Teachers & principal

Q: lack of teacher stability, teachers' organisation of students and teaching subjects in class?
Q: can you tell me about any positive or negative changes made by new principal


My apologies, I didn't get to finishing off the whole ISF discussion with all the millions of questions.  Here goes on the subject of Teachers and principal


1.  Teachers
Things have changed here significantly in the nearly 3 years we've been at the school.  The teacher turnover is down from around 20-25% (particularly amongst the English speaking teachers) to I think around 5-8%.  I've also seen a great drive towards employing more experienced and more "stable" teachers - i.e. slightly older and less likely to be at the school as part of a travelling working experience.  In at least one case a teacher who was not up to par was removed.   From what I can understand the teachers are a lot more engaged than previously and certainly the head master has had a lot to do with that.
Having said that, like in any school there are better teachers and less experienced and competent teachers.  And like with all children, some teachers and some teaching styles suit some children better than other children.  We, and a couple of other parents last year did experience the "perfect storm" with both language teachers not being up to par, and that has led to difficulties with 2 children of the class going back to 1st grade this year to repeat it, and of course you know the saga of my son.  I'm not sure  how the rest of the class fared, but I've heard that there are differences.


For me, the defining thing however is that one really does have to cope with considerable cultural differences between the "Chinese" teaching style and attitude to pupils and learning and the "English".  There are assumptions and values and beliefs that one cannot begin to imagine unless you've been through the process yourself (as in learning Chinese personally) or lived it through your child(ren).  I'm not saying anything is right or wrong, just that it is very very different and you need to keep and open mind, be very tolerant and try to meet half way.


2. Principal
I cannot have anything but praise for the new head.  In a very short space of time he's put the right people in place, got authorisation for MYP and DP (something that was so vague and seemed so unattainable 3 years ago). There's been less faffing around and hand wringing and a lot more accountability and action.  Importantly I think you can judge a leader by the people he / she surrounds themselves with.  That said, I think there are still a few people around who are perhaps not ideally suited to the school and what it is trying to achieve, but that's a personal opinion.
A good leader is not scared of strong people and I'm seeing some very good placements here, particularly in the secondary school.  I truly envy the children who are in secondary now.  They will benefit from extremely small classes, a high degree of intimacy with their peers, excellent facilities and access to a lot of attention and care.


Besides all these actions, he's always been available to people like myself, and has taken a personal interest in the education and development of my children. In fact, it is mainly due to my faith in him and what he is doing that my son is still at ISF today.  However, I will say, that now that secondary seems to be adequately on track, I would sincerely hope that the focus of his attention will move down to primary, and particularly to the Chinese side of things.  


I hope that answers all / any questions that have been out there.  Now that we'll be leaving in the next 6 months, it is with regret that we'll have to leave ISF.  Particularly for my daughter.  If we had stayed in HK, I think we'd have given it until the end of the school year, and then we'd have moved my son to a mono-lingual learning environment.  She would have stayed there.  That would have been a heart-wrenching decision after the investment in time and effort and emotion, plus the fact that I still believe that Chinese is JUST another language, and that every child CAN become bilingual, even in two languages that are as far apart as Chinese and English.   I'll write more later about why he and I think children like him struggle with Chinese in the way in which it is presented and what may have worked in hindsight.


We had a look into local schools in Singapore, particularly for my daughter so she could continue with Chinese. We were advised against it by some pretty knowledgeable people, as it would fulfil her academic needs but not her social and other needs to be a well balanced, well adjusted person who could see herself in terms of self rather than position in class or grades or scores in tests.  Besides which, we're lazy parents and like our children to be at the same school, so we can give the school our full support and attention, and of course give a school access to our two wonderful children, who will give a school community the benefit of their wide-ranging abilities and characters.  They're the ying and yang of our lives and any school should be honoured that we're prepared to share our children with them. 

Invisibility cloak

Having a few days off the hamster wheel routine that has become life is a good thing.  It allows time for introspection and contemplation and reading and pondering.  (Inbetween sightseeing and eating foreign delicacies of course).

The literature for my break was Mel Levine's A mind at a time. This follows me completing the Myth of Laziness   a little while back.  The conclusion I've been forming goes somewhere along these lines.  I've been resisting having R tested or assessed or labelled for the longest time.  Both my gut instinct and my insight and studies in psychology and my understandings of the limitations of testing and my intuition as a mother has been saying that I don't have confidence in the process or the outcome.

Clearly he is struggling with school.  Clearly he's a highly intelligent child, who if he's judged by the quality of his questions and insights rather than by that of his output on paper and test results would be an academic superstar.  And more importantly than all of that, when looking at compassion and kindness there are few who could match him.

I'm realising more and more that any SEN (special educational needs - don't you just NOT like that label?) issue and label is a little like an invisibility cloak.  I fear that it is too broad a brush, too rough a material, too wide and all encompassing.  Too convenient.  And I fear that it hides more than it reveals.  Especially a label like ADD or ADHD.

What do I believe / think?  It's still not properly formulated, but I think that Dr. Levine has a point in his 8 mind systems and pointing out that a break down in any one or combination of these can result in school bench academic failure.  I also applaud the approach for emphasizing neuro-plasticity, which is an  absolute article of faith to me.  Once you know what's happening and why there is no reason not to work on improving things.  It's a case of picking your battles and priorities.

Where to now?  I have my suspicions as to where the break-downs are occurring in learning.  And I'm less and less baffled as to why Chinese has proven to be such a formidable barrier to him.   I need to work a little more on my thinking on that as it's a little too intuitive and fuzzy at the moment to blog about.

In the mean time we probably have about 6 months left in Hong Kong, so the question is what to do in those months?  What to do with him and even more importantly what I should do?  I could graduate in mid July or I could chuck in the Chinese and ....? well I don't know what.  I'm not sure if I'm resilient enough to cope with the demands of organising a move and finishing a degree. Or if I'm just whimping out of hard work under the excuse that it's all too much to cope with...

Happy Year of the Rabbit

Just back from our short break in Harbin and Beijing.  A very happy new year to everyone.  More blogging when I've had a good night's rest.