Setting Up the Half Government-Sponsored Schools, the Little Children Became Piggies Waiting to be Slaughtered

On standardized testing for the younger kids, from the Newspapers, translated…

“The first item, seeing my child get pushed into the testing place for English qualifications is like pushing him into the slaughterhouse.”  This was, from two years ago, when a parent took her own third-grade child to taking the English qualification exams, and afterwards, the child came out, with this beaten look on her face, it’d made her regretted her actions to date.

This child had been placed in dual-language institution since she was in the kindergarten years, in order to get into a private middle school, every year, she’d taken endless number of examinations, gave up on the gaming, exercising times that elementary age children had.  And this sort of a scene is, all too familiar to parents of the metropolitan regions.  For many years, how many points above the passing grade of the English examination meant how high one’s English abilities were, this, had always been a myth for the students, as well as the parents too; but, after so many examinations, did the level of skill in English really improve for the students of Taiwan?

Sixteen years ago, there only a little over ten thousand children who took the examinations, and now, it’d become the activity for ALL the citizens across this nation, there had been, six and a half million students who’d taken the test.

There are one million kids in elementary school right now, and when scoring a high grade on the English exams became their goals of learning, it will surely, destroy the love for learning, and distort the purpose of education.  As this had become the trend today, the Department of Education should think about why they’d allowed this standardized test to extend so far, ten years ago, they’d voted on the inappropriateness of the examinations, and now, are the reasons for the testing convincing?

And so, now, you have kids, sitting at their desks, cramming their books, during off hours, instead of seeing kids, running wild AND free, doing what kids are suppose to be doing, at break time, and that, is all due to this need to make them excel, need for them to better than we are, hello, hello, hello???  You, stupid PARENTS and you god DAMN systems ARE murdering the love of learning for your young, do you not realize that already???

Work Hard, and Your Dreams Shall Come True, on Education of Children

Translated…

I’m a last year middle school instructor, I’m also the parent of a examination taker, toward the parents of my students, along with my own child too, I’d had a very different testing season.

After the major tests were done, after the first scores were noted, a TON of the kids in my class said that they don’t want to go for another test anymore, that they’re only young once, they don’t want to waste their youths away, cramming, but, they seemed to be dissatisfied with the schools they’d gotten into.  I’d asked how they felt, a lot of them believed that they should party hard first.  There are, however, three or four kids that told me, that they wanted to take the specialty exams, to give themselves another shot.

As I’d returned home, my only baby girl too, was crying, she seemed dissatisfied at the school she’d been accepted to, she told me, that she wanted to take the specialty examinations and was ready to buckle down and study.  I asked her, if there’s anything I can do, to help her out?  She hoped to take extra sessions at cram school.

And so, she started focusing on her plans of beating it, and, every day before seven I’d taken her to San-Chong MRT Station, where she got on, to go to cram school on her own; and at eleven in the night, we’d picked her up at the MRT stations.  My wife felt bad, seeing how my child would drag her tired body, she’d felt her heart ache, but I’d told my daughter clearly, that going to school is the easy part, that there are more challenges in her future up ahead, and that she should treat this time of her life, as the most hard-working time of her career as a middle school student then!

And so, some chose to party, other, to give oneself another chance.  Because of the typhoon, the grades were posted early, and my daughter got into the top three schools she’d hoped for, and those students who’d given themselves another chance, all performed relatively well too, some had even gotten accept to their first choice.  But, I’d seen on Facebook, “It must be easy for you, who’d taken the specialized examinations, so easily, you’d scored so high, had I known, I would’ve signed up too…”, without realizing, that on this road, those kids who walked it, had already worked real hard, to get to where they currently are.

In the depth of the night, I saw an article I’d saved after I’d retaken the entrance for my technical college, it wrote: “This, is probably how we all grew up/when we were younger, the meaning of life/existed only in July of the year/and so we worked hard/and studied underneath the early morning bus stops/to the lamplights of late nights…………”

Then, I wanted to cry, working hard, and, you will achieve your dreams!  Recalling my students, my own daughter, and I’d also gotten reminded of how I’d retaken my exams too, how much stamina I’d had back then.

And so, this, just shows you, how you need to set a good example for your kid to follow, like the writer of this article, he too, retook his entrance, because he didn’t get the desired grades the first time, and, because of his hard-working, never-quitting attitude, he’d gotten where he was.

For the Sakes of Fulfilling a Dream, the Piece of the Puzzle in Education Went Missing

Once again, this, is still, on the REFORMS in education, from the Front Page Sections, translated…

There had been so much storms, surrounding the newly no-examinations entrance into colleges, a TON of parents marched onto the streets, for their children’s sakes.  For the sake of the twelve years of continued education, the government had spent several billion dollars on upping the competitiveness of the community high school or technical high schools, to allow there to be better equipments, better teacher qualifications, so the kids everywhere would have that competitive edge.   But, even though the environment for better teachers had been set up, the roads to getting a higher education paved too, the counseling for the directions for the children’s future got started back in the middle school years, there is that one missing piece of the puzzle, the parents’ beliefs of the myth of honor rolls.

The entrance exams of the colleges are starting right now, and, we should start by telling the parents, to OPEN their MINDS up based off of how multivariate the questions are!

The Chinese exams had returned to the basics, but the questions are new and “alive”, there were a combinations of articles from the ages, to the current literary.  And, toward the multifaceted questions, there is an abundance of ALL sorts of reading materials, from novels, from poetry of new age poets, and, the essays from the current writers.  On the deciphering of older texts, there were stuff from the Tang, Song, Ming, and Ching Dynasties.

What’s even MORE amazing, that on the rewriting sections, the test questions used the song lyrics of pop music, anything from Faye Wang, Mayday, and the Band, F.I.R., it’d tested the students’ ability to apply what they’d learned, and, all of these abilities, are NOT gotten, by “squeezing” into the top-choice of high school, every high-end community high schools, in the Chinese classes, can manage to teach and train the students to be able to apply.

The parents worked their asses off, squeezing their offspring into the “brand” schools, wanting them to excel, to achieve, and now, having amazing students is NO longer the patent of those all-star schools, if the parents can ditch their old attitude, and choose a community high school for their children, they can still manage to create a good and amazing environment for learning for their high school age children.

Actually, the key of education is in the students, allowing the kids to save time on the commute, to spend more time on extracurricular activities, or reading for fun, allowing the school that they attend to be closer to home, so the neighbors are the kids’ classmates, it would add more to this sense of community, don’t give up on the near, because the distant is better, and kill the children’s senses of themselves, because that, is what everybody ELSE is aiming for.  The past few terms of our head of the Department of Education, NONE was from a namely high school, but, they’d done an outstanding job on getting their higher education, and job searches, along with in life too, and they’d in turn, miss their high school days.

The topics for the essay for the high school entrance is “Making a Dream Come True”, DO allow your kids to live their own dreams, let the education develop in multiple directions, to continue this fulfilling of dreams!

And so, you, YES, Y-O-U, STUPID parents should STOP believing that oh, “name-brand” is EVERYTHING, like in the U.S. where how the top five percent of high school grads are automatically admitted to state universities?  And, IF your child can be among the top FIVE in a so-so high school, but if you transferred her/him into a highly-competitive school, and her/his rank dropped to twenty-five percent, that would mean, that your kid won’t GET into that state college or state university immediately IF s/he applied, and is that what you want?  To RUIN their chances?  Yeah, I think N-O-T, but then again, maybe, I’m wrong!!!

The Stresses from the Examinations Caused a Gifted and Talented Student to Leap Off of a Building

Maybe, it’s the season, who knows???  From the Front Page Sections, translated…

The last year gifted and talented middle school student, after school last night, leapt from his twelfth story home, and killed himself; the police investigations found, that his parents are both school instructors where he’d gone, one in math, one in English, and the police suspected, that because he’d gotten too stressed out by the national middle school examinations that’s happening in May, that he’d just cracked, and killed himself.

His parents, after getting the news, hurried to the hospital, and they were heartbroken, as they were told the news of his death.  The principal from the school, after hearing the news, was shocked, that Lee had been doing quite well in school, maintained the top six scorers of his class, and scored high on both mathematics and English, had gotten fifth place in the city-wide violin competitions, is multi-talented, and would perform in front of the whole school a lot, and had entered into English Speech competitions, and gotten put up for the junior diplomat too.

The family members disclosed to the police, that recently, the son had told his school instructor, that he’d wanted to “work hard, to take the national exams”, supposing, that he was talking about the national middle school students’ examinations that is going to happen for the first time, since the implementation of the 12-year education program, “the stresses from his studies” might be the cause of his suicide.  But, the school principal, Tseng said, that there are NO major examinations scheduled any time soon, she didn’t believe that “scholastic pressures” was the cause of the student’s suicide.

So, from the surface, we still have a PERFECTIONIST, someone who’s done WELL in his studies, and what, might cause this young man to suicide, we may NEVER know for sure, as the only person with the answer to that question is already D-E-A-D, so, all of this, is still in H-I-N-D-S-I-G-H-T, and, could this have been prevented?  Maybe, so, why did it still happen?