Author: wjl5238

Tutoring is a massive industry in many Asian countries and has become an integral part of the education system. Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Hong Kong, and China lead other nations in spending on private tuition. Parents have spent billions of dollars every year to give their children a push in the education race. Tutoring used to be only for the slow learners but global competition has placed the industry in the mainstream.

On the other hand, tutoring doesn’t seem to be such a huge industry in the U.S. Is because of the cultural differences, or some difference in society? More importantly, I am also curious whether tutoring is a good complement to the education system and actually improve the quality of education.

The first questions that should be answered are why do Asian parents would like to spend a large amount of money to let their kids get tutoring. One main reason is that the overall competition is more intense, whether it’s entering university for high school and college or in the workforce. They want to arm their children with the best education possible and feel that the formal schooling system isn’t enough. Although there is yet no evidence that grades of these students have improved, parents are not leaving anything to chance and are willing to dish out a sizable amount of the household budget for tuition. There’s also peer pressure and the “kiasu” attitude – the fear of losing out and being left behind because all the other moms and dads are sending their primary and secondary kids to private tutors.

However, in the US the great majority of parents look for the lowest-price tutoring available in their community or alternatively for free, volunteer-based tutoring. The much less demand for tutoring somehow reflects the different meaning of education between the US and Asian countries. In Asian countries, education is always closely related to social mobility. An outstanding grade in those most competitive exams, normally the college entrance exam, is like a ticket to higher social strata. It’s the best evidence of the intelligence and the potential of the person, and it never expires. More importantly, everyone can take the exam. Although the uneven distribution of educational resources certainly exists, the extreme difficulty of the exam makes it more depends on talent.

Despite the difficult nature of those competitive Asian exams, as the urbanization going, the exam is inevitably becoming more unfair. However, inequality has been existing in the US education system for so long that in the culture, people hardly consider education as a functional equalizer in society. If there is not even fairness in a competition, there is no point people would invest too much effort and money in education. It’s true that education equality and fairness has made good progress in the past decades, but it takes time for the public to change their opinion, and I think the historical unfairness in US education system is the reason for the significantly less amount of tutoring in the US.

The next question is, can tutoring actually help the education system to be better-off? In most case, my answer would be no. First of all, kids can only concentrate on studying for a limited amount of time. Spending too much time in after class tutoring can make students too tired to pay attention and thereby negatively affecting learning. Besides, even if all the children are so energetic that extra studying time doesn’t influence their ability to concentrate at all, paying to after-class tutoring is unnecessary. I have discussed one major reason for sending children to tutoring school, which is parents don’t want their children to be left behind. This type of feeling also reflected that parents do not trust the public education system enough. I acknowledged that there are some terrible public school, but if someone lives in a place where the public education system is terrible, it’s also not likely that he or she would find a much better instructor in tutoring school.

In conclusion, I think the existence of too much tutoring school is the symbol of the unhealthy education system. The goal of the education system is encouraging kids to do things they are supposed to do in their age, and everything in schools should just be enough. The schools are paid by the government to provide proper education to everyone, and students personal success should depend on themselves instead of how much their parents spend on tutoring.

source:

https://qz.com/970130/asians-spend-15-of-their-family-income-on-extra-education-and-tutoring-for-kids-americans-spend-it-on-cars-and-gas/

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/08/04/asian-students-carry-high-expectations-for-success/2615483/

I recently found that the way Chinese teacher teaching Math is quite different than the way instructors use in the US, and it’s not just a personal stylistic difference between instructor. More precisely, the difference originated from the different teaching goal setting by schools or even the country.

I have never imagined I would be interested in math in college, and even choose a major closely related to it. In fact, I didn’t like math so much during high school, simply because of the extreme difficulty. I guess that’s where the stereotype that Asian people are good at math comes from. 

Let me explain what do I mean difficult. First of all, the question is normally not about getting the number of A, it’s more like prove A = B/CD * C/AD. On the one hand, there is no way people can understand how to do this question by just reading the question. Since there is no obvious connection between the question and the solution, the only way to do such a question is trying. Using a paper to write down anything they can think of, and try to make some combination to reach the answer. On the other hand, there is no plugin allowed in such a question, all the calculation are about polynomial with letters. In this case, the calculation would be much more difficult, and the student must be really sensitive to the form of the polynomial in order to find out some part that can be canceled out or do some weird transformation.

Besides the difficulty, the focus of teaching is also quite different. Chinese math teaching is more exam-oriented. During class, teachers mostly focus on how to solve a related issue in the exam. The definition and visualization were covered, but certainly not as important as exam questions. Usually, 2/3 of a class is talking about difficult questions appears in homework and exams, that might be difficult to imagine for students here. 

Then there is the pros and cons. Many people feel that Chinese math is for genius. It’s very helpful for those super smart people to realize how smart they are while allowing other students to see the difference between themselves and genius. But I would say such difficulty wasn’t completely useless. One main advantage is that there is no way students can do the question with mindless calculation. So most people can learn to observe and analyze the possible solution before actually start the calculation, which is a useful skill when solving a complex issue. Also, it allows students to be patient. Many people can get anxious when they find a question they don’t know how to solve, while for me, is there anything more usual than stuck in a difficult question??? Such a difficult question is also like training for people to calm down when they meet some troubles.

But there are certainly some cons. Firstly, it’s REALLY frustrating. I kept questioning myself why do I have so much trouble in math. I understand that many other people also have trouble doing this question, and there are tons of people having even more trouble than me, but I still feel not confident about my math. I think the actual reason for such difficulty is that college or even high school only considering exam score, also the large population of China makes the admission process highly competitive. In another word, those exams are designed to be selective, and it is normally that only a small percentage of people can actually get all the questions correctly done.  But is this still education…?

Chinese education system always selecting smart people to receive higher education and left the other with confusion and frustration. As a result, smart people feel that they are better than anyone else in any sense, and they can confidently pursue their dream, while the other has to admit that they are worse from within. I am not saying this education system is bad, making smart people more confident and others less can be beneficial for everyone sometimes, but they actually neglect another important purpose of education, giving people the knowledge to know the world. Higher education is much more popular in the U.S, many college students are not so smart, but they still enjoy the thing they are learning. The thing they learned may be completely useless for their job, but it can give people a different perspective to view the world.

Education is not the privilege of smart people. Everyone should be able to enjoy learning.

 

*(just for fun)A sample question and translation:

source:https://www.sohu.com/a/220485426_579102

parabola C: y + x^2  have focus point F, and there is a point P moving in a straight line l: x-y-2 = 0, then make two tangent lines of C  PA, PB pass through moving point P and intersect with C in A, B.

Q1: use a function to describe the movement of G, the center of gravity of triangle APB.

Q2: prove that angle PFA always equal to PFB

 

 

answer for Q1;

 

 

 

 

here is more question with translation

I don’t think any of you would be interested in the answer for Q2… Let me know if you do.

 

I read a story from VICE a few days ago. The story talked was about a common issue but people hardly take that into consideration, which is what can the younger generation do to offer parents better lives. I am going to translate this story into English and talk about my viewpoints on this story.

Elder people always say that the only thing they need is more accompaniment from their kids, but the protagonist of the story, Yin Ping isn’t satisfied with this answer. “accompany would never be enough.” She said, “No matter how many times I visit my mom, she is always sad when I left.” All the research is telling us that accompaniment is not the only thing elder people need. What they need is actually quite similar to us, which is esteem and self-actualization. While accompaniment is more like a drug. They get high when they use it, but nothing would change after that. And such accompaniment addiction makes them humble in front of their kids, which is not the author wanna see.

Yin Ping is an artist living in Beijing. Her home town is a small town in Sichuan. She went back home in 2015, and she found that there is a retailer purchasing the handcrafted woolen hat made by a local woman. The retailer buys these hat at such a low price that there is almost no space for profit, and then sell these hat with a 5 times higher price in another place. Yin Ping was quite angry, but her mom didn’t. Her mom said that the most common way to kill time for women in the town is to play real money poker, but she simply doesn’t want to lose money, so she chooses to do something more useful.

She didn’t want her mom’s time to be purchased cheaply by those retailers. So one of her friend pretend to be another retailer, and constantly purchasing these woolen hats from her mom. She also encouraged her mom to be creative. No matter how strange the hat seemed to be, the “retailer” will always appreciate her mom’s new creation and purchase them anyway. This kind retailer not only makes her mom much more confident in doing this job but also in other aspects. She never signs in any of the paperwork, since she always felt her husband is the leader for the house. While after she has income by selling hats, she can sign her name or making small decisions in the home.

On the other hand, instead of throwing them away, Yin Ping actually collected all the 300 hat her mom made in one year. “I felt like every time I looked at these hats, I can feel my mom’s passion for the job, and how happy she was when she can finally do something valuable.” Yin Ping even held a show for her mom’s hat. To her surprise, there were actually people expressed their willingness to buy these hat. At the same time, many other women in her mom’s home town also want such a good “retailer”. Finally, Yin Ping decided to become an actual seller for all the handcrafted hat from this town in an online shopping site. 

In 2017, One of Yin Ping’s friend saw these hats, who is currently preparing the 2017 Woman’s March. Her friend found that these hats are actually kind of similar to the pussy hat they need, therefore she invites Yin Ping and all the women in that small town to make the pussy hat for them.

For the woman in the small town, they probably have no idea what pussy means, but when they knew that their hat somehow related to the U.S. president, they were proud.

What Yin Ping did actually make a huge difference in many aspects of these woman’s life, and it was also inspiring in many senses, but I want to concentrate on her original motivation: Making parent have a better life. Yin Ping’s parent born in about 1960s, and they have experienced the cultural revolution in their teenagehood. Social revolution planted the idea of being part of a larger community deep in one generation’s people’s mind. They believe that they are not individuals who have personal wills, but a trivial component of a larger community, such as their family, the small town, and also the country. After suppressing their will for most of their life, they have no idea what to do when they are along except asking for accompaniment. 

I think maybe there should be an education for elder people. When they are confused about modern society, or cannot find a way to be happy, someone should be able to teach them to get used to new rules for new society, and really have the ability to control their own lives instead of infinitely rely on the children.

Here is another report for Yin Ping and more pictures

A few days ago, one of my friends sends me a link to one episode of Last Week Tonight with John Oliver about student debt. Although the title is student debt, I feel like it was more like criticism to those for-profit universities with really high tuition rate and poor education. I was quite surprised about the for-profit school since I feel Americans don’t concern about education that much, especially for those lower income families. They can always make a living as long as they want to work. Education is not the only option. China has such a for-profit university as well, as I mentioned in the first post, but the definition of poverty in China is way lower than it is here. Those farmer families can only earn 100 bucks a month, their lives are so terrible that investing huge amount of money in such universities becomes a reasonable choice. On the other hand, higher education in the US is much more common, even students’ grade is not good enough to apply to better university, community college can also provide cheap and decent education, which is certainly a much better choice than those for-profit universities.

But I was wrong, according to the data provided in that show, 13% students would like to take out a student loan to pay the high tuition, about 4 to 5 times more than the tuition of community college to get into these schools. Then the question is when for-profit schools have been reported for poor education quality, why does student choose to spend so much money to get into these schools instead of community college? 

After researching this question, I found that community school wasn’t such an ideal option either. For instance, the ratio of students who finish their 4-year program was much lower than that of for-profit universities, people even claim that their scheduling system and student services are worse than for-profit, but the article I read doesn’t provide any evidence for this statement. However, it still presents a good explanation for this difference. The author points out one likely reason community college completion rates are so low is that their heavily subsidized prices – they get tens of billions of dollars in direct government subsidies every year, which makes these colleges need not respond very effectively to student needs since much of their funding is detached from students. On the flip side, for-profit schools are much more student-centered and have a much stronger incentive to provide better services.

Another data about the popularity of for-profit schools compare to community colleges also somehow prove that for-profit schools can truly provide better educational resources. Between 1990 and 2010, for-profit colleges saw much faster enrollment growth than community colleges; 179 percent compared to 44 percent. This data collected from such a long period of time. If for-profit schools are really so terrible that its education is almost like a scam, the public should have been informed. Instead, the steady and fast growth rate shows that they are still not a bad option.

 

Then I tried to research about poverty. For people who live in poverty, attending college is a reasonable investment, while it’s hard to believe that so many teenagers don’t even have enough money to pay for their education in a developed country. The first thing I found was that the poverty rate in the U.S is not a small percentage, 16.3% of woman and 13.8% of a man, and their wage also seems to be pretty low. For a family with 3 members, the poverty threshold is about 19000 annual income, which is only a third of the average salary of a Penn State graduate. Although I didn’t grow up here, I have almost no idea what the life quality of 19000 dollars per year is like, but the huge difference between the income of a well-educated teenager and a poor family is enough to attract people invest a large amount of money in education.

After investigating the for-profit schools, I suddenly realized that public education is not just a problem in China. Oftentimes people only focus on those best universities since they stand for the best people and the best technology in a country, but neglect the need of equally huge amount of people in the bottom of the society. Many people still believe that education can help capable young people to jump into a higher social class, but the percentage of such people are always small. Most people still need to stay in the bottom for a few more generations, so in this case, a more affordable and useful higher education would largely improve their lives.

Citation:

https://povertyusa.org/facts

https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2015/01/13/even-for-profit-universities-are-better-than-americas-terrible-community-colleges/

This week, when our deliberation group discussed our topic, mental health in the U.S colleges, it reminds me an article I have read before, in which the author claimed that about 40 present of international students in the U.S colleges are suffering from depression. I know a lot of international students, and most of them seemed really happy. Even they may feel stressed out sometimes, it was still far from depression. But I do think that students today are confronting much stronger competitions, and it’s likely that mental health is becoming an issue for college students. Therefore I did some research to see what is the situation.

Here is what I found. “Researchers from the World Health Organization, led by Columbia University Psychology Professor Randy P. Auerbach, surveyed nearly 14,000 first-year college students from eight countries (Australia, Belgium, Germany, Mexico, Northern Ireland, South Africa, Spain, and the U.S.) and found that 35 percent struggled with a mental illness.” This number is way beyond my expectation. Often times, people tend to feel that anxieties, as well as other related maladaptive behaviors, are just part of the college life. For instance, Sleep deprivation is legendary in college life, and many wear it almost as a badge of honor. However, the serious problems associated with sleep deprivation are clearly documented, and it’s also closely related to mental health issues or other domains. Other similar maladaptive patterns happen in many other aspects of college lives, including eating patterns, sexual, and drinking. All of these numbers and research have shown that mental health has become an issue in colleges, and some action needs to be taken.

One major proposal for this issue is improving the number of counseling centers in university and encouraging students to meet with professionals instead of self-medicating. Though schools around the world have made serious investments in mental health resources, the researchers found that colleges are still ill-equipped to deal with the surge of mental healthcare needs. The lack of access to counseling service cause many students to choose to self-medicating by drinking and doing drugs. However, “This just doesn’t work. In addition, the college years are frequently the time when addictions develop.” explains Dr. Sherry Benton.

However, some people believe that investing more in counseling centers is not the most effective way, and the huge amount of investment is required to provide enough access to mental health professionals. Instead, online mental health resources will provide students with low-cost accessibility to healthcare resources. It can also combine with the app for passive Symptom tracking. it can record movement patterns, social interactions (such as the number of texts and phone calls), behavior at different times of the day, and vocal tone and speed by built-in sensors in smartphones. In the future, apps may be able to analyze these data to determine the user’s real-time state of mind. Such apps may be able to recognize changes in behavior patterns that signal a mood episode such as mania, depression, or psychosis before it occurs. 

solution-online mental care. All of these data would be extremely helpful for professionals to know better about the situation.

Besides providing more resources, it’s equally important to teach students how to determine if they need help. I have watched an interview with many people with depression, many of them said that at the beginning of their depression, they believe that they can address the mental health issue by themselves as long as they put some effort. But until they finally talked to the professionals, they realized that it’ not likely that people with depression can cure themselves by their thoughts. Now I think many people still believe people’s power in maintaining homeostasis, while that may cause a lot of unnecessary suffering. To address this issue, schools, especially high schools, and university should certainly shoulder the responsibility of educating students about these mental health issues and teach them to reach out for help once they found some early signs of mental problems.

Finally, some people also suggest to remove the cause of the mental health crisis, which is the pressure from schools, but I don’t think that is an option. College lives getting more competitive is a natural trend result from various aspects of modern society. The pressure and competition will always be there even though easing the burden of schools since school is not the origin of the competition, the labor market and the society is. Therefore, people should focus more on teaching students to embrace these pressures, and learn to seek help when they can no longer take it

Citation: 

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/10/04/4-ways-to-be-proactive-about-your-mental-health-in-college.html

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/theory-knowledge/201402/the-college-student-mental-health-crisis

http://www.mentalhealthamerica.net/recognizing-warning-signs

I watched a documentary called homo academicus recently, and even though many situations in this documentary seems familiar to me, it was still really inspiring. In this documentary, four students from Harvard travel to different regions in the world, and experience the different education in these areas. Since it’s a long series, I only watched the first episode, the one about the Asian education system. So I am going to focus on the comparison between China, other Asian countries, and the western world.

The first place they traveled to Korea. They went to a street full of tutoring class, where numerous students studied hard and wish to get a good grade in the super competitive college entrance exam. Even for young students, a few students at the age of 12 said that they had to keep studying after leaving night school, and normally they go to bed at 12. For China, in my memory, it’s not usual for 12 years old kids to study till 12 at night. I normally stopped studying in 10:30 when I was 12, and for many other students, they spend even less time on studying. But that was the situation when I was young, education in China is always becoming more competitive. Besides, Chinese education also really similar to the education in Korean in many aspects, such as tutoring class. According to my dad, in a relatively large city, the average fee for tutoring per year is about 8000 dollars, which is over a third of the middle-class family’s annual income. 

This type of super stressful and competitive education may seem inhumane for the western world, but as someone who has experienced similar education, I don’t think to study hard is torture to Asian kids. From their childhood, these kids are trained to be able to concentrate on studying. It’s a little bit cruel for young kids, especially when they are about 6-8, but they will get used to it finally. I even feel that the student life for Asian kids is even better than kids here since basically everyone is facing the same enemy, the exam, they can build a much stronger friendship, and students really have no time to do some stupid things such as bullying others or learn to smoke the cigarette. It’s kind of like meditation, students actually have extremely pure life. They can always empty their mind, and don’t have to make choices and think about many trivial things.

But certainly, this way of studying has drawbacks. It’s fine that student’s don’t have too much motivation for studying when they are still in the school, because they can still passively accept all the knowledge mentioned in the class. But someday when they have to make choices themselves, many of them are confused. Western education, on the other hand, is all about motivation. The freedom that American children have is unbelievable for Asian kids. They are taught to make their decision ever since they were young. Instead of concentrating on those knowledge mentioned in the class, they are encouraged to choose what they love and give themselves a motivation for further studying. 

However, there are also problems with this way of education. I have seen a memorable sentence in an article, “American education is for genius, while Asian education is for normal people.” I think it’s not only accurate description for the difference of two education system but also points out the cons of American education. It tells everyone to follow their heart, but not everyone can understand what they wanna do in the future. Sometimes people get tired of numerous choices during their teenage year, without pressure from outside, can they really stand up again and keep moving forward? For Asian Education, no one gonna excels, but people don’t fall too far behind either. While for the education in the U.S, smart kids can be extraordinary, while some kids have pay for wrong choices they make when they are young. 

The last thing I wanna discussed is why Asian people care about education so much. Education is also important here, because it’s also related to of people would be able to do things they love as a job or earn enough money to support a family, but the study doesn’t seem to be such a big deal here. I don’t really have a answer for this right now, my understanding would be that most Chinese people are less satisfied with their lives, and therefore more eager to invest in the future, which is the education of their kids. Also in Chinese culture, children are kind of like a succession of parents lives, so parents always want to impose their wish and their dreams on the younger generation. But in the western world, kids are more like a independent individual. Since they are still young, normally they don’t have such a strong will to change their lives by education, and therefore care less about their education.

I am actually quite curious about American’s education system, but I don’t really have much time for researching for this one…Probably I will try next time.

This post is inspired by documentation called “Why Poverty?  Education, Education”. In this documentation, the interviewer interviews an officer in an admission office in a Chinese university, and he told a pathetic story for the higher education system in China.

There is quite a lot of great university in China, such as Peking University, Tsinghua University. They locate in the large city, have funding from the government, and employ the best scholar as faculty. In short, they have all the best resource, they are the symbol of the higher education system in China, the Chinese government even give them a special title, 985 and 211 universities.  But how many students can get into these top university? Let’s take my personal experience as an example. I graduated from one of the best three high schools in my city, only the top 13% to 15% students are eligible to enroll in these good high school, but getting into the best high school doesn’t mean students are qualified to get into those top universities. In fact, normally only top 700 students in my high school will have enough score in college entrance exam to get into 211 universities, and in order to get into a 985 university, they need to be top 350. In another word, for every new born baby in my city, there are only 10.5%(15% * 70%) chance they will end up studying in a good university. 

However, this number doesn’t mean anything, because we have no idea where will the other 90% of students go, and this is exactly what the documentation I mentioned, in the beginning, told me. The admission officer said it himself, some garbage universities. “They are actually more like companies instead of universities, they simply want you to pay the tuition and never care about your education at all.” His job is traveling to different rural area, and tell local people how can knowledge change their children’s life, and how good their education is, while the truth is, he acknowledged that every single word he said is just a lies, and all the pictures he used during the presentation to show how good their university is all came from internet. But people trust him. People in those poor families believe they found the valuable chance to get rid of poverty, so does those kids. The tuition is normally a few thousand USD, which is definitely not a low price for those poor families, but they want this chance. 

It’s a scam. And how about the quality of their education? The answer is very simple, there is no education at all. There are teachers, but those teachers also graduated from these universities, and literally know nothing more than the students. Consequently, students spend time playing video games and watching movies. Four years later, they will have a useless degree and do what their parents do. Nothing changed, except the money they lose.

Actually, the above mentioned two types of university are kind of extreme, although there is a huge number of such universities. For those students who do not excel academically, but have some money and live in city, there are also quite a lot of universities for them. These schools are mostly in-between. Students can learn something here, but they don’t have that much opportunity. Most of them just find a career that maybe have nothing to do with what they learn in the university and make a living.

I think the problem of the Chinese education system is not about those top universities. Sometimes it’s true that only those smartest people can be the leaders or scholars, and there is no need to contribute funding to even more top universities. But the scam should be stopped. There is nothing wrong with staying in poverty. our society is just not developed enough, but they should not waste the 4 years times and the huge amount of money to pay for the tuition. Maybe they can enter some professional college, where they can learn some skills to make a living, and become a useful person. Or they can simply not attend college, stay at home and help parents to farm.

It’s honestly not such a difficult thing. There are plenty of skilled workers to teach, and many families that wish to have a better live by learning some skills. Why not? I feel like no one care about poor people. Everyone try to earn money from those rich families in large cities as if those poor people do not live in the same world as we do. It’s really pathetic.