by happyhere » Wed Apr 16, 2008 12:25 am
For primary school in Shanghai our children went to Fushan Lu Primary in Pudong. It now has several branches in Pudong and has fiddled with its name a bit. But our children went to the original one on Fushan Lu.
The work load was manageable. We sometimes let them stay for the after school homework session so they could get their work done before coming home, but other times we would have them come home and do it at home. They were limited to how much homework they could do each evening based on their year in school. I think we may have been one of the few families that really keep to the guidelines. We didn’t think it was excessive. There were no late nights and weekends were not jam packed with home work. Our children had a great school-life balance. They did martial arts, played soccer, learned guitar, biked, and swam a lot – all outside of school.
I think we didn’t feel the stress that many Chinese families feel because we knew that our children would eventually leave that system and go into international schools. So we didn’t see our children’s success or failure riding on each test. We could look beyond teh moment. That said they did well and our youngest one who had started off at a local kindergarten for three years before starting at Fushan Lu was able to consistently be at the top of her class. And it is important to note with the exception of one of our children, we didn’t even consider having them go beyond primary in the local system. We definitely saw the switch from primary to secondary as a stressful and unpleasant experience. We saw value in the local system for kindergarten and primary, but didn’t see much value FOR US beyond that.
I also think that it’s the parents’ attitude and expectations that put stress on children. Of course schools and teachers can cause stress as well. But I know there are a lot of children at international schools who are also very stressed out about how well they do not because of the school or teachers they have but because of pressure their parents put on them to do better than their classmates, to be at the top of their class, etc.
In the last ten years there have been so many educational reforms introduced nation-wide and even more so in Shanghai – from encouraging English to be taught in more enlightened ways, decreasing the number of children in each class, and mandating physical education and art classes to cutting down on the amount of homework that can be assigned. And I can tell you, a lot of educators find the greatest obstacles to those reforms are parents who are suspicious of those changes and somehow think their children’s future will be negatively affected by them.
You asked about keeping up our children’s English, well it wasn’t difficult because at home we speak English ( I am a native speaker of English so our children’s mother tongue is English), watch English TV, view English films; and our home is filled with English (and Chinese) books which our children spent a lot of time reading. So by the time they went into international schools their reading levels were in fact well above their grade level. The one area where they were academically weaker was their ability to produce extended pieces of academic writing in English – essays, reports, etc. I did not keep up their academic writing ability in English as I found it unnatural to ‘assign’ them that kind of writing task at home. Although they did a lot of letter writing in English to family and friends back home and that was one way for me to help them with their writing. All of them were able to make up this deficit really quickly once they were in international schools.
I know our experience may not be someone else’s, so I don’t want to suggest that the local system is best for everyone. But I think that for some foreign families especially ones that plan on being in China for the long haul and who really want the language, cultural and academic environment that the local system offers, it is well worth looking into.
