四海为家

I love this post on the different methods an American vs a Chinese teacher would use to teach the Cinderella story, translated into English here by ChinaSMACK. The writer is maybe a little bit off on what aspects of the story a Western teacher would highlight, but otherwise the caricatures are spot-on.

For those of you who haven’t yet had the pleasure of experiencing the Chinese school system first-hand, to generalize, you could say that the average Chinese teacher uses teaching methods that were popular in the West when Western countries faced similar constraints in terms of class sizes and available resources: lots of memorization, lots of lecturing, little class participation. With an added dose of criticizing the students — sometimes at Wuda it feels as if the teachers see their role as convincing us that we know nothing so that we’ll be motivated to study even harder (or appreciate their guidance even more). The instinct for a foreign teacher, on the other hand, tends to be to go for interactive activities or group discussions, to push students to have their own opinions, and to smile encouragingly and tell them they’re doing a good job. Obviously there are both good and bad teachers in both camps, and my favorite class at Wuda is my 古代文化 class on ancient Chinese poetry where we memorize a poem a week and get yelled at at least once per class, so maybe that method isn’t always wrong… in the classes I teach though, I think I’ll stick to the encouraging smiles. I wouldn’t want to break out of cultural stereotypes.