Happy 4th of July!!

HAPPY 4TH OF JULY !!!

Yesterday during class I was happy to talk about the projects and give our feed back on what we thought about everything. Watching the Chinese preschool video, and then watching the Japanese and U.S. preschool videos today, there is such a wide range of differences! Not just the language and they way that they learn, but the way that the teacher behaves as well as the students. Seeing the Chinese children called "spoiled" for being upset for their parents leaving was very shocking. There is such a difference in the perception of why children go to school, and what they are supposed to learn. It is not just about academics there but to learn how to become part of the whole group, and work and play cooperatively. When thinking about schools in the U.S., as the article and videos talked about, independence is a large part of going to school, to learn how to take care of oneself and express oneself with words.

I was surprised to see that the Japanese teacher did not discipline the young boy who was misbehaving so much. I feel that this is such a large and shocking thing to our culture, but practical if you think about it. Children do fight and misbehave, it is part of their nature, but then again there are children who misbehave not only for attention but to purposefully hurt other children, and this is where I would think the line would be drawn. In the U.S. preschool the young child who will not pick up the blocks is carried back to a corner to sit by himself until he is ready to put away his blocks. The teacher is not loud and does not yell in front of the other teachers, but is firm and allows him to express his feelings if he chooses. This is quite different than seen in the Japanese school where the teacher does nothing about the young boy misbehaving, even though he was kicking and hitting the other children. Keeping your hands to yourself is obviously not a rule in their classroom, or perhaps culture.

Seeing these major differences makes me excited yet very nervous to go into the English schools. I feel that there will be lots of differences in not only the material they are learning, or how they behave in class, but how also they react to my presence in the classroom, and what the teacher thinks also. It should be interesting to hear what they think about America...but whatever it is I am hoping to be able to tell them some new things and show them that not all Americans are the same.