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Re: 多間中學出10優狀元
Someone asked the question in another post whether an ordinary school could produce a 10A student. This is actually an interesting topic which is worthy of some comments. Since I could not remember where I saw it, I have to hijack this thread for a moment. And since I am going to be away for some time, I may be a bit wordy in my leaving remarks.
Can an "ordinary" school produce 10A students? The answer is: Unlikely.
The quality of some of the students at the 2-tier or 3-tier schools, I believe, can match those at the top schools, but it is unlikely they will produce 10As like their counterparts at the top schools.
The reasons for that are two-fold and both have nothing to do with the intelligence of a student.
The first factor is the environment or what we say in Chinese “土壤”. We have a relatively larger group of bright students in the top schools. They will compete with each other, encourage each other, push each other, and bring out the best from each other.
For example, my elder daughter's (she is going up to F3) inclination is not towards 金庸’s books (one of my favorite authors which I like to introduce to boys who want to improve their Chinese) and therefore I have been introducing other authors like 陳之藩 and 董橋to her. But this year she started reading 金庸 because she knew some of her classmates had already finished all of 金庸's novels. The other day I saw her taking down "The Da Vinci Code" from my bookshelf. I was slightly surprised since I had told her she wouldn’t like the book. She read it because one of her classmates recommended it to her after reading the book. My daughter is a lazy girl and has never been serious towards learning any musical instruments. She danced among piano, violin and cello for a number of years without being good at any. Her attitude changed some months after she went up to the secondary school. There are so many classmates with much higher achievements in music, and upon the encouragement form her cello teacher, she is now practising much more serious with the aim to become a member of the school's orchestra next term.
These small examples are just to show the possible environment you will have in a good school. In an "ordinary" school, if you are seen reading "The Da Vinci Code" or even just "Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince”, you might be mocked as bookish or pretentious. The encouragement and recognition from others, which is essential to push oneself forward, may not be there. My daughters' school is not one particularly pushy on academic performance but you can imagine how the top students at schools like La Salle or DB/GS are pushing each other in taking on HKCEE.
The second factor was "expectation". The top schools all have admirable traditions and have produced a lot of celebrities in their old boys/girls. Pui Ching has produced two Nobel Prize winners. For example among the most powerful ladies in Hong Kong we have Mrs Anson Chan from Sacred Heart, 范徐麗泰 from St Stephen's Girls’, and even the Chinese Government had to pick a less than mediocre Secretary for Justice from a decent Girls' school (St Clare's). These are not accidental happenings. It is just natural that the students at the top schools are told by their teachers that the school has produced a number of famous persons in the past and some of the current students similarly are bound to become as leaders in our community. The parents would also say so to their children. With this expectation internalized, some of the students will be working exceedingly hard toward this aim, even unconsciously.
My younger daughter used to have a low self-image of herself. She lived in the shadow of her elder sister for a long time. My wife and I always joked to each other that it was definitely a small trick played on us by the God that while He allows our elder daughter to have the best parts from both of us, He has not allowed our younger daughter to have even the worst parts from either of us. She used to have an extremely lousy memory, so lousy that my wife had to make up a whole story to make her how to spell "slide" in K3 and practised for a whole evening only to find that she couldn't remember a single alphabet the next morning. The situation did not improve much until she was in P5. She still failed in both Chinese and English in F4. Believe me it is very serious if you take into account of the background of her parents and the time (ie full time) we were spending together with her. We once tried to send her another school and thought very seriously about sending her to 臻美.
Once knowing it is only 9-year compulsory education in Hong Kong from her General Studies, my younger daughter would every now and then say to us she would definitely drop out from school after F3. When we pretended to take her remarks seriously and asked what she would do after that every day, she replied in a as-a-matter-of-fact way that she would become her sister’s housekeeper for her elder sister and be her baby-sitter in future. You could imagine what a self-expectation she was having of herself.
We have kept on telling her about all the good things about her, some true (she draws much better than her sister; she could ride a bike when she was two while her sister could only manage it at the age of three; she could swim in 4 styles 2 years earlier than her sister and many small other clever acts we observed she had performed) and some not necessarily true (she is more intelligent than her sister). We have done many more other things to change her expectation about herself. It worked gradually and one day all of a sudden it clicked, just like that. She now honestly believes, from the casual remarks she is making, she is cleverer than her sister with the latter only slightly better than her in memory.
Last night we went to the fifth annual public performance of my daughters' drama group (which is another deliberate means to develop my younger daughter's confidence in dealing with others and speaking in public). Although our younger daughter was still a lousy performer, we enjoyed her performance particularly, although my elder daughter was the leading lady, because she has improved so much. But still very lousy though, I must add.
After my younger daughter knew that she was able to join her sister in the same secondary school, when asked the old question whether she still considered to drop out after F3, raising her head from the game boy she was playing with, she said embarrassingly, "No la, not after all the pains I put in." You see, she has already developed a new self-expectation of herself.
The same thing can be said of the best students in the top schools. The external expectation will turn into self expectation and this will turn into aspiration for most of the students.
Certainly, there are always exceptions. That is why we have 劉翔.
A word to the teachers of our children: If you believe or hope your students will become the leaders of our community one day, tell them so, and more importantly, treat them accordingly. That is why I felt a bit disheartening when I read some of the comments the EMB's external report made on Ying Wah Girls'. I remember reading an article about DBS and the part I liked most was that the student union has a lot of say in the running of the school, sometimes even to the dislike of the teachers and the principal.
A final little story about myself to end my long-windedness. In the interview for my first job on graduation, the first question I was asked after sitting down was,” What have you done you consider have benefited our community as a whole after last week's budget speech by the Financial Secretary?"
Now you guys can have a break from this opinionated bloke for some weeks.
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發表於 05-8-11 23:13
