My husband and I would like to apply for english teaching positions. We have researched all the aspects regarding moving to a new country, but I need some advice regarding my daughters schooling in Taiwan.
She is 8 years old and a very outgoing little girl. She does however not speak any Chinese. Since both of us are going to be working we need someone to look after her. Do you think we must send her to public school. ( we would not be able to afford the private schools )
Public schools here are pretty good at the elementary level. I plan on sending my daughter to one when she’s the right age. I feel that the junior high and high schools are absolutely horrible, however. You should have some sort of plan for her education at that point. Welcome to Forumosa, btw!
I agree that the junior and senior high schools are bad. They ‘teach’ by constantly testing - every day. There is enormous pressure to get perfect scores. The students are expected to study all the time - really - your child will have no free time. The emphasis is on rote memorization, not on understanding.
bababa is right. My experience stems from teaching these kids - I’ve been teaching at one of Taipei’s “elite” private schools for quite some time now, and I see the pressure cooker that these students are in. They’re not getting a good quality education, either, IMO. I also teach in my own buxiban, and I see time and time again, how great little kids slowly get the spirit, life and spark crushed out of their soul by the time they hit their high school years. Of course, not all of them are affected this way. But most of them are. I wouldn’t put my daughter through the junior high/high school system even if they paid me.
I share Maoman’s opinion about the quality of elementary school education in Taiwan. I have an adopted daughter who is 100% Taiwanese who just graduated from elementary school. She had a great time in school. In her class, they had a girl from Australia study with them for three weeks this year, and it seemed to be a wonderful experience for everyone.
I am concerned, however, about the language difficulties your daughter will initially encounter. She’ll have to adapt to a new living environment in a place that is like another world, and asking her to jump into an all-Chinese environment sounds like a difficult challenge for an eight year old. There should be some kind of a hybrid option available for her first year to allow her to adapt in her own time, i.e. she is surrounded by Chinese-speaking kids for several hours a day but doesn’t have the pressure to take classes in a Chinese environment. Maybe home schooling combined with participation in some extracurricular activities? I’m not an expert in what options are available.
I have heard that XinSheng 新生 Bilingual elementary school next to Da-An park accepts foreign students or overseas Taiwanese students who have just moved to Taiwan and need help with their Chinese. The school will keep the students in their program for up to 6 months while they adjust to an all-Chinese learning environment, after that the students are to be transferred to the school of their own district. You can contact the school at ：(02)2391-3122 to learn more.
The biggest problem I have is that the school never translates anything for me, even though I repeatedly tell my boy’s teacher I can not read Chinese, and my spoken is not so great. He has missed out on many activities as I just didn’t know about them. He has come home and said, “you didn’t give me any colored paper and the likes… We had to make a BLAH BLAH BLAH and I just had to sit there and do nothing.” I feel pretty bad for him when that happens and also angry at his teacher as I feel if she was doing her job properly, she would make sure all her students benefited from a class activity.
I am a single dad, so we don’t have the help of his TW mom.
He is only 7 and a half, but I am having to try to teach him to write down small notes about what teacher says that I may need to know. It is quite difficult for him, he shouldn’t have to be worrying about that kind of stuff. He is just a kid. He should be thinking about Transformers or Ben10 or whoever his likes at the moment. I gave him a book and told him to ask the teacher to write a simple translation of any letter or message so he could come home and tell me anything important, but the teacher didn’t do it even once…
I ask his AnChinBan teacher to help with letters from Chinese school and they do help a lot, but sometimes there English isn’t so good.
Despite all this, my boy still got top grades in Math, and he did do pretty good in Chinese too, but I feel he is at a disadvantage as there is no Chinese at my place, maybe just TV when he watches it, but I can imagine for the TW kids, well they have a Chinese environment at home and very little English. But even so, after just completing Year 1, I am amazed at how much Chinese he can read now, and not just BPMF, but reading Chinese characters and being able to tell me what something says.
So any advice, You just need to do your research and set yourself up with a good support network. So I hope you get lots of input here. Good Luck, it can be done.
[quote=“TaipeiSean”]The biggest problem I have is that the school never translates anything for me, even though I repeatedly tell my boy’s teacher I can not read Chinese, and my spoken is not so great. He has missed out on many activities as I just didn’t know about them. He has come home and said, “you didn’t give me any colored paper and the likes… We had to make a BLAH BLAH BLAH and I just had to sit there and do nothing.” I feel pretty bad for him when that happens and also angry at his teacher as I feel if she was doing her job properly, she would make sure all her students benefited from a class activity.
I am a single dad, so we don’t have the help of his TW mom.
He is only 7 and a half, but I am having to try to teach him to write down small notes about what teacher says that I may need to know. It is quite difficult for him, he shouldn’t have to be worrying about that kind of stuff. He is just a kid. He should be thinking about Transformers or Ben10 or whoever his likes at the moment. I gave him a book and told him to ask the teacher to write a simple translation of any letter or message so he could come home and tell me anything important, but the teacher didn’t do it even once…
[/quote]
Probably his teacher’s English is bad to non-existent, or she is embarrassed by the mistakes she will make, so ‘forgets’ to translate the notes.
[quote=“bababa”][quote=“TaipeiSean”]The biggest problem I have is that the school never translates anything for me, even though I repeatedly tell my boy’s teacher I can not read Chinese, and my spoken is not so great. He has missed out on many activities as I just didn’t know about them. He has come home and said, “you didn’t give me any colored paper and the likes… We had to make a BLAH BLAH BLAH and I just had to sit there and do nothing.” I feel pretty bad for him when that happens and also angry at his teacher as I feel if she was doing her job properly, she would make sure all her students benefited from a class activity.
I am a single dad, so we don’t have the help of his TW mom.
He is only 7 and a half, but I am having to try to teach him to write down small notes about what teacher says that I may need to know. It is quite difficult for him, he shouldn’t have to be worrying about that kind of stuff. He is just a kid. He should be thinking about Transformers or Ben10 or whoever his likes at the moment. I gave him a book and told him to ask the teacher to write a simple translation of any letter or message so he could come home and tell me anything important, but the teacher didn’t do it even once…
[/quote]
Probably his teacher’s English is bad to non-existent, or she is embarrassed by the mistakes she will make, so ‘forgets’ to translate the notes.[/quote]
Actually, do you think that your son’s teacher is doing this on purpose? Isolating a child in the class is another way of getting certain messages across, especially if the child is from a mixed-marriage.
Well, I certainly hope those who educate the children here wouldn’t do it on purpose. But actually after he got in trouble for beating up a 3rd grader, (my boy is in grade 1),he has a Chinese English teacher at Chinese school who called me and when I told her that he has been bullied at school, she asked me why don’t I change schools then, but I just said to her, why should he, he is a Taiwanese, he has every right to go there and from what I can see, you are not doing your jobs properly in teaching children about other people which is quite amusing as Taiwan want to join the United Nations, how can they if they can’t accept people from other nationalities.
She didn’t offer a response.
I am not sure either, but I know for sure that back in Australia all government type forms I have had to complete have asked a question as to whether another language is spoken at home and so many forms, brochures and even tests are translated into different languages. Yes, it should get easier once he can start to translate more.
I don’t quite get the point about the United Nations!
I really admire you in a sense Sean – being a single dad in an alien strange country, where you don’t know the language well, cannot be easy. But it sounded from another post that you have the option to return to home country. As you have no contact with the child’s family, I don’t really understand why you don’t do that. What’s the point of hanging around until your boy learns Chinese well and then going to your home country where he will forget it immediately? I don’t quite get your priorities.
As to the written requests in the contact book, I am totally with you. My wife is rubbish at spotting this stuff – quite often our son will suddenly remember at bedtime that the following day he needs a green plastic bag, some sort of cooking implement that we don’t have, some lentils sewn up into little cloth bags… as we all know, many things can be obtained in Taiwan at any time of day and night, and my wife seems to have no problem with driving to Wellcome or wherever to get the requisite goodies. I can read Chinese, but the way it’s phrased (or written on the blackboard for our son to copy into his contact book) sometimes seems almost deliberately opaque.
Well, kind of meant with the United Nations comments is that if they can’t teach their children to accept someone from another nation, how can Taiwan hope to get along with other natonalities once they join the United Nations. But anyway, it was just a point to the teacher to point out that they should be teaching their children at school to accept people from other nationalities, and to stop my boy being bullied and being called names at school. I am sure there would be trouble these days back in Australia for racist name calling, you even read about it in sport every now and again in the news back home. (Yes, I know we are not there now though).
The reason why we don’t have any contact with my boy’s TW family is that after my divorce, my ex-wife vowed to make me lose everything and her father threatened me with taking my boy away as this is TW and they will do it the Taiwanese way. You may remember the Brazillian Boy case here in Taiwan a few years back. I don’t want him taken from me and then I need to fight for 2 years in court. I have had enough court cases here in Taiwan for the res of my life. They may or many not do that, but neither his TW grandparents nor his 2 sisters-in-law have made any attempt to contact me to see him in more than 5 years now. I may consider them seeing him in a very public place when I also have some friends around with me. But anyway, the TW courts awarded him solely to me.
As for him learning Chinese, I plan to stay here long enough so he won’t forget it. My ex-wife had a small business sending kids to Australia to study English and attend high school and then university. I have known a few kids that have gone over after finishing only a couple of years of junior high and they haven’t had a problem with forgetting their Chinese. Of course they always return to Taiwan at vacation time. I have also worked with lots of guys and girls that have gone to another country quite young and then have returned to Taiwan as adults to learn Chinese. I can give him that now. If that means staying until he finishes high school, I will do that. After all his mom left Taiwan straight after she finished high school, she did 6 months in an English school in Australia and then straight into university to study Microbiology. She finished that and came back to Taiwan and worked at the Academa Sinica in Taipei doing research on cloning and some other stuff, but found that boring so went back to Australia to study law and now is a registered Patent Attorney in both Taiwan and Australia. So from that, she left Taiwan at 19, so if I need to stay here till then, I will for my boy, but maybe before he turns 18 so he can miss the military service, unless he tells me he wants to do it.
But is that the right choice for him? It can be difficult to know which path the follow and you can get lots of advice from others. That’s always good. All I can do is do what feels right at the time, mak some plans for the future and make adjustments to those as needed. I am set up quite comfortable here in Taiwan now, so it isn’t really a problem for me to stay, just a few inconveniences, but you can have inconveniences everywhere, but most can be worked around in one way or another.
Ha, my boy has remembered he has needed things just at bedtime too, Luckily, we have a 24 hour Wellcome store only 50 metres from our apartment.
When my son was a teenager, he would remember those things he needed in the morning as he was getting ready for school.
On the issue of language, you have to be careful about having your boy become the man as far as translating goes. In US you see many Asian and Hispanic children who end up translating for their parents in public. And so become adults before their time. Something to consider.
But like I said before, “He is only 7 and a half, but I am having to try to teach him to write down small notes about what teacher says that I may need to know. It is quite difficult for him, he shouldn’t have to be worrying about that kind of stuff. He is just a kid. He should be thinking about Transformers or Ben10 or whoever his likes at the moment.”
I want him to learn to be independant but he must also play, he does play soccer, play Taekwondo, rollerblading and mountainbiking, swimming and just play down the park. I remember one time when he was 2y/o in Yo-Yo class and we had a parent day. I remember one parent asking the teacher to give his 2 y/o some homework. I laughed and said my boy’s homework is to go home and play with his toy cars.
The little one is entering 3’rd grade come September, and the big one is entering 6’th grade.
The little one is doing very well, however she has been picked on for being different. The teacher has not handled that very well, which I remarked on.
The big one does not have that problem, however she’s busy driving the teacher crazy with an attitude toward doing homework on time which she really needs to work on. Her teacher and I are on excellent terms, as we discuss what to do on at the very least weekly basis.
Both girls are bright and get high marks.
My plan is to have them take the first 2 years of junior high here, and then send them home to a boarding school for 2 years of junior high, and hopefully 3 years of high school.
Denmark has a ton of boarding schools catering to 8-9-10 grade, a fact I am thankful of.
[quote=“SAgirl”]My husband and I would like to apply for English teaching positions. We have researched all the aspects regarding moving to a new country, but I need some advice regarding my daughters schooling in Taiwan.
She is 8 years old and a very outgoing little girl. She does however not speak any Chinese. Since both of us are going to be working we need someone to look after her. Do you think we must send her to public school. ( we would not be able to afford the private schools )
What is the cost of public schools in Taiwan.
Any advice would be greatly appreciated. :help:
Lindie[/quote]
You might also want to consider homeschooling her and asking your employer if you can bring her to work with you and your husband. She can meet other kids there and if she’s interested in other classes like music or dance, or even sports, there are classes available in English in Tianmu, and of course, many in Chinese. There are also soccer clubs for kids her age.
The school enatai suggested is also something to consider. I met a boy about 11yo who was in that program and who had moved here from Europe. Not an easy transition at that age, or any age, really, but really helped with the adjustment to have others he could communicate with and relate to.
