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Mission Minded Educators Network (MMEnet) |
Culture Clues & Cues
Chinese Culture
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Many children have been taught to keep their eyes down when speaking to an adult and to listen politely.
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Parents will rarely criticize the teacher openly, especially to the teacher’s face. However, these parents still have important issues they wish to discuss. Teachers need to listen "between the lines" and to learn how to address those issues without causing the parents to "lose face".
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To Asian parents, the teacher is the one who is supposed to present the material initially, but it is the parents’ responsibility to practice and drill the children until they learn the lesson.
Teachers need to learn something about each child’s religious orientation to connect what is being taught to what the child may already understand. It’s much like using a different language. Some children have never heard of names like Jesus or Satan. They don’t know terms like communion, baptism, or salvation. If the teacher knows something about the child’s faith beliefs, the teacher can help that child learn more about Christianity.
Education and teachers are both very highly regarded in Asian society. Children are taught to respect and honor teachers. They are also taught not to cause the family to lose face. If the child asks a question in a public forum, from their perspective it equates to not knowing, which equates to losing face. The students may wait until after class so they don’t publicly lose face and out of respect for the teacher and her teaching time.
In Cantonese there are no past or future verb tenses. Words such as yesterday or tomorrow have to be added (e.g., the translation would be I eat yesterday or I eat tomorrow). This is why a Chinese child learning English has such difficulty and why the English sentence structure takes so long to master.
All Chinese surnames are one-syllable; all Japanese surnames are multi-syllable.
Chinese married women do not take the husband’s surname. It is correct for a student's mother to be Mrs. Wong while the dad might be Mr. Lee.
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