Little Soldiers

by Lenora Chu

  Delving deeper, it turns out that early math skills are actually correlated with higher academic achievement later in life, as well as earning potential. Early academic skills, particularly in math, are “the single most important factor” in predicting later academic achievement, says a researcher who analyzed data from thirty-five thousand preschoolers. A London-based think tank found that “math skills developed during primary school continue to matter for earnings 20–30 years down the line.” Math SAT scores predict higher earnings among adults, while verbal SAT scores show no such correlation (though I wondered how the study accounted for cases like me, who aced the math SAT but chose to become a writer, a profession in which paychecks might come once a decade).

  There are also benefits unrelated to bank accounts; people with good math skills are more likely to “volunteer, see themselves as actors in, rather than as objects of political processes, and are even more likely to trust others,” according to the OECD.

  Math skills clearly matter for countries, and plenty of research findings read like gentle encouragements for America, as if it were a nation of bozos who haven’t yet mastered long division. Boosting the math proficiency of American students to the level of Canada’s or Korea’s would “increase the annual U.S. growth rate by 0.9 percentage points and 1.3 percentage points, respectively,” found a report at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. Another report found that automation and an increasingly competitive global marketplace would continue to pinch job opportunities for lower-skilled workers. High-wage countries such as America must adjust, or risk growing income disparities and political instability, wrote the researchers.

  Policymakers in China don’t need to sound such ominous warnings: The Chinese are generally on board, and its modern leaders have long understood the link between technical skills of the population and the health of its economy (although the Soviet Union’s 1957 launch of Sputnik did spur a reorganization in US science education). Deng Xiaoping called science and technology the key to China’s modernization after the devastating Cultural Revolution of 1966–1976. Jiang Zemin, himself an electrical engineer, promoted “rejuvenating the country through science and education” during his leadership years from 1989 through the early 2000s. Hu Jintao was a hydraulic engineer who pushed the idea of “indigenous innovation” and an innovation-oriented country over the past decade.

  Today, China’s ruling class is comprised mostly of scientist and engineers.

  All this reinforced the choices I’d made for Rainey, though frankly, I could do without the Chinese sense of superiority on this topic. Zhou Nian Li, the early education professor I’d befriended, told me once about a visit to an American grocery store gone awry. She’d put $25 worth of goods in her basket, but the cash register had failed mid-checkout. This little speed bump utterly stumped the American cashier. “I told her I could tally the bill orally, but the cashier had to wait until the machine was fixed,” Zhou told me, with a practiced ripple of her fingers that suggested she could recite the first thirty digits of pi while flipping somersaults. The head of assessments at a Shanghai primary school bragged to me that Barack Obama’s law degree wouldn’t pass muster in China. “In China, maybe Obama would be a mayor, but definitely not president,” Ni sniffed, nose lifted toward the ceiling. (I didn’t dare ask Teacher Ni for thoughts on President Trump.)

  That got me thinking. Chinese families seemed to value math as a matter of culture—you might say Chinese society awards a “nerd bonus” rather than subtracts a “nerd penalty”—but what was happening inside the classroom? How differently did Chinese and American instructors approach math teaching? What would Rainey be learning in China as he got older, and what was the US equivalent? Was one method clearly superior?

  To find out, I decided to conduct an observational study of my own.

  In Shanghai, Teacher Ni invited me to visit the primary school where he worked; we’d been introduced by a mutual acquaintance. The following year, I would also visit schools in Minnesota, Massachusetts, California, and New York, eventually deciding to focus on an elementary school in the Boston area.

  The two math classrooms I chose to write about—one in the center of Shanghai and another in a high-performing school district in Massachusetts—would provide a window into two contrasting approaches. Of course, certain features about the culture and system mean a US-China comparison will never be apples to apples; for one, Chinese schools generally don’t mainstream students with special needs, which keeps children of a single classroom moving at closer to the same pace. China also expects that kids will fall out of the system at every level, whereas America prides itself on educating every child. (The most sweeping recent US education standards are named “No Child Left Behind” and “Every Student Succeeds.”)

  Yet comparing is a useful exercise, James Stigler told me from his UCLA office one summer. Stigler is a psychologist who has spent his career studying education across cultures. “Meaning often emerges through contrast,” he and his co-author Harold Stevenson had written in his book The Learning Gap. “We do not know what it means to work hard until we see how hard others work. We do not understand what children can accomplish until we have seen what other children the same age can do. So it is with cultures.”

  Pen and notepaper ready, I looked across cultures.

  * * *

  First, Chinese math.

  Teacher Ni found me at the guard entrance of his Shanghai primary school midweek on a spring day. I followed three obedient steps behind him, down a long corridor on the top floor of the school’s main building. In the school’s massive courtyard below, I observed several hundred students taking their morning exercises, uniformed children mirroring the movements of their leader.

  We reached the end of the corridor and stepped inside a classroom. “These are seven- and eight-year-olds,” Ni said, brandishing a hand through the air. Tall and imposing, with a habit of dipping his chin to emphasize a point, Ni carried himself with the import of his position.

  “Are these students academically advanced?” I asked, counting thirty-two heads. These children would be second-graders in America.

  “No, they are normal kids,” Ni responded, “average for Shanghai. Some parents taught them academics before they entered primary school, but now we encourage play when they’re younger.”

  His words were “White Bible talk”—what I use to refer to any government attempt to make education kinder and gentler for its students—but I didn’t believe for an instant that these kids had spent hours on the playground as very small tykes. The students sat on gray metal folding chairs, clustered in groups of six and eight around rectangular rosewood tables, chatting animatedly. A slab of clear glass anchored each, and I could see knees neatly tucked beneath, feet flat on the floor. All wore the red crossover necktie that is the hallmark of a Chinese schoolchild. The setup was classic for a traditional Chinese classroom: cold tile or cement floors and unadorned walls but for a framed, hanging red-and-yellow Chinese flag. For an American used to bright, carpeted schoolrooms, the Chinese equivalent often conjured up an empty icebox with a locked access door.

  Teacher Ni and I took seats at the back of the long, narrow room, and an assistant deposited a Samsung touchpad in my lap. “You’ll need this for class,” she said. At precisely nine a.m., the master teacher strode into the room from an entrance near the front and the room immediately settled. A young girl at the second table instantly rose from her chair.

  “One! Two! Three!” yelled the girl, her head nodding with each utterance. “Let’s read the twelfth text XiHuMingDi. Standing by the West Lake, willow branches swaying . . . READY, GO!”

  Seated and chanting in unison, the chorus of students echoed after her, quickly calling out the words to a popular Chinese poem. Then, without further ado:

  “Class begins,” announced Teacher Zhou, a slight woman who stood at the front.

  “Stand up!” barked the lead girl. Thirty-one chairs squeaked as the students pu
shed back from the tables. I watched a tide of black-haired heads rise.

  “Good morning, students!” said the teacher, facing her class.

  The students responded, then pivoted to the back to find me and Teacher Ni.

  “And good morning to all teachers!”

  I’d been swiping at the tablet, and the spotlight was unexpected. I slid a little lower in my seat.

  “Please sit,” Teacher Zhou said, turning to the blackboard. “Yesterday we learned from a video about square numbers. If I ask you to demonstrate a number squared using dots, can you do that?”

  “We can do that!” the students chanted, in unison.

  “Begin!” the teacher pronounced. Thirty-two heads dropped over thirty-two electronic tablets, and I counted eighty seconds of silence. The teacher clapped sharply three times. “One! Two! Three!” she barked.

  “Sit up straight!” the students chirped, adjusting their backs into ramrod position.

  “Look up at the screen,” Teacher Zhou commanded, as thirty-two heads pivoted toward the screen at the front of the classroom. Zhou pressed a button, and an array of black dots materialized on a grid up front. My Samsung followed suit.

  “Student Number Two! Stand up!” Teacher Zhou commanded. At Soong Qing Ling also, I thought, students were often called by number and not name.

  The boy rose to meet her challenge. “I’ve made a square number of four.”

  Here, Zhou began a rapid-fire stream of questioning, inquiries, and answers coming to and fro as quickly as a Ping-Pong ball bounding across a table. “What is this number?”

  “Sixteen.”

  “How did you arrange it?” said the teacher.

  “Four dots in one line.”

  “How many lines?”

  “Four.”

  “Please sit.” The student lowered himself into the chair, as if an invisible hand were pressing down on his shoulder. The teacher tapped on a screen, and another grid appeared. I marveled that a student’s work would be subject to the judgment of thirty-one classmates at the tap of a teacher’s finger.

  “Number Twenty-Seven!” Teacher Zhou said. She was calling on students at random, placing classwork on display without warning.

  A young girl rose from her chair. “I made nine. Every line has three dots, and there are three lines.”

  “Number Four!” Teacher Zhou said, another grid appearing, another child standing. The back and forth was quick, but I detected no tension or anxiety. What would happen if a student hadn’t finished the assignment or marked a wrong answer? Finally, the screen flashed a paper with dots not fully formed.

  “Someone is still working. Let’s count together for him!” Zhou said as the student rose from his chair on cue.

  In unison, his fellow classmates chanted: “One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten!” The boy stood and listened, intently. To me, his face showed no traces of embarrassment.

  “How will a student catch up if he falls behind?” I whispered to Teacher Ni, at the back of the room.

  “If he doesn’t grasp the concept, the teacher will alert the parents and require that he buyixia—catch up, practice at home,” Teacher Ni whispered back.

  With her call-at-random approach to in-class exercises, along with scores on tests, the teacher could identify laggards and implement a plan for action. This was impressive, but in almost every other way, I found this classroom jarring to my sensibilities. Buildings in China south of the Yangtze have little or no heating, and this school was no exception. This room was tapered and long, which cemented the teacher as a distant authority figure, separated from her students by the interminability of space and the impersonality of desks. Students were called by number, not by name, which helped order the classroom but also reduced children to a collection of digits.

  I surveyed the students in their tidy uniforms, heads vibrating with the effort of clapping. I glanced away for a moment and looked back.

  Not a single student had imprinted in my memory.

  * * *

  How does the American math classroom compare?

  The following fall, a teacher in a Boston-area suburb invited me to sit in on a class. Massachusetts has always taken top honors on standardized testing; by this measure it’s among the highest-performing states in America.

  I stepped into Teacher Denise’s classroom and was immediately struck by the warmth of the room. The walls were painted a bright aqua color, the floors covered with blue-gray carpet. It was the industrial variety more suited for insulation and sound absorption than for sinking toes into shag, but it lent a sense of comfort to the classroom. Bulletin boards with backgrounds of indigo blue and bright yellow were spaced along three walls, offering a graphical explanation of the Dewey decimal system, or tips on how to use one’s imagination while reading a book. Where the Chinese classroom felt like a metal-and-glass shoe box, the American counterpart was an Easter egg basket, with grassy padding and an incubator to keep everything warm.

  “This is a yardstick,” said Teacher Denise, a calm brunette with a steady voice. Where the Chinese teacher was formidable, planting on two feet at the front of the class, Teacher Denise preferred to address her class with weight shifted to one leg, giving her a casual and approachable air. She brandished a length of wood before the class. “How many inches are in a yardstick?”

  A few dozen nine-year-olds sat before Teacher Denise on the carpeted floor. About a year older than the Chinese students I’d observed in Shanghai, they were dressed casually in long-sleeved T-shirts, pullovers, and comfortable pants.

  A boy in a sweatshirt shot up his hand.

  “Matt?” said Teacher Denise.

  “Thirty-six inches,” said Matt.

  “Good. Now, class, I have a meter stick here—see the difference? A meter stick is a little bit more than three inches longer than a yardstick. If you look closely at a meter stick, you can see tiny, tiny little lines,” Teacher Denise said. “The bigger lines where the numbers are are centimeters, and the smaller lines are the millimeters.”

  So began a unit on the metric system.

  “We have the US customary system, and the metric system,” Denise said.

  From my seat at the side of the room, the little group of students resembled a carpet picnic. Where the Chinese children sat in uniforms, pressed into rosewood tables, these kids expressed individuality in every way, down to the manner of sitting: cross-legged and upright, legs outstretched and extended, or leaning back casually, as if lounging on a pool chaise.

  “Let’s think about what I just said,” Teacher Denise continued. “We have centimeters and millimeters. They both have prefixes. What other words that you know start with centi- or cent?”

  “Cents!” offered a child.

  “And how many cents make up a dollar?”

  “One hundred!” said another.

  “One hundred! Are we catching a theme here? What other words are made up of cent? DeShawn?”

  “Centipede?”

  “Century?”

  “Yes! And take a wild guess—how many years in a century?” Teacher Denise asked, moving to sit on the floor, at eye level with her students.

  “One hundred!”

  The group moved through the same exercise with “milli” and “deci”—“Millipede . . . millennium . . . good!”

  Suddenly, Teacher Denise rose. “Okay, we are going to get into our groups to work on measuring,” she instructed, and the room erupted into a flurry of activity. I counted about sixty seconds before chairs and desks in the center of the room were transported to the edges. Teacher Denise produced a handful of meter sticks. A small group of students dispatched to monitors at the back of the room for FASTT Math drills—an individualized program of games that helps students with basic math facts.

  For the next fifteen minutes, the rest of the students measured. They placed rulers against various objects: desks, chair heights, the length of a pen, a pair of scissors, the width of a textbook. In groups they se
t about their task, chatting animatedly, heads huddled together, as a designated leader jotted measurements onto a lined piece of paper. Slowly, their voices rose several registers, and Teacher Denise intervened to kill the small talk.

  “Boys and girls, volume check! Hands in the air! Volume check!” Teacher Denise called out.

  Each child lifted a hand in the air, quieting for just an instant.

  * * *

  In the Chinese classroom, the students competed in a drill.

  “Now let’s biyibi—compare!” said Teacher Zhou, populating the screen up front with a stair-step diagram. The stairs began at the bottom left of my Samsung and escalated toward the right side of the screen. Each step cradled a number.

  “This staircase is full of traps,” Teacher Zhou said, planting herself at the head of the room. “Step only on the stairs that have square numbers, otherwise you will fall. For each square number you will get one star. Let’s see who can get five stars! Begin!

  The class bent over their tablets, and I launched into my time counting. I’d gotten used to measuring the seconds during such periods, marvels of quiet efficiency and productivity.

  Twenty-five seconds passed. Teacher Zhou clapped sharply, and I startled in my seat, as I always did when serene calm is stamped out by a Chinese administrator.

  “One, two, three!” Teacher Zhou yelped. “How many stars have you got?”

  A chorus of students erupted. “Five! Five stars!”

  “Now submit your scores.” The students tapped on their screens, and a number materialized at the front of the room: 27.

  “Ah! There are twenty-seven students who got five stars.” That meant five children had lost their way, and Teacher Zhou scanned her tablet to identify a straggler. “Student Number Five? How many square numbers did you find?”

  A boy stood, a lone figure in his red crossover necktie. “I have four stars—four square numbers.”