To Darren: Not really an international school

[ianmcall]

I work at a very expensive Chinese national school, with some international students. Many of the foreign students are overseas Chinese (Canadian, American, Singapore, HK and Oz mostly) with the next biggest group being the children of Korean business people. Our students do a double major, half day of Chinese teachers and a half day with Foreign teachers doing a Manitoba curriculum. I teach in the English Language Center, which has very small classes, and our job is to do intensive work to pull up the English abilities of new students, and others who aren't coping fully in the English classroom.

This girl's brother goes to the English language kindergarten, but the older siblings go to the American School here in GZ. Oddly the school started a full "international program" last year, tehn decided to revoke the offer of free tuition for teachers' children. When several staff kids were pulling out, several other English language native speaking children were switched to other schools, so the English in the class went down farther. It seems to me that staff kids are invaluable feedstock to try to build an English environment around and the school could only see some imagined "lost" tuition.

My own two are now home schooling, and my wife quit her half time job at the school to do that.

We live at Clifford Estates, which is a magnificent housing development south of GZ, with free internal buses, a gardening and maintenance staff of about 800, its own big shopping center, hotel, a lake with swans etc. A fleet of buses goes from here to four different areas of Guangzhou for 5 yuan. We can also be in Hong Kong, by bus and jet foil in about 2 1/2 hours.