介绍:
LW: Now interesting things happening here in the world, Wu You. Maybe you can enlighten us about what’s going on.
WY: A recent report shows that a primary school has divided students into different classes according to their scores. The primary school is located in Guangxi Province, in China, and they have divided students into different classes simply by their exam results. Students with lower grades have been gathered to form one class, and some top students have also been gathered in one top class. So now some students’ parents have reported this to local authorities, and they say that if was put into practice, it feels like some kids with lower grades have been abandoned by the school. And then lower scores classes have also been assigned with different teachers.
LW: Now I know the Chinese educational system is notoriously competitive, I often find that teenagers especially, they kind of, they act up to the labels that people put on them. So if you tell kids, you’re not as gifted as these other kids, very often they just leave it.
WY: And also, that reminds me of an experiment. One scientist and also a psychologist has also made an experiment. They divided different students into different classroom, and that is simply random. And they told the students in one classroom, saying that, okay, after our test, we found out that you are the most gifted students. Actually, they are not – they’re just chosen randomly. They also told the other students, this has been separated by your scores, and by your IQ. After like one year or two years, they found out that the students who were told they are the best actually did better in scores. So that is how this says, motivation is really important [LW: Yeah] and students do act accordingly.
LW: There’s also the idea that what if, what if some kids aren’t as gifted naturally, and they maybe need a little bit more time.
BK: One thing you can do, in that case is, you take the people who finish first, and then have them go help out the people who haven’t finished yet. That way…
WY: You mean ask the students to help the students?
BK: Right, right.
LW: I remember very – I used to get very frustrated because I took – my English class, I used to write these essays, and I’d always get the same mark, regardless of how much effort I put into it, which made me very angry, because I kept thinking well this person is not even marking it. And so, I was all, I was in my head then, and I was like, this person, this person is clearly not even, this person has an image in their head of what I am, what type of student I am, what type of student this person is. Wu You?
WY: I can see that from the reports, the school’s headmaster has explained why they would to like have this kind of divided classes, is that they would like to design tailor-made classes for students with different talents, so to some degree that I can understand his initiative, it’s just like, for the top class students, maybe the class would be faster. And then for the students with lower scores maybe, and they will have more help, and probably they can just lower the speed of teaching, and then probably they were assigned with teachers who can explain everything and help every students. To that degree, I can understand, but I think there is a better way to do this. If they really want to made a tailor-made classes, they shouldn’t have start to do like this. They should have smaller classes, so that they can be more patient, and they can have more time with these students if each student would want more from the teacher.
LW: But what we actually said is they wanted to, you know, legislate for students that have different talents, so maybe the idea that, you know, maybe that’s a little bit of a shift there, in thinking, from this, from this specific school. Maybe that’ll go wider than that.
WY: I can see both ways has their own charms, but also in the Chinese way, I could understand the headmaster’s concern, because not only to better help the student but also for the final examination, that was the college entrance examination. We have like millions of students fighting together to get through this examination, and everything in middle school or in primary school is all according to scores. Maybe they have other kind of classes that were designed to better help the student, but if the final route doesn’t really change, nothing else could actually change in front of it.
BK: Right.
LW: We won’t know until this runs its course and we can compare the scores, but, yeah, I think Wu You hit the nail on the head there. Until the end result doesn’t change, we can’t really expect much changes in the process leading up to it.
BK: Right, but one, actually going on what Wu You said. I do think there should be smaller classes. In the US, this is something too. They don’t have as big of classes, but ideally you’d have about twenty students, for a primary school class. In China, obviously there’s – it’s a huge population, so you need bigger classes, but there’s also more people who can become teachers.
LW: Yeah, they should definitely pay teachers more. It’s a very thankless job.
