March 16th, 2013
I have never realized the extent of variation in younger kids these days--until today. In Chinese school, I TA for a first grade class (hojoy). There's three categories of kids. One group is the kids who come to class every day with all their homework done, and can actually understand what the teacher is teaching. The other group is the kids who go to class having no idea whatsoever about what is going on. If you ask them a question about chinese in general, they will either stare at you blankly, stare at the ground blankly, or mumble something incoherent about how they like turtles too. These kids will sometimes dress up like diva queens. The third group is the kids who have to have their parents sit with them in class because they are hyperactive and will scream their heads off if they do not have adult supervision.
In my class, I am sorry to say, group 2 is prevalent by far. Today, there was a test, and I was in charge of grading the oral parts, where the kids had to read a pingyin passage out loud and I had to judge whether or not they said the words correctly. Forget that--the kids didn't even SAY anything, let alone say it correctly. Sometimes, it was really frustrating, but it felt wrong to get mad at the kids or say anything mean. So, even if a kid got every single word wrong, I still said, "Good job, you got an awesome score."
I don't think I remember ever being like that...but I mean, you can't blame the kids for not knowing anything. Being kids, they're bound to be hyperactive and not wanting to do their homework. I can only hope that later, they'll learn to work harder.
Hey that's just like my church! Except we don't get grades or anything. (If we did, I'm pretty sure that most people would get 0's.) When I was little, I used to be in your classification of group 1, but throughout middle school, I was definitely group 2 (because I really only showed up a handfull of times per year). When my sister was little, she was the only group 3 kid in her year. My mom had to pull her out of class on a weekly basis (but it wasn't strict so it was okay).
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