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Ted, my little brother, is in Grade One. Last Friday he came back from school with a letter. The letter was from his teacher. “I got a red flower today. Could you please sign this note?” he said to mum. The note showed that he had been talking in class.
Ted hardly gets top scores in his school work. The best he gets is “OK”, but he often gets “You can do better than this.” Mum knows what it means. She tells me “You can do better than this” means “Extremely bad” in China.
In the USA, teachers never say anything too bad about their students, even if the students are making trouble in class or not working hard enough. The worst they might say is “Please be nicer tomorrow”. Many parents are satisfied with a B-grade for each subject.
But things in Chinese schools are quite different. Parents havehigh expectationsfor their children. I sometimes felt that my second-grade cousin spend more time on homework than I did when I was 6th grade in the US! Yet his parents and teachers didn't think he worked hard enough.
Is it too strict in China? Or is it not strict enough in the USA? Maybe both are true.
