Little Soldiers

by Lenora Chu

  “Let’s do it together.” Zhou summoned the group. “What have you found?”

  The chorus of voices erupted: “16, 1, 81, 49, 100.”

  “Student Number Ten! What did you leave out?” A second boy stood for his public lesson, then promptly returned to his metal folding chair. I was astounded by the content of the exercise, and I whispered to Teacher Ni. “How come such young children have already started learning square roots?”

  Ni laughed. “It’s likely parents started to teach them when they were five, or they were sent to outside classes before they entered primary school.”

  “That’s exactly what I’m afraid of,” I exclaimed. “I’m not doing this with my child at home.”

  “Ennnh,” he said. “Don’t worry. We have a handful of students who are in a similar situation. I’ll use a metaphor here: When others around you are dashing to the finish, the desire to run sometimes flames out.” In other words, don’t kill the desire to run by pushing too early. Again, these were White Bible words offered in the spirit of lightening academic pressure, although few parents would risk being the only ones listening.

  Next up was another competition. “Let’s see who can make more square numbers than the others,” the teacher proclaimed. “Begin!”

  I counted seconds again, and this time I kept going and going. Seven minutes passed before Teacher Zhou clapped.

  “Are you making very big numbers?” Zhou said.

  “Yes!” they responded, in unison.

  “Are you excited?”

  “Yes!” the students answered, voices overlapping neatly.

  The teacher had complete command of the classroom. There was little room for inquisition, and I noted that at no time did a student have the opportunity to respond, as in, “No, teacher, I am not excited, and I don’t understand.”

  “If I only provide you a sum of continuous odd numbers, can you tell me immediately whose square number is this sum?”

  “Yes,” answered the chorus of voices.

  I sat in the back, gaping at the screen. In this ordinary Shanghai primary school, these seven- and eight-year-old children were studying:

  If: 1+3+5+7 = 42

  1+3+5+7+9+11 = x2

  What is x?

  “Student Number Twelve!” she asked, surveying her seven- and eight-year-old students. “Did you discover the rule?”

  A boy rose. “It’s the number of addends.” I shrank a little lower in my seat, as if I might be up next if I inadvertently caught the teacher’s eye.

  “Yes,” replied Teacher Wang. “It’s the relationship between addends and square numbers! Let’s count how many numbers we have here for the next one!”

  A chorus of students ticked off: “One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine!”

  Teacher Zhou nodded, satisfied. Her white sweater billowed as a gust of wind suddenly blew through the classroom through the open door. “Through today’s study, we found the beauty of mathematics,” she said, nodding at her charges. On cue, they rose, chairs screeching as they scraped against the tiled floor.

  “Today’s class is over . . . dismissed,” Teacher Zhou said curtly.

  The students returned her gesture with a short bow. “Please have a rest, Teacher!”

  “Please put away your pens and paper,” the teacher said, as she retreated stage left.

  I glanced at the children. They rose from their chairs, bodies slanted in the direction of her disappearing back, thirty-two heads tipped forward in the slightest nod.

  * * *

  In the Massachusetts classroom, the children had started in on fractions, divvied into groups of four and five. Teacher Denise crouched next to a girl in a cluster near the door.

  “How many centimeters is five millimeters?” Teacher Denise asked, searching the girl’s face. The girl was stumped. Teacher Denise prompted her again, gently.

  “How about this—If you have fifty millimeters, that’s how many centimeters?” Teacher Denise tapped on the worksheet in front of the girl.

  No answer.

  “Think about it like this—how many centimeters are in a meter?”

  At this, the girl was confident. “One hundred,” she responded.

  “Okay, yes! So write that down. All right? All right. So now think about five centimeters—and how many centimeters there are in a meter. So what would be the fraction for five centimeters?”

  The girl wrote a number down on her page.

  “Okay, beautiful,” said Teacher Denise. “So five of them would be what?”

  Teacher and student huddled over the page, heads brushing against each other. For a moment, from a distance, they looked like friends.

  “You have the idea, right?” Teacher Denise asked, glancing at the girl’s face, the hope and encouragement clear in her face.

  * * *

  Spend five minutes in either classroom, and the differences leap out, a chasm in style and expectation, as well as a basic dissimilarity in what is valued: the group versus the individual.

  The Chinese teacher was the center of gravity in her classroom. She expected full attention, and she got it. In a thirty-five-minute session she asked fifty-nine questions and called on half of her class at least once—by number, not name—and completely at random. This was her method of sussing out individual progress inside of a group-oriented class; she could easily identify the laggards. Much of her lesson was delivered in lecture format, with in-class exercises cemented by a timed competition. With lessons choreographed down to the minute, she covered a great deal of content.

  The American teacher was far more approachable. She sat eye level with her students, called them by name. She rarely demanded their attention outright and deployed little tools to capture and hold their interest. She gave few orders and asked only three students to answer questions in front of the class; the rest were volunteers. In a fifty-minute class she jumped between lecture format, small group, and one-on-one interactions. While her children were working together in groups, Teacher Denise spent an entire eight minutes talking to a boy named Matt. She provided many opportunities for a student to say, “I don’t understand. Please help,” and she told me later that working with small groups allowed her to easily “see who’s not getting it.”

  I also noted a difference in what researchers call “rigor, focus, and coherence,” for which Asian math classrooms have always been praised. The Chinese teacher launched a lesson on math facts (square roots) and then directly led the students into a deeper conceptual understanding (relationship between square roots and addends). The American teacher’s lesson was less focused on math than on measuring, and when a child failed to understand fractions (“how many centimeters is five millimeters?”), she reverted to asking questions the child already knew (“how many centimeters in a meter?”) rather than pushing onward to deepen understanding.

  The Chinese teacher commended no one, while Teacher Denise delivered praise throughout the lesson, including the words, “You’re brilliant. You’re so smart. Smart kids in here! Very good.”

  The Chinese classroom notched in with a teacher-student ratio of 1:32, and did not include students with disabilities. The Americans came in at 1:6, with one teacher and two aides for eighteen students (and included students with special needs).

  Finally, I chuckled, more was expected of a Chinese kid’s bladder: Anyone needing the bathroom had to wait until the end of class. The American kids were given more latitude with expression but less trust with urinary matters. A hall pass can be had at any time but must be signed out via roster.

  “So if there’s a problem with the bathroom, and we need to know who peed over the walls, we have a name,” Teacher Denise told me, without irony.

  Of course, a single class is only one part of a lesson that develops across days, and what works in one part of the world can’t necessarily be transferred to another with the same effects. (Also, the Chinese teacher delivered a straight concept lesson, while the American one was working on a more �
��open math concept” such as measuring.) Even so, dropping into a moment in time, to me, revealed useful insights into education culture.

  * * *

  “Father Pisa” confirmed my observations about classroom dynamics.

  Assigned this moniker by the Chinese press, Andreas Schleicher is the architect of the international standardized test PISA, which spawned hundreds of international headlines. He looked exactly the part: Tall and slender, with shock-white hair and a pepper-gray mustache, he was the poster image for global standardized testing. Schleicher was eloquent on conference stages and a rock star in education circles.

  In 2015 and 2016, I traveled to Beijing to meet with him.

  “Let’s find a quiet place to talk,” he said, shaking my hand as a throng of conference attendees weaved around us. Schleicher is a statistician by trade and German by birth, and over the last decade, to some controversy, he’s cultivated the PISA into the gold standard for international education comparison. His pitch goes like this: “There’s a lot we can learn from other countries’ education systems, and PISA is the test that tells us which countries deserve a closer look.”

  When Shanghai students came in number one on math, reading, and science, the result challenged many Western beliefs: Smaller classes are good. Let children run around in open learning environments. Exploration promotes creativity. Eliminate poverty because it’s bad for learning outcomes.

  In essence, Shanghai turned much of this “wisdom” on its head, logging top scores while featuring exactly the opposite of the common American wisdoms, with such characteristics as large class sizes and authoritarian environments. Of course, critics came out and pooh-poohed PISA results: China must have cheated. Shanghai doesn’t represent all of China, so how can we draw wider conclusions about the country’s education system?

  Schleicher had an answer for all of them.

  “Sure, Shanghai isn’t representative of China, but Shanghai today is China tomorrow,” Schleicher said. “These people have spent a thousand years figuring out how to teach good mathematics. Don’t you think there’s anything we can learn?”

  I played devil’s advocate. “The Chinese spend an entire childhood taking tests,” I said. “They’re good at it. Might that help explain Shanghai’s top-place finish?”

  “Yeeaahhh,” Schleicher said, and before long, I came to understand that this polite affirmation usually preceded a counterpoint. “That explains part of it. But there’s so much more to why they do well. Teaching in math particularly deserves a close look because their approach centers on ‘rigor, focus, and coherence.’ The Chinese put a lot of cognitive demand on students, and very high expectations for every child. They teach a few things well, and they have a very good chance of advancing their understanding.”

  In essence, Schleicher explained, much of the time in a Shanghai classroom is devoted to deep conceptual understanding. “What’s probability, what’s space, what’s the mathematical function, what’s relationship?”

  “What about the way Westerners teach math? Is there not more application?” I asked him.

  “Yeeaaaah,” Schleicher said, nodding. “In the US and many countries in Europe, many mathematics lessons are tied to little day-to-day problems: A mile-wide-and-an-inch-deep curriculum. So you use conceptually quite simple mathematics, embed them in a complicated real-world context, and then we think we are making math relevant to kids. But it is actually a very shallow representation of math.”

  This Western approach comes out of the idea that memorization and direct instruction are negative, Schleicher says, but in fact knowledge delivered this way can be a very useful tool. “The Chinese memorize what needs memorizing and use the rest of the time to go very deep in conceptual understanding. Then we are surprised that our (Western) students don’t develop deep conceptual understanding that students in Shanghai do.”

  Yang Xiaowei arrived at the same conclusion. An education professor at East China Normal University, he recently visited eighteen schools in the United States and concluded that the American teaching approach is “good in theory, but doesn’t work in reality.” There’s too much focus on making kids “interested” in math and on project-based and experiential learning, Yang told me. “Too little focus on directly teaching math.”

  The student-centered approach that Yang witnessed helps kids engage more meaningfully with subjects and better understand classroom content, its supporters say. Kids can also travel at their own pace. (Yet, while this type of instruction can be very effective, it also requires training and preparation to deploy it successfully.)

  In fact, the “direct instruction” favored by the Chinese is better for early learning in many disciplines, especially those with “multistep procedures that students are unlikely to discover on their own, such as geometry, algebra, and computer programming,” wrote two professors in a Psychological Science article. In early science education, especially, “many more children learned from direct instruction than from self-discovery.” A 2015 OECD report found that teacher-directed instruction is actually associated with higher scores in science (and inquiry-based instruction with lower scores). Kids in countries with more teacher-directed instruction were also more likely to express interest in pursuing a science-related career. I most enjoyed the stark takedown of a group of education researchers who wrote in the Educational Psychologist that “the past half-century of empirical research” provides “overwhelming and unambiguous evidence” that minimally guided instruction is essentially a failure.

  Another lesson I’ve learned is that the Western attitude toward math needs a little massaging. In my interviewing, I’d heard more than a few American teachers and friends say, “Oh, I was terrible at math, and I did okay in life.” A Michigan-based education professor who had spent thirty years researching mathematics curriculum told me he’s frustrated by the American attitude toward his life’s work. “I see an attitude of ‘mathematics literacy—that’s okay we don’t need it,’” he told me. “You’d never hear these same parents say to their children, ‘It’s okay if you don’t learn how to read.’”

  In Boston, Teacher Denise herself espoused a math-as-elective approach: “Students don’t need physics or calculus on a regular basis, but we use math every day. As far as fourth-grade math goes, it’s essential. Further than that? I think it’s individual. It depends on what your goals are,” she told me.

  Few Chinese would ever dream of saying that.

  The words of Jenny Zheng Zhou and her NYC-Beijing researchers rang in my head again: “Mathematics skills are present in all cultures, but it will develop to a greater extent in those cultures that value it more highly.”

  Certainly, the Chinese exhibit undeniable flaws when it comes to math teaching—toddlers should spend time on swings, not times tables—and the system overreaches with its level of difficulty in later years. A natural interest in other subjects, such as art, drama, literature, and foreign languages, shouldn’t be overridden for the pursuit of high math scores. By many accounts, Chinese students struggle when asked to apply knowledge to an unfamiliar situation, or when questions deviate in some way from what’s taught. But I admire the Chinese dedication to math in the primary years and the rigorous, teacher-centered ways in which they deliver their lessons. Excellence sometimes means a healthy dose of basic memorization and regular practice of deeper concepts.

  As Schleicher told me, “You can never copy and paste an education system, but you can look at the features that make a system successful and see how you can configure them in your own context.”

  In Rainey’s first year at a Chinese primary school, I would watch, slightly stunned, as he learned double-digit addition and subtraction at six years old. He began participating in timed drills, in which he’d have a minute to complete twenty double-digit addition problems:

  56 + 27 – 32 = ☐

  74 + ☐ – 21 = 42

  When Rainey first showed me this homework exercise, apprehension flooded my body. I envisioned m
y son becoming a nail-biter riddled with performance anxiety, and thoughts of Rainey as a robotic android who recited multiplication tables streamed through my mind.

  The reality was different. Just as Rainey eventually conquered the gridded worksheet from kindergarten—103 precedes 104 and follows 102—he learned double-digit addition and subtraction. The concepts took some coaxing and cajoling at the start, but with the guidance of his first-grade teacher and assistance at home, Rainey succeeded.

  Soon enough, he was helping to count out change at restaurants and asking after the price of sneakers, and I saw that he gained confidence from his success.

  How much does a sandwich cost at the local café, if the intervals between prices are exactly the same?

  Cucumber sandwich: 35元2角

  Ham sandwich: ☐元 ☐角

  Salmon sandwich: 36元8角

  “Thirty-six yuan for a ham sandwich!” Rainey would chirp.

  Perhaps children are more than capable of learning subjects like math, even from a young age. The first step is to believe that it’s both important and possible for our kids to accomplish.

  12

  Genius Means Struggle

  Americans emphasize achievement without hard work. They believe in the concept of genius. This is a problem. The Chinese—they know hard work.

  —Xiaodong Lin, professor of cognitive studies

  In December, Teacher Song distributed an announcement via the class WeChat: “We have been rehearsing for weeks for the Soong Qing Ling Annual Show.”

  The Chinese love a good performance, especially one with costumes and photo ops, and the WeChat parent response was robust:

  “Excellent, Teacher!”

  “You are so brave and diligent!”

  “I look forward to the day!”

  I had a hard time faking enthusiasm for this one, as did Rainey. “All we do is practice, practice, practice,” Rainey said, wrinkling his face into a scowl at breakfast.