School Series #2: Our experience with Chinese school

The post you've all been waiting for.

Welcome back to the series!

I received quite a few DMs asking me when I would be done with this post. The answer is yesterday, because I typed out the entire thing but something glitched and the whole post disappeared on me. T______T

Now I’m straining to remember what I wrote so I can speed type this out and not waste another few days of my life. T____T

Anyway. *deep meditative breath*

So if it’s not obvious yet, both my kids attend Chinese government school, or SJKC. Fighter is in Standard 3, while Penny is in Standard 1.

(If you’re new to Malaysian schools, SJKC stands for sekolah jenis kebangsaan Cina, or Chinese type government school. While English and Bahasa Malaysia are taught there, the primary language of instruction is English.)

The choice of schools for the critters had always seemed obvious.

My own father went to Penang Free School in his youth. In his time, lessons were conducted in English; as a result his BM is super bad hahaha. My mother went to full on Chinese schools all the way to Form 6.

When it was time to enroll me in primary school, we had two choices in my town - a sekolah kebangsaan, SK, where the main medium of instruction is BM, and English is taught as a secondary language, and an SJKC right next door. My parents opted to place me in the SK.

“I felt so sorry for you thinking about all the homework and pressure you would be under if we sent you to Chinese school,” my mom told me.

I mean, everyone knows that, right? Chinese school is famous for tons of homework that you rush to complete late in the night, lots of pressure and a big dollop of competition. My parents didn’t want that childhood for me so off I went to Malay school.

Looking back, I had a pretty balanced schooling life. Manageable amounts of homework, reasonable exams and competition. I had close friends of different religions and race. I learned to speak BM fluently which is something I’m still proud of today! That’s not to say I didn’t struggle initially since I knew zero BM when I first stepped into school: I remember memorizing the Rukun Tetangga and wondering when “undang-undang” was mentioned, was it that there was a ban on prawns or something LOL. (prawns in Malay is 'udang’ hahaahha)

But I graduated…. not knowing Mandarin. Sure, I had my fair share of POL classes (pupil’s own language). My mom made sure I signed up for every POL class available, but I think it was only something like three periods a week, or 1.5 hours weekly. Not nearly enough to pick up any sort of fluency in a language especially if you’re not actually interested. I remember whenever we had weekly spelling tests, or ting xie, I would scribble down the answers on my desk beforehand so I could refer to them. O_O Please don’t follow me kids wtf. My Mandarin retention was maybe 10 percent.

Growing up, I didn’t see a need to learn Chinese since my circle was very much English and Bahasa speaking. It wasn’t only until after I graduated and started working and my world expanded, that I felt at a disadvantage for not knowing Mandarin. When you don’t know Chinese, it’s much harder to bond and communicate with Chinese speakers, even if they can speak English.

And I felt what I perceived as a loss of culture and heritage, a missed connection to my roots. I am Malaysian Chinese after all, and I regretted not knowing my own language, even if I can speak passable Hokkien and basic (very basic) Cantonese.

As a parent, you want more, better things for your kids. I wanted my children to have this skill that Fatty and I lacked.

So when I had my own kids and the time came to decide on their education, the choice seemed obvious. I had it all planned. I sent them a bilingual preschool so they would have early exposure to the language. Then to a full private Chinese kindergarten. And now in a Chinese primary school.

How has it been?

Which is why, we’re here now, writing this blog post for you guys. We’ve had three years of experience of an SJKC so I think I can share a little (or a lot) about what it’s been like.

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Let’s start with the physical environment.

Toilets are still dirty LOL. Dirty school toilets were such a feature of our childhoods though that when Fighter or Penny complain about their bathrooms, I'm like “high five bros!” Thank you dirty toilets for connecting us hahahaha. I’ve visited their school bathrooms though, and the toilets are much improved. Last time I had to hold my breath the entire time I went to toilet, but now their bathrooms are actually quite bright and airy, the toilets flush, and there’s even hand soap. *angels singing*

Everything else is standard issue government school. The difference is that Chinese school PTA tends to be well funded so their classrooms are air conditioned. And instead of blackboards, they have white boards and smart screens now.

Fighter has made a lot of friends, being the extrovert he is. He has a big group of friends, mostly boys, all from English speaking families that he runs with and they seem to have a lot of fun together. I didn’t even know he had this big group until it was his birthday and he came up to me with a list of names he wanted to invite to his party hahaha.

Penny is a bit shyer, and had trouble making friends at first, mostly cos she had covid and missed the first week of school. She has quite a few friends now though, and one of them is a little girl whose first language is Chinese. So they talk and play together in a mix of English and Chinese which I find super adorable!? At this rate I think she’ll pick up Chinese way faster than Fighter. :3

I will note that I expected the school to be very racially homogenous. 90% of the kids are Chinese of course, but there are more non-Chinese kids than I’d expected. Fighter’s class itself has two mixed kids, two Korean children and even a pair of twins hahahaha. Penny’s class may be less so with two Indian children I think. But I’ve seen quite a few white or mixed children in the other classes as well. I’ll take any diversity I can get!

It’s a pretty old, established school they go to, so I find the culture and experiences they’re having quite mirror mine. Running to the canteen when the recess bell rings, queueing up to buy fried snacks, ‘chup-ing’ places for their friends in the canteen, gobbling down their food so they have time to play in the field. I quite like that cos I think everyone generally has great memories of recess time especially hahaha.

I also like that they go big on events and activities, so there is a strong sense of community and celebration. Sports Day this year was held in a proper stadium, complete with student performances and dancing. They also throw big celebrations for the major cultural festivals like Hari Raya, CNY and National Day. Children’s Day is always fun - the children get to wear their own clothes to school, there’s potluck class parties where they over indulge on snacks and candy, and this year there were even balloon-folding clowns! (parent volunteers no less hahahaha.)

Their school in particular - not sure about other schools - has a robust program of after school extra curricular activities and tutoring classes, ranging from chess to scouts to even Kpop dance, speech and drama and Diabolo. I find it’s a good way to balance, not just focusing on academics but also other skills and socialization. Fighter has tried wushu and badminton while Penny stays back every week for rhythmic gymnastics.

Education wise…

Chinese school is Chinese school la hahahaha. Homework is very manageable though! I don’t know if they’ve mellowed out this generation or what, but homework usually goes up to a few pages a day only. We haven’t had to deal with extreme homework situations; in fact, things are pretty relaxed (or maybe it’s just me wtf) since there are no exams for Standard 1 to 3 as exams have been abolished for these years by the ministry of education.

In terms of learning, like everyone else in the world, we were impacted by covid lockdowns of course. Zoom classes were essentially useless and I think after that, teachers rushed to complete the syllabus on time, and it feels like they’re still rushing until today. I don’t know if it’s a government school thing, or a Chinese school thing, or its covid, but more attention seems to be paid to completing the syllabus rather than individual children’s actual learning. I am assuming this is common though.

Fighter’s Mandarin is pretty decent considering that beside his Chinese tutor, there’s nobody at home to help him with his Mandarin. But this is also kind of expected as he’s in full language immersion five times a week. His BM sucks though and I attribute it mostly to the fact that Chinese school teaches Malay in Chinese. I did not expect this - I assumed language would be taught in the language itself?? I was quite concerned about this as Bahasa Malaysia is as much a part of our heritage as Chinese. Recently though I’ve noticed some improvements - he’s able to understand a fair bit of movie subtitles and simple comics so I’m praying hard hahaha.

Teachers are a mixed bag, honestly. I’ve heard they assign the younger teachers to the younger classes, cos you know, they're more fun and can keep up with all that baby energy. In our experience, teachers tend to start off fierce and strict (is it because they feel like they need to get the upper hand?) but mellow down as they get to know the children. The kids have had quite a few caring teachers. Some of the older ones are quite ‘old school’ though. They can be punitive, meting out what to me are unnecessary punishments for honest mistakes or small transgressions, or just sometimes kids being kids? This is something that bothers me a lot - I don’t believe it’s effective to teach by fear which is essentially the entire culture of Chinese school. It’s not even something I didn’t know before - it’s just very startling and troubling seeing it happen in front of us.

As for learning differences and challenges, the school is just not equipped to deal with those. Fighter was diagnosed with anxiety and ADHD a little less than two years ago. I sent his reports and recommendations to his class and math teachers, whom I speak more to. While they have been awesome, very caring and understanding, I can’t say the same for the rest of his teachers. The reports were meant to be sent to all his subject teachers but either they’re not, or the teachers just don’t bother. :/. The fierce teachers continue to be unfair and anxiety-triggering, and no real action was taken to accomodate recommendations (eg allowing more frequent toilet breaks or tiny breaks for him to move around a bit, allowing fidget toys to calm him and keep him still, more time in exams, etc). Correct me if I’m wrong but I doubt any public school has official guidelines to handle learning differences anyway.

I think I’ve covered most major aspects of attending a Chinese school (or that I can think of, anyway). If I’ve missed something out, or if you want to clarify anything, feel free to leave me a comment to ask and I can add on to it.

I hope reading this gave you guys more clarity about what Chinese school education is like. Choosing schools is a huge decision, and I myself have visited about six other private schools already besides our own in an ongoing attempt to figure out what kind of school and education style works best for us.

My next blog post will be “Why we decided to switch schools”. Pray I get it up within the next two weeks hahahaha.

Thank you for reading!

Love,
Aud.