Home Learning Cultures: What, how, and why?

Have you ever wondered about the culture you create in your home? I'm not talking about culture in terms of race, ethnicity, heritage or religion. And, I'm not talking about how loving or dysfunctional the family is (although this is, undoubtedly, the most important aspect of any family).

I'm talking about the kind of values and interests a home embodies. What does your home say about who you are and what you value? What kinds of objects are on display in your house? What do you have up on your walls? What kind of activities does your family do for fun? What do people talk about at the dinner table? What messages do the physical, verbal, and behavioral culture of your home give your child?

As Peter Drucker, the business guru says, "Culture eats strategy for breakfast," and I think that's true. The culture of the home shapes kids far more than any specific strategy, class, or task that we impose upon them.

One of my closest childhood friends lived in a home permeated by technology. His dad ran a software company, and his mom was also extremely computer savvy. They always had the latest technology and the best computers, and as a family, they preferred movies to books. My friend himself was always playing around on his computer -- not on mindless games, but on really sophisticated stuff. He started programming really young, and unsurprisingly, he went on to become a very successful software engineer. In his home, dinner table discussions would often revolve around computers, new technologies, and cars.

My own childhood home was full of literature, poetry, and art. Big, dusty bookcases crowded with books about art and architecture, museums and travel. Other bookcases overflowed with works of fiction -- great literature from India and the West. We were a reading family, and we were an artsy family.  Neither of my parents cared much about technology. They just weren't into machines. We had a small TV that was never switched on. Our house was also a quiet house. I don't remember much music or noise. Everyone in the family seemed to enjoy silence and solitude.

I often consider the kind of home that I'm creating for my children. What kind of culture are they living and breathing everyday. How can I make sure that the culture of my home reflects my love of learning, reading, and ideas?

When I talk to parents about learning, I often discuss what " a learning culture" looks and feels like at home. 

Parents can create a math culture -- with legos, tangrams, math conversations, math games, and math exercises. 

And they can create a reading culture -- with bookshelves everywhere, conversations about books, and lots of time for reading. 

And importantly, parents can ensure that everything about their homes signals to kids that learning is beautiful, enjoyable, and important.

Whose Stories Matter?

A few months after I started teaching at an international school in Singapore, I sat down at my desk with a cup of hot coffee and a pile of short stories that my ninth graders had written.

The first story was about a New Yorker named Joe who is caught in the middle of a gory murder mystery. At one point in the story, Joe runs his hands through his light brown hair in an exasperated gesture, as his blue-gray eyes twinkle. Joe is clearly White.

The second story was a tragic narrative about a young teenage girl named Sienna who is grieving over the loss of her mother. Over the course of the story, Sienna meets a young man named Steve, who offers her comfort. Early in the story, Sienna’s blonde hair flies in the wind, and later, she glances at Steve, and her soft hazel eyes meet his piercing blue ones. Clearly, Sienna and Steve are both White too.

Here’s the interesting part: both these stories were written by Asian students who had spent their entire lives in Asia. As I worked my way through the pile, I realized that all my students – my Chinese students, Korean students, Indian students, and Japanese students -- had crafted Caucasian characters in Western settings. This particular class was about 70% Asian, and many of my students had previously attended local Chinese and Indian schools. Yet every single story had a White protagonist.

I was surprised. In a decade of teaching White students in the US, I never had a single White student write a story about a non-White protagonist. In contrast, year after year in Singapore, all my Asian students write stories about White characters in Western settings. The default character, at least as teenagers see it, is a White one. And the default setting seems to be a place in America or Europe.

I joked about this with my students when I returned their stories: Who’s going to tell me a story set in Singapore with a protagonist named Mustafa or Mei-Jia? Don’t Asians fall in love, solve mysteries, and deal with conflicts? Don’t Asians have stories to tell too? Some of my students laughed; others shifted uncomfortably in their seats.

Had they, through a steady consumption of Western children’s books and Western media, internalized the belief that stories about Whites are better stories? Visit any toyshop or bookshop in India or Singapore, and you will encounter blonde haired dolls, Ladybird readers with Peter and Jane, and posters of smiling White children playing and reading.

Or, was their choice of Western characters and settings actually a function of the language that they were writing in? Would an Indian child writing in Hindi craft a story about a Caucasian named Joe who lives in New York City? If my Korean student were writing in Korean instead of English, would she have been more likely to set her story in Seoul and narrate a romance between Ji Hoon and Min Seo? Would Singaporean children writing stories in their mother tongue – Mandarin, Malay, or Tamil – create White characters in Western settings? Perhaps the issue was that the history and culture associated with the English language somehow demanded the protagonists be Western.

I am not sure whether my students’ inability to imagine Asian characters in Asian settings is a function of the language in which they are writing or of their social conditioning. Perhaps it is a blend of both. What I do know, however, is that my Asian students respond very well to books by Asian authors set in Asian contexts. And I also know, as an English teacher who scours libraries and online book shops for titles, that there are too few Asian books for children. When my students read stories by Amy Tan, they nod and laugh, as they recognize the foods, smells, tastes, and sounds that Tan describes. When they discuss the mother-daughter relationships in her books, they often say things like, “that sounds so familiar.”

I see this recognition in my own children’s reading experiences as well. When I buy picture books with Indian protagonists and Indian settings for my daughter, she scrutinizes the pictures carefully. She loves the pictures of mischievous Neil Hariharan in Anushka Sankar’s humorous book “Excuses, Excuses.” And when she first encountered Pooja Makhijani’s book, “My Mother’s Saris,” she turned to me and said, “the girl looks like me.”

Moving to Singapore jolted me into recalibrating my own storytelling. Of all the recent stories I’ve concocted for my daughter, her favorite is about a beautiful fairy named Sarita who has chocolate brown skin and long black hair that shimmers like black silk. Sarita is queen of the fairies in Fairyland, and she, together with her band of fairy friends, manages to defeat evil witches, tame terrible monsters, and save Fairyland from all sorts of awful fates. Often my daughter becomes a character in the story as she too somehow ends up in Fairyland to help Sarita in her magical quests.

Given that many Asian students, particularly in Singapore and India, live and study in English speaking contexts, maybe it’s time we provide them with English stories that are set in Asia so that they begin to see English as a global language that they can claim as their own, a global language that can tell their stories as well as it tells the stories of Joe, Sienna, and Steve.

Our children deserve a wide range of children’s literature about Asian characters in Asian countries. We need to write and publish these stories for them, both in English and in Asian languages.

My hope is that down the road when I grade my students’ stories, I will be able to read about Li Jing’s search for love as her black hair flies in the wind and Hassan’s brilliance at solving mysteries as he navigates the back lanes of Kampong Glam in Singapore.

Rigor versus Creativity: Are they mutually exclusive?

The Singapore local system prides itself for its "rigorous" program. And if you've ever looked at the exam papers for primary school kids on this island, you'll be amazed at the level of rigor. The word problems involve a tremendous amount of conceptual complexity, multiple steps, and hard calculations. The exams that these kids take are hard.

Firstly, let's clarify what we mean by rigor. It's all the rage in education circles around the world, and the East certainly prides itself in the rigor that it offers kids. Rigor, I think, refers to three things:

• The level of challenge of the problems/tasks/assessments that kids are expected to do.

• The level of precision and quality expected of kids, especially when it comes to basic skills like mathematical problem solving, critical reading, and analytical writing. 

• In order to ensure that kids can meet academic challenges and display strong academic skills, a rigorous education often requires teachers to explicitly teach concepts, assign homework, and provide detailed feedback. Rigor involves lots of practice with the goal of mastery. Rigorous education is often associated more with traditional exam-focused instruction than with constructivist project-based progressive education.

One look at Singapore's exam system for sixth graders is proof of its rigor.

But what about creativity? The major criticism leveled at the Singaporean exam system -- and perhaps any exam system -- is its lack of creativity. Exams are the antithesis of creativity because they require students to provide the answers that the examiner is looking for. There's no room for questioning or original thought or experimenting on an exam, not even on a well-designed exam. 

What does a creative system look like: it's open-ended and exploratory. Kids ask questions of their own, they design and create, they work on collaborative group projects and presentations that involve multiple disciplines and a range of skills. In an English class, kids might write poems and act out a range of interpretations of a dramatic scene; in a Science class, they ask questions and design their own experiments; in a math class, they discuss various strategies with group members to solve a math problem. The US, known for constructivism and progressive education, embraces these kinds of creative projects. 

And these projects are great -- they inspire kids, they get kids excited, they teach kids to work together and ask questions, they give kids the freedom to innovate or experiment...so what's the problem? The problem is that without a rigorous skill based education, these constructivist projects might end up being superficial and shallow. They focus more on giving a kid broad exposure and less on ensuring mastery.

If kids don't have strong skills and lots of rich content knowledge, they might end up just skimming the surface and not really learning anything deep. Without a rigorous skill-focused education, kids' reports and projects might involve sloppy writing and bad grammar; when they read, they might focus more on their feelings and less on actual literary analysis. Additionally, they will almost certainly have weak math foundations full of gaps; it's really hard to gain a strong math foundation without a systematic, sequential, and rigorous program. And as any student can tell you, group projects often mean that a few kids do all the work and learn a lot, while the other kids do very little and learn nothing. So yes, they offer creativity and inspiration, and kids certainly learn a lot from well-designed projects and explorations, but constructivism is not perfect either.

So, here's my question: why can't an education provide kids with both academic rigor and creative freedom?  Why can't we teach basic skills and core content-- critical reading, analytical writing, mathematical problem solving, core science content -- in a rigorous, more traditional way, but ALSO give kids sufficient time and space to pursue projects, engage in open-ended discussions of literature, write their own poetry, and design their own experiments? Why can't we do both? Why do educators and education systems pit rigor and creativity against each other, instead of agreeing that both have value, and that in fact, they can complement each other?

The Best Multicultural Reading List for Kids in Grades 2 to 6 - MUST READ BOOKS

Here's a list of my own kids' favorite books from all around the world. I believe SO strongly that kids need to see themselves and others reflected in literature, and this list offers kids like mine -- global South Asian kids growing up in Singapore -- a wide range of books that reflect both the familiar and the foreign in wonderful ways. 

BOOK LIST: FICTION

Charlotte’s Web (US)

-       The Folk of the Faraway Tree (England)

-       Where the Mountain Meets the Moon (China)

-       Starry River of the Skies (China)

-       The Mudskipper (Singapore)
-Sherlock Sam series (Singapore)

-       A Single Shard (Korea)

-       Noodle Pie (Vietnam/Australia)

-       Listen, Slowly (Vietnam)

-       Just A Train Ride Away (India)

     Tiger Boy (India)
Thai-riffic (Thailand, Australia)

-       Danger By Moonlight (India, Italy)

-       Flora and Ulysses (US)

-       Number the Stars (Denmark)

-       The Giver (US)

-       Esperanza Rising (Mexico, US)

-       I Lived on Butterfly Hill (Chile)

-       The Garbage King (Ethiopia)

-       Clay Marble (Cambodia)

-       The Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basil E.Frankeweiler (US)

-       Oliver Twist (UK)

-       Red Scarf Girl (China)

-       Chinese Cinderella (China)

-       I Am David (Europe)

-       Oranges in No Man’s Land (Lebanon)
-The Ash Mistry Series (India/UK)

How Teens Learn: 3 Things all Parents Should Know

Spring break, unfortunately, is rapidly coming to an end. I've read a few wonderful books over break -- some great fiction, and one really interesting non-fiction book about the adolescent brain. In her book "The Teenage Brain," neuroscientist Frances Jensen offers parents and educators insights into the neuroscience of the developing adolescent brain as well as the implications of this science.

(Parents: Be warned though -- Jensen includes a number of anxiety-producing stories in the book as well, as she looks at reckless teenage behavior and the vulnerability of the teenage brain.)

Here are 3 Take-Aways from Jensen's Chapter on Learning:

1. Mastering Key Skills and Information Takes A LONG Time: Mere Exposure is Insufficient, Mastery Requires Repetition and Practice.

Jensen quotes Nobel prize winner John Eccles, "Long periods of excess use or disuse are required in order to produce detectable synaptic change." Jensen comments on this by saying, "What Eccles failed to realize is that the repetitions he observed...those 'long periods of excess use' ... were the the brain at work, learning and acquiring knowledge. After repeated stimulation, a brain cell will respond much more strongly to a stimulus than it initially did. Hence the brain circuit learns. And the more ingrained the knowledge, the easier it is to recall and use."

I've written about how learning requires sustained effort in a particular area over time, both in previous posts and in my book "Beyond The Tiger Mom."  I appreciated Jensen's detailed discussion of the science behind this phenomenon, and I think that contemporary educators need to think carefully about the science here. Too often, educators assume that merely exposing kids to interesting stuff is sufficient -- but if we really want them to master key skills and content, we need to ensure that they get sufficient practice and feedback.

2. The Teenage Years are a "Golden Age" for the Brain

 Jensen writes, "Memories are easier to make and last longer when acquired in the teen years compared with adult years."

This makes total sense intuitively: We remember the music from our teen years so well, we remember things we learned in adolescence so clearly. So what does this mean for our kids and their learning?

Jensen writes: "The teenage years are the time to identify strengths and invest in emerging talents. It's also the time when you can get the best results from remediation, special help, for learning and emotional issues."

What kids learn -- both intellectually and emotionally -- in their teenage years will have a tremendous impact on their later years, so this is a time period when we want to make sure that our kids are getting both a rigorous academic education but also, and very importantly, a thoughtful emotional education. The teenage years are a great time to get kids to think about relationships, emotional control, ethics, goodness, and truth. The values, ideas, and behaviors that they absorb at this terrific stage will impact them throughout their lives.

3. Teens need a lot of help with organization, time management, and focus -- We've got to set limits for them.

This is something that every parent and educator who works with teens knows: many of our teens need a lot of help managing their time, dealing with all the distractions that permeate the teenage world, and focusing.

Many teens, if left to their own devices (pun intended), will waste their time on social media, gaming, and a host of other unproductive activities, only to find that it's almost midnight and they haven't done any of their homework. Then they show up at school the next day, exhausted and frustrated.

So what can parents do? Jensen offers these practical suggestions:
- Remind your teen to stop and think about they need to do  and when to do it.
- Give your teen a calendar and suggest that they write down their daily schedules.  By doing so on a regular basis, they train their own brains.
- Set limits on the amount of time your teen can socialize virtually. Jensen recommends taking a hard line here: "If your teenager fails to comply, take away the phone or the iPod, or limit computer use to homework...Also insist on knowing the user names and passwords for all accounts."

Jensen writes, "The fewer the temptations for your teen, the more their brains will learn how to deal without the constant distractions."


In conclusion, Jensen's book is well worth a read. The science she describes is fascinating, and the implications are profound (though sometimes frightening).

Tuition Fever: Madness in Singapore?

During a recent conversation with a friend, we began chatting about the tutoring frenzy in Singapore, which I've written about before here.

While it's common knowledge that local Singaporean kids engage in hours of tuition, often in all their major subjects, it may come as a surprise to some that kids in international schools attend almost as much tuition as their local peers.

Divesh Shah, of the famed Math Vision Center, tutors thousands of international school kids in math and Science. Many of his pupils are young -- they start as early as grade 2. And now, apparently, there are also a host of tutors for English, History, and Economics. High school kids, apparently, are even skipping school to attend tutoring sessions... Why would any high school student require extra tuition in every subject?

I can't help but wonder at this phenomenon. I can understand tutoring in a subject or two -- when a child is really struggling. But tutoring in every subject? How is that helpful?

Here are my thoughts on the subject:

1. If parents and teachers work together in the early years to ensure that kids have strong academic foundations/skills, then kids should not need tutors when they get to middle and high school. Much of this tutoring frenzy, particularly for international school kids who move around alot, may be the result of major academic gaps in the early years.
Parents: help your kids build strong foundations in math, reading, and writing early on, and high school will be a whole lot easier.

2. Relying on tutors can be dangerous in the long run. Kids have to learn to study and work independently at some point. They've got to be able to use resources available to them on the web and in books to help them, and they've got to be proactive about seeking extra help from teachers at school. There are no private tutors in university, and there are no tutors in the workplace. So, getting kids to rely so completely on tutors may backfire down the road.

3. Calm down everyone! If kids are attending these tutoring sessions just because everyone else is doing it, and if anxiety is fueling this tutoring craze, then parents and students need to take a deep breath and calm down! By all means, kids should get customized, individualized help in subjects where they're really struggling or the school isn't delivering at all, but beyond that, they should have the confidence and courage to study and work on their own. 

Experiential Learning: Is experience the best teacher?

We just got back from a beautiful weekend in Krabi, Thailand.



As we dove off a boat with our snorkel gear on, we found ourselves face-to-face with rainbow colored fish, their bright blue, sparkly yellow, striped black scales shining as they swam around us. Below us, spongy coral waved their tentacles; above us, hot sun and blue sky.

As we emerged from our snorkeling adventure and clambered back on the boat, my daughter whispered to me, "Ma, that was amazing. I never knew the ocean was that enchanting."

Now we've read lots of books about marine life together, and I've taken my kids to the aquarium in Singapore, but this was the real thing. They were experiencing the beauty, mystery, and wonder of the ocean firsthand.

In many ways, experience is the best teacher. For certain things -- perhaps the most important things -- experiences are what shape us,  change us, and make us who we are.

If we want our kids to understand the natural world and develop a desire to preserve and protect the environment, then we've got to let them experience nature first hand.

If we want our kids to love art and culture, then we've got to let them experience the arts and cultural traditions firsthand through travel, celebrations, cultural outings, performances, and artistic experiences.

If we want our kids to understand issues of social justice, then we've got to get them out in the field doing service, seeing how other people live, and witnessing first-hand the inequities around us.

For all of the above, experience is the best teacher. Experiences will make our kids interesting and humane; experiences will fuel our kids' desire to learn, explore, advocate, and act.

While experiential learning is fantastic, I know that experiential learning, too, has its limitations.

For basic academic skills and content, explicit instruction and book learning are crucial. Skill and drill are necessary. No child masters fractions and decimals by camping and traveling. No child fully understands the structure of an atom or cell just through interesting experiences. For kids to master academic skills and content, they need direct instruction, practice, and review.

BUT a real, true education must combine academic work with experiential learning to give kids not only the skills and knowledge they'll need, but also the desire to do wonderful and purposeful things with their lives. 

Do you #afterschool? No more swiss cheese foundations.

There's an American name for what so many parents here in Singapore do: afterschooling.

Here in Singapore, parents refer to it as "sitting with your child," "tuitions," "enrichment," and "supplementing." But in the US, many mothers refer to all of the above as various forms of "afterschooling."

Most Singaporean parents do a significant amount of "afterschooling," particularly when their kids are young -- ages 4 to 10.  In an ideal world, parents help their kids build strong academic foundations in the early years, and then kids can work independently as they grow older.

In my book, Beyond the Tiger Mom, I offer parents suggestions on how to "afterschool" their kids, particularly in the first ten years.

Here are some reasons to afterschool:

1. The First Ten Years Really Matter:
Research consistently shows that skill levels in grade 3 correlate highly with academic outcomes in high school. If kids don't master crucial skills in elementary school, then middle school and high school will be really hard. Here are some articles on the importance of foundations: Early Warning Confirmed, What's So Important About Third Grade, and Why Third Grade is so Important: The Mathew Effect.

Lost time in the early years is very difficult to remediate down the road, so make sure that kids master basic reading, writing, and math skills in elementary school to prime them for an easy ride in middle and high school.

2. Fill in the Gaps: Where is your child's school not delivering?
If you want to make sure that your child has strong academic foundations and a broad holistic education, figure out the deficits in your child's school and then fill in the gaps.

So if your child's school uses, for example, a weak math curriculum that lacks rigor and challenge, you might want to afterschool math using Singapore math (or outsource it to a tutor, if you choose the Singapore way.)

Or, if your school doesn't give your child enough time to engage with the arts, then you might want to buy art supplies and offer your child the space and time to paint, draw, and create.

3. Provide more practice and address areas of weakness:
If your child is struggling with a particular area at school and needs more practice, this might be where you focus your time when you supplement your child's education. Maybe she needs help with reading or writing. Or with math. Or with fine motor skills. Whatever the area may be, help your child by giving him/her some additional practice exercises at home.

4. Build on strengths and nurture passions:
If your child has a clear passion or interest, you might want to build this up and fuel it further. For example, if your child loves animals, you might want to buy lots of books about animals, get your child to volunteer at an animal shelter, and help your child further this passion. Or if your child loves legos and math, then encourage robotics, scratch, math olympiad and other math/STEM pursuits.

5. Keep gifted kids challenged:
If your child is breezing through school without ever experiencing what academic struggle and challenge feel like, you should consider afterschooling. There's a definite danger in feeling as though you can do well without much work -- bright, gifted kids NEED to experience significant challenge and understand the struggle and satisfaction of wrestling with difficult academic work. They need to know what it feels like to work hard, and moreover, the extra challenge will be a wonderful antidote to boredom.

And finally, whatever your reasons for afterschooling, remind your child that learning happens all the time and that there are few pursuits more pleasurable than learning. Like a bird in flight or a mountain climber scaling heights, the life of the mind is thrilling. Get your kids excited about learning through the home environment you create for them.

Does it matter if kids can't identify a verb?

So here's an interesting article from Ed Week about grammar making a (sort-of) comeback in American classrooms because of the increased complexity of Common Core texts.

I've thought about grammar instruction a lot for a number of reasons:

1. I'm a full-fledged grammar geek.  I love thinking about language at the level of the sentence.
Additionally, my own knowledge of grammar has helped me write, edit, and teach better. Therefore, it's important to me that my own kids and my students have a solid understanding of basic grammar and punctuation rules/concepts.

but more importantly,

2. These days, my high school students often arrive in grade 9 not knowing ANYTHING about grammar and punctuation.
(And these kids come in not just from the school where I teach but from schools around the world, mostly American/International schools. They are privileged kids who've attended good schools.)

Many kids have no idea what a verb is. 

One bright and earnest student asked me, "Ms.T, what's that 'sky comma' that people often use at the end of a word before an s?" 
She was talking about an apostrophe -- she had never been taught how to use an apostrophe. And this kid had attended very elite, expensive American schools before arriving in my classroom.

So what's going on? Does basic grammar and punctuation just not matter anymore? Should it be taught? And if so, how and when?

Here are my thoughts on the matter:

1. Explicit grammar instruction has value only IF it is taught systematically with the goal of mastery.

If kids just get a bit of grammar instruction here and there with the goal of mere exposure to concepts, then it's a total waste of time. It won't stick, and it won't have any value at all. Grammar, in this case, is a bit like math. If you're going to teach it, the goal has to be mastery.

2. Teaching grammar in isolation doesn't automatically mean that kids will use these grammar rules in their writing, so teachers have to carefully think about how to encourage that transfer of skills.

Even if a school has a strong, explicit, systematic grammar curriculum, as a few fantastic prep schools do (like The Winsor School in Boston, where I taught for three years early in my career), teachers still have to strategically help kids see the connections between grammar lessons and actual authentic writing.

3. If you're a parent and you care about grammar instruction, your best bet is to teach it yourself because most schools either don't teach grammar at all, or they teach it in such a haphazard way that it's a waste of time.

(Full disclosure: I teach my own kids grammar - we do half an hour lessons every weekend. I'm hoping they learn to love the mechanics of language the way I do.)

4. And of course, grammar instruction ONLY works alongside a reading-rich curriculum/environment, where kids are seeing grammar at work in context.

When kids read a book, they can see what writers are doing with language, and they are exposed to a wide range of different sentence structures and grammatical patterns. Wide and repeated exposure will hone their intuition for language, and they'll absorb an intuitive understanding of grammar and punctuation, even if they can't accurately identify parts of speech or diagram a sentence.
So if you don't feel comfortable teaching your kids grammar, don't worry -- just get them to read extensively, and they'll probably pick up many grammatical concepts just through reading.

Asian versus Western Parental Demands: A Deepening Rift?

I recently read this really interesting article in the NY Times on a school district in the US, where parental opinions on curriculum and academic pressure are severely divided along racial lines. Apparently, the White parents in this particular school are pressuring the school to reduce academic competition and pressure, while Asian parents, mostly immigrants, are anxious that the school will then be reducing standards, "dumbing down education," and preventing their children from excelling academically.

Here are some interesting extracts from the article:

"On the other side are parents like Mike Jia, one of the thousands of Asian-American professionals who have moved to the district in the past decade, who said Dr. Aderhold’s reforms would amount to a “dumbing down” of his children’s education.

“What is happening here reflects a national anti-intellectual trend that will not prepare our children for the future,” Mr. Jia said.

About 10 minutes from Princeton and an hour and a half from New York City, West Windsor and Plainsboro have become popular bedroom communities for technology entrepreneurs, pharmaceutical researchers and engineers, drawn in large part by the public schools. From the last three graduating classes, 16 seniors were admitted to M.I.T. It churns out Science Olympiad winners, classically trained musicians and students with perfect SAT scores.

The district has become increasingly popular with immigrant families from China, India and Korea. This year, 65 percent of its students are Asian-American, compared with 44 percent in 2007. Many of them are the first in their families born in the United States.

They have had a growing influence on the district. Asian-American parents are enthusiastic supporters of the competitive instrumental music program. They have been huge supporters of the district’s advanced mathematics program, which once began in the fourth grade but will now start in the sixth. The change to the program, in which 90 percent of the participating students are Asian-American, is one of Dr. Aderhold’s reforms. (bolding mine)"

The article was intriguing, and in some ways it mirrors the discussions I have with parents here in Singapore as well. International schools in Singapore often have a fairly even split between White and Asian families, and this demographic often creates a sort of split personality for the school, pulling it in two entirely different directions. Asian parents tend to want more "academic rigor," whereas Western parents worry that the programs are becoming too competitive and rigorous for their children.

Is it possibly for schools to address the concerns while still maintaining respect for both cultural attitudes towards parenting and education? Also, how can schools run by European and American faculty and administrators become more sensitive to the ways in which Asians view education and parenting? Perhaps the answer is to engage in more cross-cultural dialogue so that both sides actually talk to each other and learn from each other-- taking one side or another seems to be a recipe for disaster, as it will inevitably alienate half the school's population.

Shadow Education: Helpful or Harmful?

A couple years ago, one of my seventh grade students complained that I was giving the class too much homework. "We don't have time to do all this work," he argued vehemently.
"Why not?" I asked, wondering what these kids were doing after school.
"We have too much other stuff to do after school," he replied.

Curious, I polled my class. What do you do after school each day?
The results were about as stereotypical as results could get.
Most of my East Asian kids went on to hagwon (Korean school) or juku (Japanese school) or tuition classes of some sort for two hours every evening. There, they studied Math, English, and their native language.
Most of my South Asian kids spent a lot of time at "tutions," but they also engaged in some extracurricular activities.
And most of my European/Australian kids spent a lot of time on after-school sports. One of my students swam for two hours every evening. Another was at basketball practice for hours, and she travelled all over the region for tournaments.

In the Indian community in Singapore, moms often talk about Divesh Shah, the math guru who guarantees high scores in high school Math. Every Indian kid I meet here goes to Divesh Shah, and these moms swear by him. He's tough though -- the kids stay at his tuition center for hours, and he piles extra homework on them as well. But he does guarantee results.

I've been thinking a lot about the Asian practice of "shadow education." Sometimes, shadow education happens at home: moms "sitting with their kids" on a daily basis to supplement school education with extra math worksheets. Sometimes it includes private tutors. Often it involves large, established "enrichment centers" or "after-school schools" including Kumon, Abacus, Korean school (hagwons), Japanese schools (jukus), Divesh Shah centers, Mindlab, and a host of other tuition centers. Much of the academic success that Asian kids experience is a result of long hours in a shadow-school of some sort.

The proliferation and success of shadow-schools makes me wonder about a lot of things:

What is the role of a school? Should schools be sufficient in and of themselves? Is shadow education a sign that regular schools are failing? Does it mean that schools don't give students sufficient opportunities for practice during school hours?

Or is it an alternative model of education: schools tell kids what they should be able to do, provide creative opportunities to begin to explore these topics, and assess how well they can do these things. To supplement schools, shadow schools teach kids how to do these tasks well and give them opportunities for drill and practice. Society sort of acknowledges the limitations of group settings/school settings, and accepts the need for the shadow school to make sure that students get more individualized attention and practice.

Would kids be better off if we acknowledged and formalized the role of shadow schools by cutting the school day down so that kids go home for lunch? Then kids can go to shadow school earlier, finish up earlier, and have a little more time for fun stuff?

Do shadow schools cause too much pressure and competition amongst students? How much school is sufficient for students?

Many of my Western colleagues are very against the practice of shadow-schooling because they believe that it destroys creativity. Do shadow schools squelch and destroy creativity by making students focus entirely on analytical skills, test-taking strategies, and drill and practice exercises? Would these kids be better off taking a walk in the park and day-dreaming? Or painting a picture or reading a book? What is the opportunity cost of these shadow-schools?

The Singapore School system's new learner-centered motto is "Teach Less, Learn More." As one Singaporean parent said to me, what they really mean is that the schools will teach less so that the students can go to even more tuition classes to learn more. Is that really what's going on in Singaporean schools and international schools?

I'm curious about what moms think of shadow schools: a blessing? a necessary evil? a terrible source of pressure and competition?