Shang Ning’s Blog

The elementary grade curriculum

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 26th, 2008.

Someone says that we Chinese are clever, Chinese overseas usually gained full marks in the examination, I don’t agree full marks equals clever, I think clever means the comprehensive ability.

List of pupil

The most Chinese believe examination is most important for students, so Chinese pupil lack of physical exercise in the school often.

I asked my little brother for his sixth-grade curriculum, there has three sport classes per week, two music classes per week, and only one art class per week.

Chinese pupil lack of physical exercise in the school.

Look at the curriculum, the classes of Chinese, English and Math are the major classes everyday, my little brother just a kid, he should be filled with sports, music and arts in his life. How painful it is.

Another suprise is the Polity Class, pupil, can little boy (ten or thirteen years old) understand what is polity? Why there is no history and geography of our motherland, but two polity classes per week, I am afraid I can not accept that true.

6 Responses to “The elementary grade curriculum”

Nux
February 26th, 2008 at 2:20 pm

well, academic is quite important for chinese. Having good ranking (and scoring straight A’s) is somehow being potrayed as clever and successful. Such belief has been ‘embedded’ into our thinkings since centuries ago, and from my point of view, will hardly change.

beautyful becky
February 28th, 2008 at 10:34 pm

I have attended a interview of cabin crew, when I passed two rounds I was requested to write a article of ‘your favorate subject in the school’.I try to think which subject is my favorate, but it’s so difficult to me because I have learned little subjects except math chinese and english in the school.At last, the interviewor all shocked when they find my favorate subject is englih…

beautiful becky
February 28th, 2008 at 11:49 pm

hehe

Michael
February 29th, 2008 at 11:46 am

Dear ShangNing,

You have a great blog! I have subscribed to it and I look forward to reading more of your posts in the future. I hope you will allow me to introduce your blog to my students.

Since I’m teaching in Japan, most of my students are Japanese, but I sometimes teach students from other countries too, including China. Perhaps you’ve seen some of the work done by my Chinese students posted on my blog.

I went to Beijing a couple of years ago in order to give a presentation about curriculum development at the AsiaTEFL conference. I also managed to make time for sightseeing. Climbing the Great Wall was a life-long dream come true! I hope I have a chance to visit Beijing again. You can see some photos of my trip to Beijing on my flickr page: http://www.flickr.com/photos/mc_sensei/

As for the grade six curriculum timetable you posted, my first reaction is, wow! I’m glad I didn’t do grade six in China because all the difficult classes are in the morning! I wasn’t a morning person. I am from the English-speaking part of Canada. As you may know, Canada is officially a bilingual country. So, I had French lessons. In grade six, I had only one lesson a week. Unfortunately, I never mastered French.

I agree with you, good test scores do not mean someone is clever. Japanese students take many exams and many believe that getting good test scores is most important. When my father was a student there were university entrance exams in Canada too, but by the time I was in high school there were no more entrance examinations. Generally speaking, universities accepted students based on the students’ grades. For example, my university accepted students with an average of 60%. However, students who wanted to major in engineering needed a higher average. I’m only telling you the basics. The system was quite complicated and the standards changed. For example, after I entered university, the number of high school students who applied to my university increased, so the minimum acceptable high school average was raised to 72%. So, the standards change depending on the number of students that want to enter university.

Well,this comment has got very long. So, I’ll stop.

Shangning
February 29th, 2008 at 3:09 pm

Hi, Michael, your comment is so long~~, can you imagining how happy I am? Thanks very much.

I have subscribed your blog in Google reader, and it is my pleasure to read yours :D

And I read more about Japan from your photos, I hope I have change to travel the country of Cherries.

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March 9th, 2008 at 1:00 am

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