Last week I took the morning off to visit a local primary school, arranged by Jasper’s nursery. Althou it will be another 2 years before Jasper attends primary school, we will have to make a choice for him much sooner, and it doesn’t hurt to learn a bit more about the popular schools in the area.
The one I went to is very popular in the area. Full day school, prep time on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday afternoons. Extra-curriculam activities and sports on Thursday and Friday afternoons. Apparently workload is uber heavy, and competition is fierce.
The Headmaster mentioned that the standard number of kids in a class should be 32, but since the school is so popular, they want to take in as many as possible, the average class size is actually 36.
There is something serious wrong here. Regardless as to whether a school is truly good by anyone’s standard, the fact is, the Headmaster and the teachers must have done well to make the school popular. Well instead of getting extra resources so they could expand the school, take on extra staff, or give themselves a raise in salary (nope, everybody’s on the same pay scale), they get to take care of a few more kids and extra work. That is right they are penalized for being competent.
And it’s kinda funny how the teachers and parents kept talking about the kids’ “performance”, like the kids were finely tuned racing cars! For Pete’s sake it’s elementary education we are talking about here! The cynical me thinks some of these parents have an inferior complex or something.
In the same week the Lady visited another school related to the one I visited. She was most impressed with the hardware (it was one of those new Millennium schools) but much less so with the Headmaster who was so very impressed with his own sales pitch. When asked whether they have a timeline or any plan for teaching Chinese language in PTH, the Headmaster babbled on the practical difficulties and stressed that dancing and basket ball training were conducted in PTH No sh*t.
IT DOESN’T LOOK GOOD.