to be horrified at the behaviour in bohunt school

[SEsofty]

Just watched the programme about Chinese teachers in uk. Whilst I appreciate that it is reality tv and thus exaggeration for effect I was still horrified with the apparent number of children who were talking in class.

I'm not that accident and went to a very normal school but talking whilst teacher did simply didn't happen. I don't agree with the Chinese methods but talking whilst someone is trying to teach you is simply rude.

Zhx3- I didn't mean to be aggressive- I'm sorry if that's how it read to you. The tasteless joke didn't come from you. I won't repeat it if you missed it- it was very unpleasant.

When you say that the vast majority of Chinese will not be concerned about who cleans their cars do you mean because they are too poor to have a car to be washed?

Looking back I think Zhx3 was very clear at what opportunities her peers and previous generation had. Her brainy friend who was from a farming village now drives a taxi, which her teacher mum was sad about as he never realised his full potential.

My point is that looking at it from our western culture will never be a touch on what families without welfare will feel. You cannot impose our relatively luxury standards on a country where there is a very real chance that if you don't get exam results you won't be employed. You seem to be saying it is all the same and their attitudes to study aren't different at all and trying to point out similarities, where I don't think you can. What I was pointing out was why some children and parents would rather their kids have better jobs, not just for salary but because the work itself isn't regulated enough to ensure they come home with all of their limbs...
No idea why you think I would want that over here. I am merely pointing out some 'extreme' differences.

BR, I reluctantly wanted to further contribute to this post as I find your responses quite frankly rude. I don't know if you genuinely want to know or just like to be sarcastic and aggressive in your approach. I feel that you are against the Chinese, private schooling and parents that want their children to do well irrespective of their background.

FYI and to answer an earlier question of yours ... being Chinese, my family is from a working class poor background. We had no private tuition and we all went to a comprehensive school in a highly deprived area.

Due to our culture of having to do well at school and provide for ourselves, my brother ended up in a Russell Group university and my sister at Cambridge. As for myself, well I certainly wasn't a grade A student and I was not allowed to go to university as I was expected to work long hours supporting my family's business whilst still at school and during half terms.

Now? My husband is a nurse and myself in an office but I work on average 50hrs a week so that I can afford the school fees to send my DD to a relatively cheap non-selective private school whereby we have had to make other sacrifices. Why private? Because after visiting both state and private we were impressed by the behaviour and politeness of the students at my DD's current school and due to the quiet, shy nature of my DD. AND before you start saying it could all be "on show", since joining the school, we have experienced pupils being courteous by opening doors for parents, having good manners etc.

So I do find your post insulting when you question how do I know my DD is 4 years ahead of the others blah blah ... I've explained it. When told so by the experienced teachers and my DD's ability to do various books at home above her age then I feel proud of what she has achieved. And as mentioned in an earlier threat of mine, this is not to sound boastful but in support of one poster commenting on how the Chinese in English schools do well.

Although I don't agree with the Chinese culture on many things such as their human rights record, favouritism towards boys and lack of empathy towards animals etc.. those low achievers who don't meet the grade (you could say, myself!) work hard/put in the hours to provide for the family because of my can do and take own responsibility attitude as well as sense of pride.

bertrand I absolutely do not include my own DC as part of that group.

Not because they are exceptional in any way. They're not.

But because I know from many years on MN on threads just like this that my expectations ( in terms of behaviour, attainment etc) make me an outlier.
This is also borne out by the many many school visits I make and teachers I speak to.

Personally, I think huge swathes of young people are being let down by the (well meaning) adults in their life... But to misquote Amy Chua 'not on my watch'.

Blossom8- I am really sorry you think I am aggressive and rude.

However, I take great exception to your statement that I am racist because I question the Chinese school system. I would like you to retract that statement, please.

And I find it extraordinary that you think I am against parents wanting their children to do well regardless of background because I am trying to find out what happens in China to children who are or lower ability or who have parents who can't afford tutoring.

It is usual for people who make categoric statements "Chinese teenagers are 3 years ahead of British ones" "My child is 4/5 years ahead of the national average" to be asked to provide some sort of evidence. I thought your statement about your dd was very interesting and wanted to find out whether you thought it was because of private school, her natural intelligence or her Chinese background. Which seemed to me to be a perfectly reasonable question. I am sorry you didn't see it that way.

Anyway. Retract the allegation of racism and I promise not to engage with you again.

My comments are not restricted to state schools Mehitabel. That really is a red herring for I am sure you are right - behaviour in many independent schools leaves a lot to be desired. However in the good ones, just as in a good state one, the Riot Act is read if there is bad behaviour and unpleasant consequences flow from that behaviour to the offender. I suspect that if you had reported the behaviour of the boys from the public school they would have been made to regret it. At Bohunt no effective sanctions appear to have been imposed on any of the troublemakers. My point is that in all good schools I would have expected a Head who wanted an experiment to succeed on its own terms, to ensure that children in his charge behaved in a way which did credit to themselves, their parents and their school and told them in advance of that expectation and that his beady eye would be on them! Perhaps that would have been the case with a Head who either had no wish for one outcome or the other or was able efficiently and fully to set any personal feeling aside in the interest of academic experiment. The only excuse for not setting clear boundaries for the children in advance would be if he did not know that enforcing classroom discipline was not necessary for Chinese teachers and so did not foresee the problems they would have. That excuse rapidly disappeared. little happened in response to appalling behaviour from some - just a feeble lecture from a member of staff about future conduct, which was unaccompanied by threat or rela discioline and made no impact beyond a moment.

Thank you for your apology BR, your post upset me. I have only met my China cousins a handful of times, so although we don't "know" each other, when we meet, there is that familial closeness of knowing what everyone is up to.

The expectation from many Chinese parents (I guess apart from those at the top of the ladder is "a life better and more comfortable than the one I have had". So for my parents, it is that we didn't have to endure the long hours, heavy work and racist abuse from customers that comes with catering. Oxbridge was the expectation, followed by a professional job, preferably a doctor, lawyer and accountant - that's a British Born Chinese in-joke. For my cousins, the expectation would have been to get out of the village and farming (not farming for profit, by the way, farming to live). They have all done so.

For the lady from rural China, who worked as a nanny for my niece, getting out into work in the city would have been her parents' ambition. This would have been a family who ate congee rather than rice, because there wasn't enough rice to go around. She was treated well within my cousin's family and got to send money home. This won't be the case for many Chinese migrants.

Life was shit under Mao for millions of Chinese - my father's family because they starved, and my mother's family because they were persecuted. Life was shit under Japanese occupation too. The history is still very recent. Chinese people still see education as a ticket out of poverty.

Most Chinese don't own cars or clothes that need dry-cleaning.

My friend who drives the taxi is in the UK, not China, by the way.

BR, I appreciate your response and apology. I'm not implying that you are racist at all.

I'm not saying Chinese are the best academically but just trying to give you an insight into our culture and what is expected from us, for example how education for us is important. I think an earlier poster provided the insight and I supported that. She's from a middle class background and myself a working class background.

I'm British after all and as mentioned there are many aspects of the Chinese culture I don't agree with.

Project Hope is the project I was thinking of, to increase the educational opportunities for children in poverty in China. My parents' local Chinese association supported the building of a school in Shaanxi province, and went to visit the children. They said it was a humbling experience.
www.into-giving.com/en/projects/china-hope-project/

Sorry, blossom8. You said "I feel that you are against the Chinese,"

That is an allegation of racism. Please retract it and apologise.

BR, I apologise if you feel my comment was implying that you are a racist which has been misconstrued

I think that after such a parents' meeting, most parents I know would be vowing to get home and give their children a bollocking. I'd like to think that the parents at Bohunt were particularly crap (would be great to hear from them though, now they've presumably seen the show!), and I was definitely surprised to see and hear their reactions.

Those children behaved horribly, and their English teachers were rubbish at dealing with it, and their parents backed them up.

Interestingly, my DC said they saw nothing wrong with being lectured to, and that they quite liked lessons in that format. But that being expected to take continual and full notes while listening would have been difficult. I suspect that it's often the more charismatic of their teachers who do stand at the front and talk, because they have something interesting to talk about and it captures the students' interest. But they don't do it about photosynthesis and just expect children to copy everything down.

DD is worried that at university she won't know which bits to write down and which are just for additional interest, in lectures

I really didn't like how the Chinese teacher kept going on about the welfare system almost writing the kids off! All kids are chatty like that, they was hardly bad behaved!!

Also they need to help the students more instead of just standing up the front! No wonder they don't listen because when I don't understand something I lose interest!!

I would be put off a school where they wanted to expose pupils on national TV. They must have had to get permission. Many would have refused. There is no way that I would have allowed my children to take part.
I disapprove of the whole experiment and only think it useful had it been done in a very different way.

Do you think the parents had any idea of how things were going when they went to that parents evening, Nit? Because if so they were truly crap.

"BR, I apologise if you feel my comment was implying that you are a racist which has been misconstrued"

It is impossible to misconstrue "I think you are against the Chinese"

I must say I question the value of this as an OU study. It must be fairly obvious that the Chinese system gets the results it does because children have been steeped in it from the start and don't know anything different. Suddenly transplanting that into a British school without those years of preparation was never going to give a very realistic picture.

Most Bohunt parents are horrified I think, at what they have seen. (Former Bohunt parent, still live nearby)

Agree most parents wouldn't have given permission for their children to be filmed (I certainly wouldn't put my teens at the mercy of a film company's editing).

Poor decision by the school to participate at all. No way could this be an objective study as many PP have pointed out. You can't just import a culture wholesale like that and think it will work.

Of the pupils who are given a lot of airtime for all the wrong reasons, I think other pupils who aren't in the film, are not at all surprised.

'But the hype around the Chinese system, which nobody seems to be questioning, is that every single child is emerging from school with stellar results and going on to professional careers.'

Of course that has been questioned. Everybody knows that 'Chinese PISA results' are 'Shanghai results' and even at that the selection criteria as to what schools or test results are included in the count are probably dodgy.

But I want to know why injecting a healthy dose of reality into the lives of teenagers in the UK is considered a mean thing to do and why it seems to be taken for granted that certain young people are preordained to be cashiers in supermarkets.

This thread is like a scab that itches to be picked!

A couple of posters have asked what happens to those students who do not excel or achieve, and I hope that what I have shared about my family and friends, here and in China, provided some insight to those who were interested. There has been a question about children with special educational needs, and what happens to them? I know one child (now an adult) with autism. His family are wealthy (built up a manufacturing business), so I have not shared details of how he is cared for. It wouldn't be typical for an "average" Chinese citizen, and I suspect it wouldn't provide a satisfactory answer to those who have asked the question. When his parents are no longer here, responsibility for his care will pass on to his brother, I would think.

Someone has mentioned that caring for elders is a role that will fall heavily onto women and I don't disagree with this, but this is not a China-specific problem, is it? I think if you don't understand or haven't grown up with the concepts of filial piety or loss of face, it can be difficult to comprehend or accept them. Going back to my dad, he left his family aged 12 to come to the UK on his own to live with his aunt and uncle. He was educated here and went into catering. He sent a lot of the money he earned home to his family (sometimes a source of tension when we were growing up), and has only seen them a handful of times. This is an example of filial piety, his responsibility to his parents and family. My maternal grandmother lived with us since my parents were married and despite their differences, my dad cooked for her every day and visited her in hospital every day when she was sick. Because he worked catering hours and my mum worked office hours, he would do daytime and she would do evenings. My parents are my heroes, to be honest. My nan too. But you can't generalise 1.2 billion people easily.

For those girls (and boys) "zipping along", achieving well academically... if they don't have the time with their jobs to care for their elders themselves, I assume that they will have means to outsource that care. When grandparents come to live with you, it isn't unequivocally the case that only women care for them. Grandchildren will help, both parents may be in jobs outside the home. I speak from my personal experience, and those of my Chinese friends and family here and in HK and China. But we are a small sample set.

I see there is a new series soon called Educating Cardiff. I'm amazed head teachers are still volunteering for these programmes as they must know how they will be edited. The Educating Yorkshire head said he was surprised they didn't show the well behaved ones and the brightest ones more. But surely by now no head can be under any illusions about it.

Bertrand I think they had some idea - JOsh's mum must have, for one!

Hollyoaks they were worse than 'chatty', they were downright rude and badly behaved!

"But I want to know why injecting a healthy dose of reality into the lives of teenagers in the UK is considered a mean thing to do and why it seems to be taken for granted that certain young people are preordained to be cashiers in supermarkets."

It isn't. Oh, and it isn't.

bertrand you and I may be happy to do so, but MN is living proof that a large proportion of parents do not think their DC should do anything dull or difficult.

School should be engaging and 'accessible' otherwise the little darlings misbehave.

I was quite upset when watching the programme. I am not Chinese and don't know much about their culture and society beyond what is probably a common stereotype.

I was bullied at school and when watching I feel the class dynamics are a form of bullying towards the teachers. I understand various explanations for this behaviour, but I don’t understand why the parents and the head teacher appear to condone it. At least that is how it appears to me.

I really struggle to understand the behaviour of the mother of the boy with the kettle without contemplating an element of racism. Would her son behave so disruptively and disrespectfully in a lesson of Bohunt teacher? If the mother were confronted by a white British teacher about that disgraceful behaviour, would she start with the history of the kettle and that disrupting drinking tea in class is a human right?

Nor do I understand that stereotype about being an individual. What does this really say? Which people are not individuals? Why is that boy entitled to disrupt and disrespect other individuals?