Results tagged “schools”

The saga of problems and setbacks that China has faced in attempting to implement the controversial Green Dam internet censorship software just keeps on going. After postponing the software's release indefinitely this summer, the government has attempted to find ways to censor the 'net without provoking massive public outrage. Which is funny, because the government is sneaking around trying to do things on the internet without anyone noticing, just like us!

Hong Kong's Chief Executive Donald Tsang announced today that beginning tomorrow all kindergartens, primary schools, and care centers in the city will be closed for 14 days. It was decided after it had been determined that the recent H1N1 flu cases had been transmitted within the local community. From Bloomberg.com: "The government is well prepared and will monitor developments closely," Tsang said. "There's no need to panic."

• Black and White Cat translates a collection of headlines from the earliest editions of Xinhua Daily, Jiangsu Province's oldest party newspaper. In its bid to oust the Kuomintang, the CCP positioned itself as a champion of democracy and demanded for change, human rights and general elections.
• Tao Wang of UBS explains to Thomas Crampton why he thinks the new wave of unemployment is unlikely to cause unrest in China.
• EastSouthWestNorth has a set of pictures of what is supposed to be Guangdong's most run-down school.

China and North Korea will celebrate the 60th anniversary of their diplomatic relations in 2009 in a 'Year of Friendship', reports AP. Yesterday, Chinese President Hu Jintao praised 'deep and traditional friendship' between the two nations and said, "The development of bilateral relations not only conforms to the fundamental interests and common will of the two peoples, but also contributes to the peace and stability of the region." What will the two good friends do in this new 'Year of Friendship', you ask? For a crystal-clear answer, let's turn to Xinhua:

During the year of friendship, China is willing to work together with the DPRK to further enhance friendship, promote exchanges and deepen cooperation through a variety of activities, in order to have a better future of China-DPRK friendly and cooperative relations.

Last month, we reported that Chinese-made grenades were found to have been used by the terrorists that launched the deadly spate of attacks in Mumbai. This time, Israel is saying that whereas previously Palestinian terrorists used predominantly home-made rockets, now they're using more sophisticated rockets, some made in China. Said Brigadier-General Avraham Ben-David of the Israeli Defence Forces to YNetNews:

The army official said the rocket that struck the school in Beersheba was manufactured in China, is heavier than the Qassam and can "potentially cause much greater damage." He said the rocket contains metal pallets that can spread out across a radius of up to 100 meters (about 328 feet) from the point of impact.

If you've ever wondered how Chinese kids are being indoctrinated with nationalistic bullshit ideals from a young age, here's how. This video shows a class of elementary school students reciting a poem entitled 《2009中国加油》("2009, Go China!") written by their teachers on how a triumphant China is rising against earthquakes and the wiles of evil politicians like Nicolas Sarkozy in "pathetic Europe" with a successful Olympics, the launch of Shenzhou 7 and the "iron will" of its people. Watch it with the Chinese transliteration and English translation from China Digital Times after the jump, but be warned, this is spine-tingling and hair-raising stuff. We find it hard to think that teachers in cities like Shanghai or Beijing would make their kids do the same thing, but then again you never know.

Via Micah Sittig on Twitter we learned of this spreadsheet that compares tuition fees for international high schools in Shanghai. Fourteen schools are included on the list and they range in annual cost from US$11,319 (Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation Private School), up 30% from last year, to US$30,689 (British International School), up 7% from last year. The only school whose tuition went down this year was the Shanghai American School, down 7% to US$22,092. Time to stock up on the ol' birth control.

Experts have introduced a new version of eye exercises for Chinese students that are said to combine Traditional Chinese Medicine techniques with massage and application of pressure to eye-related acu-points. If the old eye exercises were not able to combat the high incidence of myopia among Chinese students as this CCTV report seems to suggest, then we think the new exercises will just be as useless as the old ones.

Following the death of four female students at the Shanghai Business School in Xuhui District, the Shanghai Education Commission has launched an emergency fire safety campaign to be conducted throughout all schools. Students from the dormitory told reporters from the Xinhua News Agency that the fire extinguishers they tried to use were all way past their expiry date and the griefstricken parents are now blaming the college for the death of their daughters. According to Shanghai Daily, an electric heating stick (used to boil water) that was placed on the blanket of one of the girls caused the fire.

The world's biggest children's entertainment company now also wants to play a part in educating your children too — and to be more specific, to teach them how to speak proper English. When we found an ad in the taxi we were in yesterday drawing our attention to DisneyEnglish.com, we thought this was some fake school that had ripped off Disney's name, but when we got home to check it we realised that not only was this a genuine Disney English school, this was the world's very first Disney English school. And it's right here in Shanghai, located on Maoming Lu. For some strange reason, we think this is going to be a huge success in the Chinese market. What do you think?

The Peoples Daily reports the Ministry of Education has added new rules for primary school teachers to "take care of their students' safety" and "teachers should pay more attention to the health of students", spurred on by the public condemnation of secondary school teacher Fan Meizhong who ran for his life, leaving behind his students during the May 12 Sichuan quake. No word on what they'll do with errant teachers next. Will all teachers be expected to give up their lives for students when the next earthquake strikes?

At this point, this is only an unsubstantiated rumour but a highly plausible one given what we've seen and heard in the last few months. Here is an email sent to us by one teacher at an international school in Shanghai, and we quote verbatim: "I don't know anymore specifics, but I received an Email from my principal warning us about our online behaviour after an international school teacher was deported from China. I don't know the name or the location of the school, teacher or offending website. If more details emerge, I will share them with you." Watch what you put on your website, y'all. Someone's watching.

The government has announced the start of a massive probe to find out why close to 7,000 schools classrooms have been destroyed and promised that anyone found responsible for shoddy construction will be severely punished. A great many of the casualties we've seen so far are students and teachers who were still in class when the quake struck.

Interesting piece by France24 on Shanghai student, Qiu Gonghao, who appears to be having the time of his life studying at the Ecole Polytechnic in Paris, one of the top engineering schools in France. Will this chap ever choose to come back to Shanghai, we wonder?

Business and Economy WSJ: China Takes Additional Step To Cool Economy AFP: Underground money traders flourish on Hong Kong border Religion Xinhua: China-based Christian group prints 50 mln Bibles Reuters: Dalai Lama says sorry he can't meet Pope SCMP: Student leader finds meaning in life with God's will on campus [Subscription] AP: Dallas evangelical Christian seminary offers online courses in Chinese Miscellaneous AP: China Detains 33 in Deadly Mine Blast CNSNews: For China, Even...

If you, like us, are already cursing the arrival of winter, watch this. There is a little 5 year old girl in Jiangxi who is still prancing around in her birthday suit, and revelling in the cold waters as if its still summer. Her parents say that since she turned one, the girl started showing her great dislike for clothes. She goes to bed nightly without even a blanket on, and if someone actually tried...

Yes, that was our reaction when we saw these pictures, but sorry to disappoint all you Facebook whores (that includes ourselves!) out there, the image on the right is just a Facebook clone, Xiaonei.com (校内网). It looks like the portal was started around 2005 (less than two years after Facebook was born), and since then, it has grown exponentially to cover around 2,000 university campuses in Greater China. They have just recently started to pan out their services to cover high schools and companies (though one wonders how they would do it with a name like that because "校内“ literally means "in school").

Who is Yacht ?

Right: We told you about the duet between mainland crooner Sun Nan and Singapore pastor-turned-popstar Ho Yeow Sun that was supposed to have been the theme song for the Special Olympics but was scrapped. Now we found the video. Make your own judgements.

This cute little video is from an English teacher in Taiwan who came up with a way to teach his kids English... the MC Hammer way. We wish school was this fun for us, and hopefully the clip will inspire all TEFL teachers out there. From Daryl Caesar:The final performance is here! The kids were totally petrified, and performed way worse than the rehersals, but what can I expect from 5 year olds dancing and...

About 100 Chinese teachers are expected to arrive at state schools in the United Kingdom (yes, that haven of foreign language education) by next year, but schools which have already employed some of those teachers in their classrooms (which they described as "lovely") have already found problems, such as the following:

"Their lack of familiarity with the English system of discipline, target setting etc is a problem."

"They also tend to have different, perhaps unrealistic, expectations of pupils."

"Concerns are expressed about Chinese teachers' abilities to manage pupils, particularly whole classes or where there is a tendency for students to be disruptive."

We've just spent an entertaining and enlightening weekend at the Learning2cn education technology conference at Concordia International School in Jinqiao.

Colleague: Haha, I understand. I'm not a very good CCP member, and not a very bad one either, but you probably can't say I'm a member anymore. I have not been paying my party membership fees for three years now, and haven't been keeping up with the meetings, so they probably struck my name off the list.

The principal of the 150-student Henan Child Prodigy School (河南神童学校), Zhang Xuexin (张学新) says he has devised a revolutionary method of training the right brain of children to make them child prodigies. His students can not only memorise their textbooks and ancient poetry, they can actually recite them backwards. Throughout the school and around classrooms, one sees banners such as “China's first school that teaches education of the total brain" (中国第一所全脑教育学校), “Today's child prodigy, tomorrow's talent" (今日东方神童，明日世纪天才) and "I am a child prodigy, I am a memory expert" (我是神童，我是记忆天才).

At least 20,000 police surveillance cameras are being installed along streets in southern China and will soon be guided by sophisticated computer software from an American-financed company to recognise automatically the faces of police suspects and detect unusual activity.

China should be an obvious beneficiary of the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) Scheme, which seeks to provide robust $100 portable Internet computers to children in developing countries. Behind the headlines of double digit growth and urban prosperity, two thirds of Chinese still live in the countryside and two hundred million people earn less than a dollar a day. Still, the Chinese government has not signed up to this project.

But here's the hard part — the families can't live in Shanghai, Beijing or Guangzhou. If you think you can help these guys out, please contact them directly. From the filmmakers:

I turned to several government departments, including the local police station and the Shanghai Civil Affairs Bureau Yangpu District branch, but no one would solve the problem. I know the residence problem will affect my daughter's whole life, so I still asked authorities for help, but I was shocked by the result. They suggested I send her to an orphanage.

Yep. At least that is what Newsweek would have us believe. They attended the 2007 World Cheerleading Championships in Orlando, Florida, last month and noted that 38 teams from 15 foreign countries participated in the international events. Two years ago, when the international events were launched, three teams showed up.