February 13, 2002
Overseas education class act
Retired Traverse City teachers spend five months in China
By Carol South
Herald contributing writer
Two retired Traverse City area teachers got to see the workings of the Chinese educational system up close and personal during a five-month stint of teaching there.
Lynn Larson and Ann Krantz, both retired English teachers from the Traverse City Area Public Schools, taught oral English to university students and primary school students while living in Qingdao, a coastal city of seven million.
Krantz and Larson left for China on September 4 and returned on February 3. Living and teaching on the campus of the University of Qingdao, the pair worked with freshman and sophomore education students - some of the country's future teachers. They also worked with second and fourth grade students, using songs, stories and poems to teach English skills to classrooms packed with up to 70 students at a time.
Immersing themselves in the culture during their stay, the veteran teachers found a very different approach to and attitude about education. Larson noted that education in China is highly revered and, with a government-enforced one-child policy, families have very high expectations for that child.
All students complete an exam that determines whether they can attend the university, technical school or will become unskilled laborers. Those who enroll in a university are the cream of the crop and highly motivated to learn and succeed, noted Lynn Larson.
"My students were thrilled, absolutely thrilled and I just can't tell you how affirming they were," said Larson, who retired in 2000. "They are absolutely motivated to learn. I never, ever had a student who was not prepared."
"Education is everything to them but they had no balance, it was all studying."
Larson had taught overseas before spending two years in Micronesia. She had visited China five years before and when she heard about this teaching opportunity, she wanted to go, but not alone. She enrolled her friend, Krantz, into accompanying her since she was participating without a formal sponsor. A variety of organizations such as church groups or universities sponsored the 24 other foreign teachers at the University of Qingdao, 10 of whom were Americans.
Larson noted that the university students led a strict, disciplined life that required them to live in dorms, eight to a room, and attend class from 8 a.m. until 3 or 4 in the afternoon. All students had a mandatory exercise period in the morning before class and a study period back in the classroom every evening from 7 p.m. until 10 p.m. Students also chose their course of study their first year and could not deviate from that, a source of some upset among students.
"My students were really complaining about that," Larson noted. "We had a lot of discussions about education systems and the differences. Ours certainly isn't perfect and neither is theirs."
Krantz and Larson taught six classes at the university level and met with their students once a week.
"This is an impossible situation for learning a spoken language," said Krantz, who taught at both Traverse Heights Elementary School and West Junior High School before retiring in 2000. "On the other hand, they had been taking English since the fourth grade, so by the time they were sophomores they were pretty good."
The extreme differences between Chinese and English, from letters in English to pictographs in Chinese, reflect a very different worldview. Krantz noted that she struggled herself just to master a small amount of Chinese.
"Over the course of five months, although I wasn't trying to learn Chinese, I think I probably learned at most six words and those I could not pronounce correctly," she said.
Krantz and Larson packed in as much touring and cultural activities as possible around their teaching duties. Calling China a shopping Mecca, both enjoyed browsing the open-air markets that abounded in both Qingdao and other cities they visited. They also participated in a multi-city tour with a group of Chinese tourists, with a guide and translator from the university helping them.
The breadth and depth of the Chinese culture, which dates back thousands of years, amazed both Krantz and Larson. Even Qingdao was considered a relatively new city in China, being only 250 years old, older even than the United States.
"We toured cities that had a lot of cultural history, places where poets had written famous poems in the second century, for example," Krantz said. "One of the places we went was the place where Confucius lived and was buried, and all his direct descendants were buried there, too. He lived 2000 years ago."
Larson also visited the families of many of her students and thoroughly enjoyed seeing how they lived in either rural villages or small city apartments.
"One person's grandmother had never seen an American before and she held my hand the whole time I was there," she said.
Both teachers reveled in their time in China and both are considering returning for another semester - after they get settled into their lives again.
"Overall, I tell you, I couldn't have been treated better. I never had a bad day while I was there, not one!" Larson noted.