I had another lesson with my Chinese tutor today, and I’m finally getting to the point where I can hold some level of (clunky) conversation, switching between Mandarin and English as we need. She lives in Xi’an and we were talking about lots of things like the weather and how it sucks is typically in FL. Then we got into how she has never visited America and wanted to know more about it. Fuck man. She was flabbergasted to the point of not believing she understood me properly when I explained that homeless people get arrested (more polite than saying get the shit kicked out of them or literally killed) for sleeping on public benches. I told her about private and public schooling, and about how I used to go to a richer private high school and there were still kids doing crazy shit like ripping soap dispensers off the walls to spray them everywhere, kicking in doors, and going 65 in the parking lot for fun. I didn’t even tell her about the fights. She was mortified and that isn’t even remotely bad by USian standards. Apparently the CPC recently mandated the amount of homework students recieve be decreased? I didn’t even know about that. Comedic level of juxtaposition.
she was flabbergasted to the point of not believing she understood me properly when I explained that homeless people get arrested
it’s kinda weird thinking that this is how “freedom” looks for the west and this is something that you can’t do in the “ccp dictatorship”
Man I wish i was born in the “horrible cccp dictatorship” 😪
Culture shock do be like that sometimes.
I would spend 3 or 4 hours doing homework every night. My high school we got three levels: college prep, honors, and then advanced placement (AP).
I was college prep and I did not want to go into the more academically gifted programs despite efforts by my teachers and administrators who wanted me in honors because I was academically gifted compared to the normal kids. I didn’t want to do more homework and school work, I wanted a life outside of school.
Honors and AP were supposed to be more challenging this meant more school work and more homework. AP students supposedly had not life besides doing constant school and home work, but this could have been college prep propaganda.
I can certainly say if the private school I went to was to be a high standard, premium level of Statesian education, I can understand why we have a literacy crisis. The education there was a joke. I took honors and AP classes all the way through and 90% of the homework was pointless busywork that sparked no curiosity and stimulated no learning. The non honors/AP classes? Please. If attendance wasn’t compulsory, it would be more time efficient to not show up to class and skim the textbook.
I could go on for quite some time about that school.
I should say I went to an American public school. Not the very best of high schools, but definitely not the worse. Probably out of high schools it was above average.
Private schools being intrinsically better are a form of petty-bourgeois propaganda born out of the racism of the American segregated school system. Many public schools in nice areas are significantly better than many private schools that charge an arm and a leg. Now, this is of course not to say that some private schools aren’t better than any public high school in the US, but those private schools are for the top 0.1% of the population that can afford USD$30,000+ a year tuition for 4 years per kid. Mine definitely falls into the former category of being a worse private school (inferor to even my local public school) that just sells itself well to wring more money out of the gullible and better off members of the ‘middle’ class labor aristocracy. It was 100% a business first (and probably one that laundered quite a bit of money for school leadership judging by a few questionable investment decisions the school made) and an academic institution second.
The two schools that were thought of of being the nicer public schools were both majority white. Mine used to be the best public school in the area before the other two were built.
Mine was also mostly white, but recently in a few years had became known for being very diverse from people who weren’t just white or black. We got people from Latin America, Nepal and India, and a decent size Muslim community. When I was there, our superintendent of my county, a white woman came to my highschool to do a speech which was like 30 minutes to an hour of praising my high school for being diverse.
Imagine a society caring about children. I’m American so I can’t
Apparently the CPC recently mandated the amount of homework students receive be decreased? I didn’t even know about that.
Neurotypicals may see this as a bad thing but for me it’d be a good thing.
I couldn’t possibly imagine how it would be a bad thing honestly. Kids need time to be kids and their free time should be just as respected as the free time of adults working jobs.
I don’t have to, I’ve seen takes indicating that the reason China is at the top of the R&D world is because of all the homework they did.
