I had a wonderful experience at TIS and am very grateful for my time spent in the Chinese immersion track as I have had many amazing opportunities to extend my friendship to individuals across the world. It has been nine years since I graduated, and I know a lot of things have changed while I have been in middle and high school. While here at college, some peers and I began discussing different aspects of education and its flaws, I noticed I did not resonate with my peers on the overuse of preparation for and implementing state standardized tests during my time at TIS, which I am very thankful for. The only testing that I took multiple times was the HSK (Hanyu Shuiping Kaoshi), an exam that was given in China to test an individual’s reading, writing, and speaking skills. I took it a few times on my own accord, and I did well enough to apply to University in China as a fluent exchange student.
TIS did an extraordinary job creating the Chinese, Japanese and Spanish immersion tracks. Granted, combining different styles of learning from two very diverse cultures is extremely difficult. Being taught in a more traditional Chinese way had its pros and cons. Mathematics and sciences were straight forward, and I found I enjoyed those class periods the most. On the other hand, I do remember strongly disliking the weekly memorization of famous essays and poems that would take me many hours to finally know word for word. More than nine years later and I do not remember a single line of any of the poems I memorized and I never completely understood what the authors were trying to convey. Forcing me to memorize those poems made my want to shy away more from learning more about the language and culture, and I do know many classmates who stopped taking Mandarin classes after elementary school for that reason. That is one aspect of my education at TIS that showed me that I wanted to learn things on my own and that blindly memorizing information would not help me later in life.
While on my 5th grade capstone trip, my two classmates and I stayed at a boarding school in Beijing for a week. The teacher would write on the board in chalk and talk at the class, no discussion was allowed during class time and if anyone was caught taking they would be sent outside. Granted, this is an extreme version of how traditional classes were taught, but I did notice the similarity of not being allowed to discuss topics.
Teaching a second language that involves a character system, I am sure, is not an easy task to do without implementing memorization. I think that analyzing the methods that work really well for education in both the United States and the traditional Chinese way of teaching and mixing them together would create a better environment for students rather than just teaching in a more traditional manner. By increasing the discussion between classmates and finding creative ways of teaching characters to students, I think TIS would improve greatly.
Thank you,
Coral Ng ‘08