeing the shock on my face, he chuckled: ”It's students' minds being blown away! “
For a teacher, it ought to be deeply satisfying to set students’ minds ablaze. Irish poet William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) said that “education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire.” Becoming such an educational arsonist involves more than a secret pedagogical match. It requires one to care about students, and to have a deep understanding of human psychology to help students learn with focus, purpose, confidence, and satisfaction.
I became interested in student motivation as I notice an increasing number of Chinese children dropping out of weekend Chinese schools. As untrained volunteers, many teachers are actually parents who teach the way they were taught while growing up in China, while the conditions for learning have changed for children. As a result, students can be frustrated or bored to tears with classes. Whey kids say they would wash dishes than going to the Chinese school, something is very wrong in the ways they learn. How are they going to love their roots in Chinese and China if all their memory is associated with pain?
The school invited veteran overseas Chinese teacher Professor Zhang Yajun to talk about Chinese teaching. Professor Zhang said something that really struck a cord in me: “In Chinese, we have so many expressions about ‘hard’ learning”, emphasizing that learning is necessarily difficult, without paying equal attention to the joys learning brings." We say things like “Hard work is the path in the mountain of books, arduous work is the boat in the sea of learning.” What if, for instance, you row the boat without the compass to navigate? Or worse, what if you don’t know where you are going in the first place?
Elements like purpose, effort, and play should be artfully orchestrated to produce the conditions for learning. In his book The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything, Ken Robionson stresses the importance of finding our intrinsic motivation which will guide us to live a productive and satisfying life. This ought to lead us Chinese to think beyond mere hard work.
There is nothing wrong with hard work itself. Most cultures stress hard work. In our agricultural tradition we say: “One portion of cultivation yields one portion of crop” (一分耕耘一分收获). Children in other cultures say similar things like “No bees, no honey; no work, no money.” Time on task is often one of the key contributors towards success at learning. Let’s not forget, however, that those who are effective learners have increased time doing what they enjoy or what they perceive to be meaningful, useful or at the very least necessary.
Take meaning for instance. When there is personal meaning to the subject matter, learning is not bitter and hard. For instance, students may be lukewarm towards teacher-assigned online discussions, but see what happens on their Facebook pages. What’s the difference there? Students simply find their Facebook sites to be places they “own”, or so they think.
Chinese parents often find it legitimate to force children to endure the hardships of learning without explaining why they are learning what they learn, using such lame excuses as: “they will understand it when they grow up.” If you cannot articulate the purpose to your children, maybe you do not know the purpose yourself. Maybe you just follow the faceless middle-class crowds who spend money sending their children to various after-school classes – let me be brutally honest here -- to have an illusion of being responsible. In these classes teachers pretend to teach and children pretend to learn. Your children may spend years studying piano to pass level tests, only to throw away all the books and never touch piano again when they “grow up”. Tell me about delayed satisfaction, and I can tell you about destroyed motivation, often happening in slow motion, over many years and across many regions.
If you love your child, transform learning into a voyage as described in the poem Ithaca by Greek poet Constantine P. Cavafy(1863 –1933):
“Pray that the road is long.
That the summer mornings are many, when,
with such pleasure, with such joy
you will enter ports seen for the first time.”
If there is such pursuit for discovery, then there is no need to fear “the Lestrygonians and the Cyclops, the angry Poseidon” in the learning process.
China Daily, March 19 2012
Tuesday, April 3, 2012
shocking scenes behind the fabrication scandal
On Jan 6, National Public Radio of America aired an episode of This American Life featuring excerpts from actor Mike Daisey's solo show, The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, describing Daisy's supposed findings from a "research trip" to Shenzhen, China, and the allegedly miserable working conditions at FoxConn, one of Apple's major manufacturers in China.
Daisey is not a journalist, but an independent performer of a one-man show. In his show he uses dramatic license to include exaggerations and fabrications for theatrical effect. However, this is no longer Marco Polo's world when one traveler to a faraway land can tell a story the way he wants and everybody simply believes him, and the loopholes in Daisey's story were soon exposed and discussed and analyzed in other major media outlets.
I am afraid that this greater truth is being lost in the media glare of the scandal. For instance, some have claimed that contrary to working long hours in a sweatshop, workers at FoxConn actually complain of not having enough overtime. Counterintuitive as this may sound, it is only natural given the fact that a large number of factory workers are migrant workers who have come to these factories to make money as quickly as possible to realize dreams that are common to many people the world over: buying a house, getting married, having a family. Cut off from their families and previous rural lives, of course they do not mind some extra work, especially if it means they get double pay.
Ignorant of this context, labor organizations and international media are all too quick to rigidly apply the standards of developed countries when evaluating working conditions in a Chinese factory. So wages are increased a little and "overtime" is cut. This makes everyone happy, except the workers, who can no longer work more to earn more.
But regardless of the hours they work, Chinese workers endure working and living conditions that no American worker today would accept. Benchmarked against working conditions in the developed world, many businesses in China would not even be marked a C or D. As a developing country, China's labor conditions are the same as those experienced by US workers years or decades ago.
As a nation China should be committed to improving the working conditions for the tens of millions of migrant workers, and should strive to create jobs closer to their homes or make it easier for them to settle in the cities where they work.
To me, that is the greater truth that needs telling.
Daisey is not a journalist, but an independent performer of a one-man show. In his show he uses dramatic license to include exaggerations and fabrications for theatrical effect. However, this is no longer Marco Polo's world when one traveler to a faraway land can tell a story the way he wants and everybody simply believes him, and the loopholes in Daisey's story were soon exposed and discussed and analyzed in other major media outlets.
As a result, Ira Glass, the producer and host of This American Life retracted the program aired on Jan 6 and produced a 58-minute program in which Glass interrogated Daisey as a lawyer would interrogate a criminal. Daisey's telltale pauses and silences were faithfully kept in this Pinteresque radio drama about truth and lies.
Daisey has defended himself by saying: "What I do is not journalism. The tools of the theater are not the same as the tools of journalism. For this reason, I regret that I allowed This American Life to air an excerpt from my monologue. This American Life is essentially a journalistic not a theatrical enterprise, and as such it operates under a different set of rules and expectations."
However, the furor over Daisey's dramatic license means that in the future, people in the United States will be very cautions about criticizing Apple's processing operations and FoxConn's labor conditions. This may be great news for Corporate America, but it is very bad news for the workers in China who produce the products these multinationals profit from.
However, the furor over Daisey's dramatic license means that in the future, people in the United States will be very cautions about criticizing Apple's processing operations and FoxConn's labor conditions. This may be great news for Corporate America, but it is very bad news for the workers in China who produce the products these multinationals profit from.
I am afraid that this greater truth is being lost in the media glare of the scandal. For instance, some have claimed that contrary to working long hours in a sweatshop, workers at FoxConn actually complain of not having enough overtime. Counterintuitive as this may sound, it is only natural given the fact that a large number of factory workers are migrant workers who have come to these factories to make money as quickly as possible to realize dreams that are common to many people the world over: buying a house, getting married, having a family. Cut off from their families and previous rural lives, of course they do not mind some extra work, especially if it means they get double pay.
Ignorant of this context, labor organizations and international media are all too quick to rigidly apply the standards of developed countries when evaluating working conditions in a Chinese factory. So wages are increased a little and "overtime" is cut. This makes everyone happy, except the workers, who can no longer work more to earn more.
But regardless of the hours they work, Chinese workers endure working and living conditions that no American worker today would accept. Benchmarked against working conditions in the developed world, many businesses in China would not even be marked a C or D. As a developing country, China's labor conditions are the same as those experienced by US workers years or decades ago.
As a nation China should be committed to improving the working conditions for the tens of millions of migrant workers, and should strive to create jobs closer to their homes or make it easier for them to settle in the cities where they work.
To me, that is the greater truth that needs telling.
(China Daily 03/28/2012 page8)
Top 5 problems an average Chinese faces
A friend recently asked about the top five problems in China from the perspective of an average Chinese. And here are a few that I listed as an average Chinese, thinking aloud mainly:
1. Geographic mobility: China has a rigid residency system called "hukou" which is tied to many things, such as housing, employment, schooling and social benefits. In the past you had to work where your "hukou" was. Though there is increasing flexibility now (you can work in another place with a temporary "hukou"), the system still restricts people from living and working wherever they want. Hukou causes an artificial divide among people, which has deep socioeconomical, psychological and political implications. An overhaul is long overdue, but politicians do not have the guts to fix it for fear that such massive changes will cause things to go out of control. People capable of speaking for change are shortsighted, unwilling to give up what they consider to be advantages they have "earned", and underestimating the perils of living in a society artificially divided.
Migrant worker phenomenon is a result of such a system. People who migrate to another city to work fulfill some job needs, but they do not identify with the city, and that may cause all types of problems. Divide into urban and rural hukou also raises concerns of social equality and systematic prejudice within the nation.
2. Education, especially children's education (K12). There is a dual anxiety among parents: dismayed that their child is not learning what he or she is supposed to learn as a developing person, while being fearful of allowing the child to lack behind in the rat race, insane as it is. Though Americans sometimes look to China for experience and expertise in advancing STEM subjects, most Chinese would dismiss such praises. What is the use of excelling in the exams earned with extra effort and training, if schools do not guide students to develop sustainable competencies to face the future?
Higher education is also broken. Programs are measured in terms of "research". Only the young and less experienced faculty do the hard work of teaching. "Research" becomes like the "Great Leap Forward" in the 50s and 60s, creating an illusion of being productive, when most products are shoddy. In the meantime, students do not get the quality education they paid for.
Due to the lack of a better educational model, people do not grow up learning to think for themselves and pursue their dreams, as the Chinese educational system is heavily based on norm-referenced tests which you have to excel to beat competitors. Schools graduate excellent test-takers, but not as many independent thinkers, qualified researchers, responsible citizens, and so on.
3. Housing: The price of housing is prohibitively high for young workers. Young people choose to stay in bigger cities because they think that's where the opportunities are (once again, this ties back to the hukou issue, which causes disparity in resource allocation), so cities like Shanghai and Beijing have soaring housing prices.
4. Healthcare: The system is problematic in all sorts of ways. For instance, doctors are poorly paid and some resort to corrupted practices (such as accepting kickbacks and bribes). Insurance sometimes does not cover critical illnesses that require expensive treatments. A major illness can reduce a family's living standards to ground zero. People always talk about what "developed countries" are doing, unfortunately America is not much of an example either at this moment.
5. Pride: One sad thing that I observed is that many Chinese have lost the pride of belonging to China, which is rather unusual in Chinese history. Social mobility was seen by some as having deteriorated. There is a sense that the second generations of the poor will stay poor because children of the rich and the powerful has too much of a head start.
The wealth China has accumulated does not have anything to do with the average guy on the street. The government may spend billions pleasing an European government, but poor kids in the countryside still depend on the good will of charity givers to have a decent schoolhouse. The average Chinese feel disconnected to the rhetorics the government is promoting on TV. Except the powerful and the rich, few people have anything to do with the "emerging superpower" construct western media promotes.
There is much anxiety about the future of the country, developing like this, allowing money to run over every other principle a civil society needs to function. This is best illustrated by the case of 18 people passing by as a little girl lie on a street dying after a traffic accident last year.
However, I believe that the pride is still dormant. Despair and helplessness have dampened everything for the moment.
1. Geographic mobility: China has a rigid residency system called "hukou" which is tied to many things, such as housing, employment, schooling and social benefits. In the past you had to work where your "hukou" was. Though there is increasing flexibility now (you can work in another place with a temporary "hukou"), the system still restricts people from living and working wherever they want. Hukou causes an artificial divide among people, which has deep socioeconomical, psychological and political implications. An overhaul is long overdue, but politicians do not have the guts to fix it for fear that such massive changes will cause things to go out of control. People capable of speaking for change are shortsighted, unwilling to give up what they consider to be advantages they have "earned", and underestimating the perils of living in a society artificially divided.
Migrant worker phenomenon is a result of such a system. People who migrate to another city to work fulfill some job needs, but they do not identify with the city, and that may cause all types of problems. Divide into urban and rural hukou also raises concerns of social equality and systematic prejudice within the nation.
2. Education, especially children's education (K12). There is a dual anxiety among parents: dismayed that their child is not learning what he or she is supposed to learn as a developing person, while being fearful of allowing the child to lack behind in the rat race, insane as it is. Though Americans sometimes look to China for experience and expertise in advancing STEM subjects, most Chinese would dismiss such praises. What is the use of excelling in the exams earned with extra effort and training, if schools do not guide students to develop sustainable competencies to face the future?
Higher education is also broken. Programs are measured in terms of "research". Only the young and less experienced faculty do the hard work of teaching. "Research" becomes like the "Great Leap Forward" in the 50s and 60s, creating an illusion of being productive, when most products are shoddy. In the meantime, students do not get the quality education they paid for.
Due to the lack of a better educational model, people do not grow up learning to think for themselves and pursue their dreams, as the Chinese educational system is heavily based on norm-referenced tests which you have to excel to beat competitors. Schools graduate excellent test-takers, but not as many independent thinkers, qualified researchers, responsible citizens, and so on.
3. Housing: The price of housing is prohibitively high for young workers. Young people choose to stay in bigger cities because they think that's where the opportunities are (once again, this ties back to the hukou issue, which causes disparity in resource allocation), so cities like Shanghai and Beijing have soaring housing prices.
4. Healthcare: The system is problematic in all sorts of ways. For instance, doctors are poorly paid and some resort to corrupted practices (such as accepting kickbacks and bribes). Insurance sometimes does not cover critical illnesses that require expensive treatments. A major illness can reduce a family's living standards to ground zero. People always talk about what "developed countries" are doing, unfortunately America is not much of an example either at this moment.
5. Pride: One sad thing that I observed is that many Chinese have lost the pride of belonging to China, which is rather unusual in Chinese history. Social mobility was seen by some as having deteriorated. There is a sense that the second generations of the poor will stay poor because children of the rich and the powerful has too much of a head start.
The wealth China has accumulated does not have anything to do with the average guy on the street. The government may spend billions pleasing an European government, but poor kids in the countryside still depend on the good will of charity givers to have a decent schoolhouse. The average Chinese feel disconnected to the rhetorics the government is promoting on TV. Except the powerful and the rich, few people have anything to do with the "emerging superpower" construct western media promotes.
There is much anxiety about the future of the country, developing like this, allowing money to run over every other principle a civil society needs to function. This is best illustrated by the case of 18 people passing by as a little girl lie on a street dying after a traffic accident last year.
However, I believe that the pride is still dormant. Despair and helplessness have dampened everything for the moment.
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