Let's hear it for immaturity!

Well, that's not exactly what I mean. But ever since I got to Taiwan, something has been in the back of my mind about cultural differences when it comes to going to school.

Two things - one general and one more specific - have been on my mind. The more general one is the fact that several teachers I had in high school used to bemoan the fact that American kids weren't more like Asian ones when it came to work ethic. We were always told tales of kids spending twice as long at school every day and studying twice as hard at night and loving it all. Furthermore, we would always hear, they were going to eat us for breakfast in the rat race once we graduated.

The more specific one was a rather ugly and borderline racist cartoon my 12th-grade calculus teacher had pinned up in her classroom, which drove the same point home. The cartoon depicted an American teenager and a Japanese one, and the dialogue went something like this:

"Bummer! I hate the first day of school!"
"Not me! In Japan we go to school twelve hours a day, all year long. I love it!"
"Yeah? What does that make you? A nerd? A know-it-all? A schoolboy?"
"Your boss."

(I say "borderline racist," by the way, because the Japanese kid's facial features were very overdone in the drawing. I concede that that part of the story was probably unintentional on the cartoonist's part, but still...)

So, is there any accuracy to all the stories we heard for all those years?

If my experience is any guide, not really. Yes, kids here do spend far more time in school than they do back home, but they're still kids, and the "I love it!" part of the story appears to be totally mythical. Do they really learn that much more? It's hard for me to judge since I only teach one subject, but it doesn't appear that way to me. Certainly, most of them aren't much better at their second language than I was with mine when I was their age. (I suppose French is easier for a native English-speaker to learn than English is for a Chinese-native, but they also spend a lot more time at it than I did.) The long hours really show, too, in the form of school clothes that tend to be awfully dirty and in their tired faces. Also, outside of English class, most of them attend Chinese schools where every class is apparently about the size of a Big Ten intro-to-communications class. They wear numbers on their clothes to identify them - I really do hope they're too young to recognize some of the uglier connotations of all that! But I think they probably are, and it is more a part of the culture here anyway, for better or worse.

And they certainly aren't little machines the way the Japanese kids were so often portrayed to us back in the day. No, they're kids, and they like junk food and comic books and bad music and worse jokes just like so many of us did. I suppose my job would be a lot easier if the stereotypes were true. But nonetheless, I've found it immensely comforting that they're not. It's been great to discover that kids really are kids everywhere and that if one system has some advantages over another, the one still isn't any closer to perfection than the other.

I do, however, kind of wish I were still in touch with my old teachers so I could explain all this to them. Somehow I doubt they'd buy it, though. Given what public school teachers in America have to go through these days, I suspect a lot of them just have to believe that there's a place somewhere where kids act like adults and everyone thirsts constantly for knowledge.
It ain't here, babe.