The Politics of 6th Grade: Contested English

Yesterday was all Elementary English day. First, I got invited out to one of the better local elementary schools near my house. It was the leading elementary school in its part of the world, but last year a horrible thing had happened: none of their kids had finished in the upper tier of the English storytelling and reading competitions at the county level, for the first time. This was absolutely mortifying for a proud school that dates back to the early days of the Japanese period, and being good businessmen, they swung into action and hired a consultant, none other than your trusty writer. That they would take such an extraordinary step shows how important such contests are to the self-image, and the public image, of the schools. They paid well, too.

After I heard their story, I couldn't help but ask why they thought I was necessary, since it appeared to be a one-time thing. I suppose as a good consultant I should be emphasizing how much they needed me, but it was obvious they didn't. The English teacher had a wonderful faint trill to her English, and was vivacious and friendly, not to mention totally competent. My age (23 these many years), she had grown up in Argentina. She too felt I wasn't needed, but orders were orders....so we went to work.

I was hired because I regularly judge the Taichung county speech contests, and because I could communicate with the locals in Chinese. And I supposed because I was foreign and therefore "know English" -- although knowledge of English was not really the issue, it was figuring out how to shape the presentations to the judging guidelines. Me having been a judge was thus important. For the storytelling this wasn't really a problem, I had lots of good suggestions. It was the reading section that was the puzzler. Did lots of work on intonation and vowels....

Part of the problem is that while the content is English, everything else is Sinified. The "right" way to do it is the way everyone else does it. The students present the stories using exactly the same intonation and movements as they use when they present Chinese content (what other model is there?). The effect is insomniac, especially reading, which should on no account be judged while sober. Further deadening effects come from the presentation guidelines, which permit no deviation from content, so no creative subversion of the story is permissible -- the three little pigs always kill the wolf, the enormous turnip is inevitably pulled up, and the gingerbread man never escapes from his bad end. So let it be written, so let it be done.

Got home from that to encounter English in another way. One problem people have constantly complained about since the reforms that began here in late 1990s is the perceived fall-off in textbook quality. My daughter took her English exam this week and got 99. She missed a point on the English Comprehension section, a true-false question that asked about the brothers of Mary, though no information had been presented in the text on any brothers. Textbook quality strikes again! My daughter had shrugged and guessed (one aspect of the shaping that takes place at this level is the accommodation of the growing self to the arbitrariness of the testing system). Part of it was the teacher who had simply copied the questions wholesale out of the textbook, part of it was the reluctance of teachers to give 100 even when deserved. So my daughter was all upset over having missed this point, having internalized already the capital importance of tests, and my wife had another go-round with the teacher, who had done the same thing previously with the same kind of error and the same result. Finally the teacher called my daughter yesterday and my daughter was awarded the point.....

[Taiwan]