The gift of giving

I must admit to a certain feeling of weariness. I had anticipated this week with a great amount of glee - a week all to myself. No school, no committments, kids still at their school. Husband travelling. I guess I'd underestimated the toll of a year of go go go which culminated in everything happening last week.

I dressed myself to go up the mountain for a run. We got outdoors. The temperature has plummeted to 7 degrees and it's drizzling. I put the kids on the bus, my headphones on and walked up anyway. Slowly. Plodding. Wondering what this immense fatigue was that has gotten into my core. One hightlight was the podcast on the Beethoven project trio - well worth a listen.

Back home.  Dumped out 2 bags onto my bed - my handbag and school bag full of stuff to sort, file, administer to.  Walk to my desk.  A pile of mail that needed attending.  The ex-inhabitants of our house receiving Christmas cards at a ratio of about 5:1 to us at the moment (we stopped sending cards about 4 years ago and make donations instead, so we've been scrapped off most people's lists, hopefully as they do they same...).

A pink envelope.  Addressed to me, in the shape and form of a Christmas card.  But from someone I wouldn't have thought went in for the whole card thing.  A cheque with a blank payee falls out of a letter.  It is from one of my readers who has become a friend.  It's her birthday soon and she's sending friends a cheque and asking them to use it to donate the money to a cause dear to their hearts and just let her know what they chose.  I'm feeling a little teary.  And also suddenly I feel like I have been given a difficult choice.  How would I allocate this wisely?

Our charities this year in lieu of Christmas cards have been Cotlands in South Africa, AUW in Bangledesh, as well as the Food Bank in Hong Kong.  During the year instead of birthday presents we've requested donations to the Borneo Orangutan Survival Foundation (BOS) in Indonesia and Bring me a book (Hong Kong).  So why don't I just write out the cheque to any of those?  It would be easy enough.  They're all causes I believe in.  And yet I'm reluctant to do so.  Is there a natural limit to our capacity to give, a satiety of "I've given you enough and now it's someone else's turn"?  Is this a strange question?  Surely if we believe in a cause we give and give and give and not ever feel we'd given enough?

So I'm looking for suggestions.  I'd like it to be a local Hong Kong charity.  Not operation Santa, that would be too easy.  Something involving people, particularly the elderly or homeless.  A reputable well run something with low overheads.  Any ideas?

Video overload

It's my free week with kids still and school and me free.  I'm doing the usual dentist, physio,  have to stuff, but I also borrowed a stack of DVD's from the university library.  Here are the one's I've been watching so far - all recommended.

One of the most interesting was "Superkids" but I can't find a clip for it. It was downright scary what was happening to the kids as they were pushed through high school, parents who kept on changing their schools in search of the "perfect" program.

The nature of the beast

 Q: drifting between wanting to be an ib school and a local school?


This is a very good question.  Sometimes I grapple with it myself.  I was at school yesterday waiting for someone and picked up a copy of the IB magazine "IB World" and flicking through it was thinking that every parent at the school should actually receive a copy of it.  Sometimes in our day to day drudgery of finishing assignments, working to the next assessment, getting everything done on time intact and without too many tears we lose sight of the bigger picture.  And with IB there is a bigger picture.  A much bigger and quite admirable picture, which is why, so many years ago we made the decision to try and have our children educated within the IB framework.


Yet again, last week was human rights week, and I was most encouraged to see that the secondary section had placed some very thought provoking displays and information, including a stand from Amnesty International.  There are all kinds of children and parents working on all kinds of things that I think fit in very well with the IB system.


The local school thing.  Sometimes I despair on the Chinese side.  What drives the "local school" accusation?  I don't know.  Is it the mentality of (some) teachers?  Is it the mentality of (some) parents.  Certainly there are extremists, like in any school.  Is it the very nature of Chinese that means that the school has to have some aspects that lead to the label "local" i.e. meaning rote learning and assessment and dictation and heaps of homework. Not thinking, not challenging the status quo. I had a long chat with a girlfriend who has also studied Chinese about this, and her conclusion and that of some of her classmates who she spent a year with in China many years ago was that they would NOT send their children to Chinese or Chinese/English immersion schools since the very nature of Chinese and having to learn it at a young age would rob their children of creativity and spontaneity by it's very nature and the way in which it needs to be learnt.  Now these are people who completely believe in the importance of learning Chinese and have made personal sacrifices in order to learn it.  People living and working in China.  And they're not saying their children won't learn Chinese.  They're just saying that learning Chinese at a young age would be at the cost of something else and that something else they see in colleagues and job applicants and highly intelligent very motivated very successful ex-students of the Chinese system.  And they don't like it.


I'd hate to be a leader of a school like ISF.  I can tell you that the parent body is POLES apart.  There are extremists on both ends of the spectrum.  For every parent complaining about too much too soon, too much homework, too many assessments there are probably 5 or 6 parents who would prefer that the school gave more homework, more frequent tests, ranked the children in order of the test results, streamed the classes in terms of academic ability and got rid of any academically marginal children.  Parents who'd like to see the school recreated in the image of their preferred local school, but then with better English and a dose of creativity thrown in.  There are also parents for whom ISF is the 2nd choice or the choice for their academically struggling boys while their compliant, fit in the system girls go to local schools (talk about schizophrenic?).


That's the parents.  I think the school is pretty clear from a leadership point of view what it is.  It just takes time for the message to filter down, be understood and be accepted and internalised by the rest of the stakeholders.  And they have  a huge task on their hands to make sure that all the teachers can lose some of what they're used to and adapt to these very different needs while maintaining the good and the desirable.  We all are products of where we come from and how we were brought up and educated.  It's not that easy to put that to one side and change beliefs and behaviours.


I've still not made my personal conclusion.  No, in answer to your question, it is NOT a local school.  But the deeper question is whether learning Chinese as an additional language is something that every child can do and at what personal cost it is acquired.