Quote:
Originally Posted by Melkerson
Nah, it's just that my Asian international school experience was very different from what you're describing. I mean I actually experienced it first hand, so I can tell you it was real. And if all the alumni fund-raising propaganda they send out is any indication, things haven't changed all that much.
Seriously, though, what are some of the types of schools these kids aspire to.
China is another planet from the rest of Asia. I assume you were in Singapore, which is a more sane country. Things are far more corrupt here than anywhere else and ideas about what constitutes education are totally different. It's far more based on exams in their domestic system and they very much carry that over to the international curriculum. When I say "international school" I should probably be saying "foreign language school", because the actual international schools with non-Chinese passport holders function as you describe. In China, our international schools typically pay about 10-15% less than those for Chinese passport holders. Here, it is a competitive industry including private and public schools which strive to attract the most students possible and do so through marketing matriculations and their rankings. In particular, the number of "Oxbridge" (Oxford or Cambridge) offers every year is the most important metric of school quality according to parents. We had 3 Oxbridge offers, all of them mathematics, last year. This resulted in a near 40% increase in the size of our incoming class. The median student goes to somewhere like Warwick university, with the dummies going to places like Liverpool. Additionally, we have plenty of students going to great schools in HK/Canada/Aus/NZL. In my career, although I only have a handful of Oxford/Cambridge students who studied econ or related majors, I have dozens that ended up in HKU or HKUST which probably honestly have a higher level of undergraduate education than Ivy League or G5 universities anyway.
At my current school, kids going to American universities is rare and typically restricted to those going into the arts. We have no art/music/performing arts/sports at this program. It is only ~130-160 students at any given time, so getting 3 Oxbridge offers is actually kind of a huge deal for a program of our small size.
So how does it work? We teach content for way too many periods per week for our first semester, then our second semester is literally just spamming past exam papers and students practicing questions over and over again. From March to June I'm pretty much just solving questions in front of the classroom then allocating practicing work and grading it/giving feedback. The CIE A-levels, IGCSE, and American AP exams are very predictable and gameable, and if you just keep practicing previous years papers and figure out how to answer the questions, you can get by with surprisingly little actual subject knowledge because you understand the format of the question, the grading, and how to optimally answer the question. I don't know about other exam boards, but for CIE (which has been what I have done most of my years) questions can even repeat on the MCQ section. So even if the conceptual knowledge, understanding, or English reading is weak, they can often get the correct answer simply because they've done the question before. We take teaching to the exam to new extremes, and very little outside-of-curriculum topics are discussed. In fact, when a teacher ventures outside of topics immediately relevant to what will be presented on the official exam, students get really pissed. You should generally only do this if students are authentically curious about it and ask you to do so and its within censorship guidelines. But its a fairly small minority, maybe around 10%, who would ever be curious about these things. Most students just want to maximize their exam scores while learning as little as possible about the subject.
Every program will always identify "Oxbridge Candidates" in early grade 11 and then pick these students out to do extra classes where they'll learn more deeply about their chosen subject maybe once or twice a week in an additional lesson not attended by the other students. These have always been a blast because usually these are the motivated and curious students. They often ask what I can only call "Nobel-Prize" questions and interacting with them in these sessions is usually thought provoking. There's also an implied relaxation of censorship with these students, and not surprisingly these are often the ones most critical of Chinese government policy and most informed about history. In these sessions we usually cover fairly broad topics and try to get a feel for what economics is about in an elite undergraduate environment and make them comfortable talking about the subject in a more spontaneous way, which is important because Oxford and Cambridge require oral interviews via Zoom to make sure the kid isn't just an exam machine like most of our students basically are.
The kids are my current program are the highest ability level I've had in my career, but that's simply because it's a public school and thus requires a Zhongkao score. Even still we have a handful of tards, but they're a much smaller minority than what I'm used to. My previous school was very deliberately targetting "nu money ******s" who usually had tard kids... Sometimes literally they had special needs that prevented them from going to a regular high school but the parent insisted they finish an undergraduate diploma. It is very much possible for a kid like this to go to a private "international" school, barely understand english, have his GPA fabricated, earn mediocre/bad scores on official exams, be admitted to a Z-tier undergradaute university, graduate from said university, and have a high income job arranged for him through nepotism. But the social status of having a high school diploma/undergraduate degree is still of vital importance to Chinese parents. Face saving is still very extreme here relative to SG/TW/HK.
Did I have some bitterness about essentially being an exam prep instructor rather than a proper high school teacher? Initially, yes. But later on I realized the exams and education part are barely important... mostly they just need an adult in their life who cares for their well being, interacts with them, is interested in their lives, and can serve as a role model. You're really there largely to fill in the gaps and imperfections their own parents have, which are often very large. Some of my most rewarding experiences in my career were essentially being surrogate dads to unhappy kids who just needed someone to talk to and vent to. Up until now it's always been unpopular female students and I'd kinda hoped I would be similarly approached by male students, but it has literally never happened yet. Female students have always liked me a lot more than male students, which I really wasn't expecting given my sort of "scary" appearance. But anyone who's followed my logs over the years knows that I have a fairly "feminine" and sensitive dispostion that probably gets indirectly communicated in my classroom interactions.
I really do feel a great sense of pride when a student tells me about how they took up lifting or I observe a kid bringing healthy home made food to school instead of eating oily gross trash. And yeah, we shoehorn in some actual education for the students who are really interested. But ultimately its mostly just childcare. Another thing most people don't realize is that Chinese students are about 3-5 years less mature psychologically and emotionally than their western counterparts. I'm basically taking care of 10-15 year olds, not really 15-18 year olds. Overall, I'm super satisfied with the job and don't have major complaints. If I could go back to age 18 and pick another career would I? Yes, absolutely. I would have gone into cosmetic surgery for sure. I had no idea what this industry was really about until a few years ago and believed all the stigma and negativity that surrounds it in the west. My most recent ex-gf was in this career, but in the shadiest way possible. I'd rather not write too much about that...
