kaipakati wrote:I've had a different experience of the Taiwanese elementary education system than most - extremely positive.
My daughter had always had problems fitting into school, starting as a five year old back in her home country. I'd heard all the stories of the perils of the Taiwan education system and was very very worried about what I was bringing her to. She was nine years old at the time, and spoke no Mandarin. After some hunting around, I decided on a small "mountain" school. These schools are still part of the govt system. Because of difficulty getting a sufficient roll of children from their local area, they often expand in creative ways to fill a niche, and like to take students with "special needs", who are eligible to be counted as one and half, or two students, for funding purposes. Hence, schools can continue to operate with very small class sizes. Cool!
Cheers!
Thanks for this kaipakati. My wife and I are fed up with my daughter's school/class. She is in second grade. They have listening tests every Monday and my daughter has to study for these on Saturdays and Sundays (because we found the extra review involved by studying over two days brought better results). She works so hard and she gets her fair share of 90s and 80s on the tests on all of her tests (including on her math tests), but there are also tests where she gets 70s and even one in the 20s! That 20 test was the last straw. My daughter mentioned that one boy got a zero on that test. Zero! Why not just give him a 59? It's still an F. That's just too brutal for second grade. Well, I could go on and on, but my wife and I just decided yesterday on one of these mountain schools not too far from our house. My daughter will be switching next week. I know it will be the best decision we ever made.
We want our daughter to have a life and extracurricular activities. We want her to have self-confidence. She will get none of these things continuing with a normal school in Taipei/New Taipei City.
