My Corner for Education

My grandparents raised me since the day I was born. They took me from my mother’s arms to care for me in their bedroom in the attic. We lived in a big old house in Chia-Yi City, right behind the downtown provincial hospital and next to a temple. I love that city! My grandfather was a scholar and a civil servant who used to work in the city hall. Wherever we went in town, people seemed to recognize my grandparents and greeted them with great respect. My grandmother used to be so proud of showing me off to people because she became a grandmother at the age of 43. My grandparents were like my parents when I was growing up.

 

My grandmother raised three sons and two daughters. My father was the oldest one, the first born to give them a grandchild. They raised me in the family home, so my parents could be spared to focus on building their careers. My parents were young when they started a family and had me right away. It was not easy for my father to pursue his career in Chia-yi because farming was the main industry in Southern Taiwan then. He was an engraver. He decided to leave the family in Chia-yi and moved up north to run his business. Later on my mother, who ran a beauty hair salon, also left Chia-yi with my younger siblings to unite with him. I was left to stay with my grandparents.

 

My grandparents took care of me and taught me many things while I was growing up in the south. The advantage of growing up with the grandparents was that I got to know a lot about their past history and the family stories. The disadvantage was that I never got close to my parents until later on when I was older. This is one of the reasons why I never encourage my friends or family to send their young children to study abroad on their own. Young children need their parents!

 

I had never been in a kindergarten class. I remember my aunt took me to a kindergarten to visit her friend once. I felt very awkward meeting children of my own age. I felt I was a lot older than those kids; however, I was fascinated by the toys they had. I was given a rocking piggy bank there at the kindergarten. That was my first ever toy. In fact, I did not grow up with toys, never played with a real doll. I always made my own toys such as dress-up paper dolls or games.

 

I had tons of pastime activities in my grandparents’ home. My grandfather used to take me everywhere on the weekends. My grandmother was a stay-home housewife, so I used to tag alone wherever she went. They allowed me to roam the field across the street at the hospital or climb the trees to pick fruit in our yard. My best buddy was the boy next door who was my age but he was a bit slow. There was another girl who lived behind the temple and her grandmother used to run a small variety store. My grandmother used to tell me that her grandmother often took advantage of the little kids who shopped in her variety store. When I left for Taipei, I never got to see them again.

 

We went on a field trip to visit a very famous arboretum last Wednesday. The trip turned out to be very disappointing because of the rain during midday. However, the real downer was the surprised confrontational verbal conflict that we had witnessed before we left school.

 

All of my students were really excited about the first field trip of the year last Wednesday. I could sense their excitement in the air when they were lining up to entre the school. When we were ready to leave after the national anthem, O’ Canada, one of my students named RR reported to me that her lunch was missing. She insisted that she brought her lunch in a black backpack but it was no longer there on her hook. I told her to go to the office to call home in case that she left it at home. While we were on our way to the office, she returned in tears to tell me that her mom was coming to school to pick her up. I was very puzzled and told her that she could have half of my lunch if she did not mind sharing the lunch with me. My point was there was no reason for her to go home and not to go on the trip with the whole class because of her missing lunch. I told her to get in line and get ready to leave with us.

 

By the time we got to the office, the trouble showed up. The secretary told me that the mother was furious that RR’s lunch was “stolen” and she insisted on checking everyone’s backpack. Shortly after we got to the office, in come the mother, and she was obviously very upset and raising her voice in the office. She was stopped by the principal not to go further into our school and was advised to stop yelling in the office. I did not realize that there was bad water between the principal and the parent prior to this incident. They were arguing in front of two classes of school children and some of them were obviously shocked and shaken by the scene.

 

I quickly escorted my students on to the bus and asked the other teacher and parent volunteers to look after them for me. I returned to the office to get that poor girl who was crying and caught in the middle between the principal’s and her mother’s heated argument. The mother told me that she wanted her trip money back and the student was not going with us. The principal returned her comment by saying that we would give her the money back. I could see all the gloom faces in the office. It was such a chaotic situation!

 

I held on to the howling girl and explained to the mother that the child could share the lunch with me. I told her that the missing lunch was a problem that had already happened. A lunch would not just simply disappear. We would find it eventually if it was lost at school. If she did not let her daughter go on the trip, she was in fact creating a second problem for her daughter’s education. I insisted that the child needed to go! The parent volunteer who was in charge of the school-wide lunch program quickly gave me some snack packs to put in my backpack after she heard me. I grabbed on to the girl and gently lead her out the front door towards the bus. I was SO worried that the mother might follow and use force to have a “tug-of-war” with me to pull the girl back. Thank God, the mother did not argue with me. She followed me and the child but then let me take the sobbing child quickly out of the office. When she called the girl to turn around to get a bottle of water from her car, the rock was then finally settled in my heart. She actually listened to me!

 

Any educational system has its flaws; therefore, Taiwan’s education system is not exceptional. I have heard that, after the last ten years of educational reform in Taiwan, the direction of education policies just got worse and the quality of education is dwindling on all levels. Apparently, universities are sprouting from all corners of Taiwan. The admission rate for university has been risen up to higher than 90%. I don’t know whether the rumor is a true reflection of the education reform since I have been absent from Taiwan for the past 17 years. Judging from the stories I have heard, I am not so sure that the “free-for-all” approach to admit as many students as possible is a good idea for betterment in education. I am just wondering if the drop-out rate for the first year university students is also high to sieve out students who are not really ready for the academia stream.

 

The proportion of labour forces in all fields has to be balanced in order to maintain a well functioning society. The training for all professional fields should not be limited to academia only. They should also include training for skilled trades and apprenticeship programs. Unfortunately, most parents, no matter in the East or the West, hope to send their children to higher education one day. The traditional Asian societies, under the deep-rooted Confucius influence, believe that a scholarly status is superior to a blue collar position. The fact is that we need people of all professions in a modern society. We probably need as many mechanics as mechanical engineers.

 

In fact, according a news report I read a few years ago, the only welder in one medical University made as much money as a dean in one year due to the strong demands for his service at the university. He was the only experienced welder the university could find in town; therefore, he had to work so much overtime to meet the demands. The news broke out because all public servants in Ontario who earned more than one hundred thousand dollars have to reveal their income level. The welder worked for the hospital attached to the university, so his name and income was listed. Unfortunately, if a teacher tells parents that their kid should take an apprenticeship program to become a welder or a mechanics, the teacher would definitely get a very negative response from the parents.

 

When I went to school, it was not easy to get into a university. We had to work so darn hard to take tests after tests to prepare for that entrance exam on that hot judgment day in July. Some people were really good at the book-learning; they would do well on those paper-pencil tests. However, their luck also depended on the blue moon. If you happened to be in a day of the bad moon arising, such as getting sick or having something out of ordinary happened to you, that day might just become your doom day in your destiny, at least the destiny for the next few years anyway.

 

One of the popular sayings before I went to university was:

For the last few years, Terry Fox Run has been the first school-wide fundraising event we organize at school every September. Last Friday, we had the assembly to launch the campaign. This week, I decided to read a book on Terry Fox to my students. For anyone out there who is not familiar with Terry Fox, Terry has been recognized by most Canadians as a national hero. Here is the link to the book I read, so you can have a brief idea about Terry Fox’s life story. (http://www.maxinetrottier.com/fox.html)

I always enjoy reading aloud to my students. Whenever I read to them, I model the reading with great passion. I dramatize a story, read with voice expressions, and sometimes add little sound effects to intensify the story. I love to see my students so intrigued when listening to a story because I myself was fascinated and intrigued by it. We don’t want children just to decode when they read. We want children to immerse themselves in reading with deeper understanding. So, once a while, I do have to clown myself to ensure that they have full comprehension of a text and are enthusiastic about reading. I want them to be so eager to grab the book off my hands and read. (That might be a bit stretched exaggeration.)

On Friday, when I was reading the Terry Fox biography to my students, I guess I immersed myself TOO MUCH into the book. They listened so attentively to my reading and we were so empathetic and touched by Terry’s life struggle, I started to sniffle and then wept in front of my students. I usually present myself as a tough one in front of all students at school; however, I am often moved by sad life stories including this one. My students suddenly became so quiet and, I guess, they just didn’t know how to react to their teacher’s bizarre behaviour. When I finally pulled myself together after getting a few pieces of tissue to blow my nose and wipe my tears. A few hands went up and this little voice came out of a little girl, “I bet Terry’s story reminded you of your dad who died of cancer.” My God, I had to turn back to grab a few more tissue after I heard that comment! Their teacher just shed her iron tears in front of them.

I have been trying to teach my students the importance of making connections when reading (Critical Literacy: focus on making analysis, inferences, and synthesis in reading comprehension). I told the little Grade Three students that we often connect a story we read to another story we had read before, to a personal experience we had encountered or an event that had happened in the world around us. Terry Fox died of cancer and my students also know that my father died of cancer. They immediately connected the two things together and applied their empathy to conclude that I must be crying because of my own connection to Terry’s tragic life.