Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Dear Jeff,
I have begun to miss you since you were out of my sight in the Raleigh-Durham airport.
The decision of letting you go after two months since you flew 14 hours from China alone was
sudden and conflicting for me. I have never told you how I am proud of you for daring to fly
here by yourself. Even though you said you had twice short cries, you were unimaginably calm,
brave and well-behaved in China Airs super large air plane during such a long trip according to
flight attendants. I know your incredible courage derives from unlimited yearnings for me. When
I joked to have you fly back alone, you said you dared not do it again. I knew you just didnt
want to leave me. No matter how tough and boring with me here, you said sweet words to me
and you never complained. However, I would never forget how harsh I beat you when I wanted
you to be quiet or go to sleep at night. I would never forget how great you were while travelling
with me. I would never forget your courage in singing along on the stage in Houston. I would
never forget your attentiveness in writing down each kids name and I will miss you on their
Even though you agreed to go back, I know you were struggling inside as well. Because you
just began to get used to meeting and playing with 18 kids with different colors of skin in Ms.
Ava class in the daycare every day and you began to expect to see one of the kind-hearted 11L
bus driver who greeted you every time and offered to bring you toys. You begun to expect to play
with the Vietnamese girl called Gui. Before making the decision, I struggled whether I should
drive away the overwhelming anxiety coming from the old saying guarantee quality company
before six for the sake of kids lifelong sense of security or stick to it and keep your stay. When
I was told after you went back that you were worse than before, such as bad eating, bad sleep and
bad temper, I felt so sad. I have been keeping comforting myself: you are adjusting life and it
takes time to go back to routines. My beloved son, if I have hurt you when you were here with
me, I am writing to apologize and share with you some lessons I have learned and why I finally
decided to let you go back. Writing this letter is as if I am holding a smiling face with two black
holes in the front teeth, looking into my eyes with love and admiration.
My beloved son, you are a great boy with exceptional work memory and savvy in
operating digital devices. I was so amazed at your quick understanding when I first taught you
how to create PPT slides. Just instructed once, you could create several slides with animation
and images searched, saved and inserted by yourself. But you were unwilling to repeat doing
that longer or explore some new functions as you are eager to start watching your favorite
Paw Patrol. But being able to apply known skills and knowledge to new situations and
experiment with something new is critical for a smart boy like you. Since I left you with digital
devices when I was busy with my coursework, you began to get engrossed in watching
cartoons and playing games. It seemed to me your interest began to be in watching videos and
digital games. You were happy to watch cartoons for hours without even bothering to move.
After that you became so easy to get irritated and scream. I became exceptionally worried
about your addition to that and I was afraid it was one of the causes of your impatience and less
interest in doing and experimenting with something new and challenging as your brain feels so
empty after watching animations. When you watch videos, it does all the work FOR you.
Your brain shuts off because it has no job to do. Use it or lose it indeed. You dont need to
create in your mind like you do when reading. When you read, your brain has to use
imagination to come up with the smells, the tastes, the sounds, the pictures, and the feelings
described in the book or article but when you watch TV or videos, all of that is already done for
you (at least the hearing and seeing part). My dear son, be cautious of this underlying danger.
Dont get too upset while you are not allowed to get access to tablets and TV at home. When
you really have a purpose of using them, you can but the prerequisite is you can explicitly tell
why you want to use and control yourself to put it aside after finishing as promised. You should
know internet and computer is indispensible in our life, but I want it to be a blessing not a curse
for you.
Pick up your interest in reading and listening to audiobooks. I began to read books to you
when you were still in my womb and you loved listening to audio history stories before getting
into sleep every night since you were three. You could tell a lot about the four national classic
novels: Journey to the West, The Romance of Three Kingdoms, A Dream of the Red Mansion,
Heroes of Water Marshes. I was once so proud that you formed a habit of listening to books
and knew a lot of characters through reading very naturally. But gradually, I dont exactly know
when you began to lose interest in books. Maybe since you were with me here? Since I took the
computer and tablets as babysitters? Or as early as since I left for America? I felt so frustrated
that you began to lose your good habit of reading. But I could not spare extra time to
accompany you with quality. Compared with the benefit of picking up more English, I would
rather you live more happily and colorfully and love reading no matter in what kind of
language even if without being able to speak fluent English. I believe you can learn quickly
when you really want to in the future as long as you form a good habit of reading and thinking.
Besides, dont always rely on others to read to you as you need to start to read by yourself. You
have to let yourself be quiet while opening a book and enjoy the time with it, as reading can
accompany you, enrich you and amuse you, and can be your most loyal and fun friend.
My beloved son, you will start grade 1 in September, which means besides a lot of fun, you
will have more assignments to do back home every day and you will have to face mid and final
exams and many quizzes which might still be traditional ways of evaluation in China. You will
have a lot of scores given by the teachers. As a parent who is also a teacher, I am striving to
change the current evaluation system. But if not, I hope you value the process of learning as
much as you value the result. I hope you have more on-going evaluation assignments and your
assignments can be less about memorization and more about reading and authentic tasks by
using what you have learned and are learning. Authentic assignments are not so easy as
memorization and repetition but can yield more fun. Please have patience to explore something
new and experiment with what you have learned and dont be afraid of making mistakes. Dont
feel daunted when you are not the best and correct one. Nobody can avoid making mistakes
and nobody is always correct. Ask questions when you dont understand. Remember I
appreciate how much efforts you put into difficulties and puzzles in learning and doing
authentic assignments and extra reading, but I dont care much about your scores. Yes, you
didnt listen wrong: I do not care much about your scores. I expect you to be able to enjoy
yourself doing what you are interested in and what you challenge yourself to do. If you can
start to manage yourself, reflect yourself and teach yourself when there are no parents and
teachers around, I will be more than happy than anybody else. Dont be bothered by scores no
matter high or low. Usually, teachers feedback for your improvement means more than scores.
At the same time, your self-assessment is equally important since forming your own opinions
by reading and listening to others perspectives is more phenomenal than any full mark.
My beloved son, you always asked me when I would get back. I hope I could say it was one
week or one day but it is five months. Strong yearnings will make one day like a year. Maybe
the best way to let time pass quickly is to do what you are interested in and to play with kids
you want to play with. Resuming kindergarten life is as urgent and necessary as breath for you.
I am sorry, my beloved son, I didnt ensure you could get back into kindergarten immediately
and you have such a busy father who cannot accompany you either when I am not available.
But I know you admire your father as a military officer whose mission is to serve the country
and you are proud of your father, arent you? We love you, my son. Our love is beyond any
word. I cannot imagine how extremely excited I will be when I am seeing you on the Beijing
airport five months later. Anyway, this long departure with you brings me some bitter taste of
your future leaving for college, military service or settling down in another city. No matter how
tough it is, we have to get used to the unavoidable leaving. I cannot give up and you cant give
up either. Therefore, lets treasure our future time together with more patience, more gentleness
Love
Mom
Reference
1. The Harmful Effects of Watching Too Much Television ... (n.d.). Retrieved March
IG=D28E854B70D54C0D9AF549845777CFE2&CID=1207B7CA61856A9533ADBD8
360B46B45&rd=1&h=KSHBpv5ZnWgqgQCr3Jb5VZ2slj2X3JF0BQsCDirdRX4&v=1&
r=http://briankim.net/articles/harmful-effects-watching-much-
television/&p=DevEx,5040.1
A Letter to Principal Wang
I hope this letter will reach you in good spirit and health. Full of gratitude and motivation
for your astronomical generosity and vision in sending teachers out to pursue further study, I
would like to raise a bold suggestion to improve our school at large: downplaying mid-term and
final formative exams in the semester but adding on-going assessment throughout the semester. I
know you have realized the long-term consequence of teaching to the narrowed pipe test early on
as you pushed the TAO (Teaching Affairs Office) to reform on separation of teaching and testing
two years ago. Its a wise and strong prescription to curb unethical teaching-to-the-test problem,
but to curb curriculum teaching-to-the-test problem (still stick to curriculum but spend most of
the time in doing test exercises and lecturing old test exercises) and upgrade our school to truly
cultivate international interdisciplinary high calibers, with ability to solve problems that require
synthesizing and complex communication skills more than simply following rules or applying
knowledge to new situations, who are in skyrocketing demand in the current and future job
First, why should we downplay the mid and final formative exams? Downplaying these two
exams aims to highlight cumulative performance throughout the semester. Currently, we assess
students mainly by one midterm exam (30%), one final exam (40%) plus overall performance
(30%) which includes attendance, participation and homework. It seems reasonable that we test
what students have learned in the middle and at the end and students overall performance are
taken into account as well. But actually overall performance score which is given at the end of
the semester doesnt make a lot of difference due to lack of systematic record and tracking
evidence. If both teachers and students dont take it as seriously as two exams, teachers have lost
an effective means to attract students to what they teach in their class and to put efforts in doing
assignments. Since no matter how bad their attendance and quality of their homework, students
have chance to catch up during the exam preparation month and they know they can make up the
test in the next semester as well, which has further worsened their attitude on daily efforts of
doing assignments. Another truth is both teachers and students put a lot of efforts into preparing
the exams, plus at least two of those AP/A-level and international language tests (TOEFL and
IELTs, SAT and ACT), which means a lot of valuable learning time has been wasted by rote
learning and teacher lecturing. Once the formula catches on, both teachers and students become
more short-visioned and reluctant to spend time on doing long term beneficial activities and
projects, which are in their eyes useless and ineffective for producing decent scores in a short
time. Of course I can tell from my experience that they know very well teaching to the test
doesnt ensure high scores but they have got too used to that as it is as easy as gravity. They cant
go out of the trap without outer assistance under such test systems. Do you remember how
frustrated you were and English teachers were during the first semester of Grade 12 every year
while facing still indecent language scores? Actually students and English teachers have been
drained of teaching to the test and being tested. When the process of learning has gone wrong,
the result wont go right. The right means should be able to meet the ends. If not, we have to
reflect on our means and our process. We should not repeat our ineffective and burn-out practice
We should never and ever forget about tests, and preparing students for tests doesnt hurt,
but the key is to ensure our teachers teach with diverse materials, collaborative activities,
authentic and demanding assignments that are both creative and practical also need basic
disciplinary facts to go with. Here are my pieces of advice. 1) Designing on-going assessment
into quality syllabus to supplement mid and final exams; 2) Requiring teachers to collaboratively
design syllabus in which we list both regular assignments, as well as big synthesizing
assignments and projects and what percentages each assignment account for and most
importantly list rubrics of each assignment to provide guidance and standard of grading; 3)
Meanwhile, TAO should put more efforts into reviewing teachers syllabus before the semester
starts and tracking students assignment in a systematic way after the semester starts.
To design such a quality syllabus needs our teachers, who teach the same level of classes, to
collaborate, research and innovate based on their students and subjects, which is time-consuming
and demanding of teachers professional expertise as there is no off-the-shelf one to fit all. But
the time spent on collaborative planning will actually shorten up their long but low-efficient class
preparation compared with their random, roughly-made and isolated class preparation before.
Also, teachers can make best of each teachers strength through collaborative syllabus design.
When teachers have quality syllabus, they are able to teach with more ease and calmly
evaluate and give feedback to students submitted works as the semester is going on and
more effectively think about how to give differentiated instruction to different individuals instead
of wasting much time on either motivating or punishing students for not doing the homework as
before. In the syllabus, the most important part is quality assignment which decides the validity
of ongoing assessment. A trio of widely respected researchers -- Newmann, Bryk, and Nagaoka
-- then affiliated with the Chicago Consortium on School Research, conducted a three-year study
analyzing classroom assignments and student gains on standardized tests across more than 400
Chicago classrooms in almost 20 elementary schools. The research findings strongly suggest that
accountability and standardized tests need not be in conflict with good instruction, and it is
wrong to assume that off-the-shelf tests require teachers to give up teaching higher level skills.
Moreover, both high- and low-achieving students benefited from the more demanding and
authentic assignments.
But some may argue that it is too burdensome to design a systematic and manageable
syllabus collaboratively as the burden may come from conflicts derived from collaboration
among colleagues. Also, some may hold that some teachers are not be able to contribute valuable
ideas and they may take free rides. All these concerns prove that as teachers in Beijing Royal
School we need to learn to collaborate first to better model our students team work spirit and
collaboration. Before collaboration, we should not assume bad intent and underestimate our
colleagues, as we will never know what unique potential the others will present if we can
properly inspire, discuss and share. Of course, some teachers will need professional help while
transforming their traditional way of test-centered teaching and rote memorization assignment.
Students blessing is all teachers are working at the same goal to empower them with solid skills,
Principle Wang, I believe you have exceptional decisiveness and wisdom to initiate
changes. Martin Luther King says: we must use time creatively, in the knowledge that the time
is always ripe to do right. Its high time our school made a big stride in reforming assessment
Sincerely,
Xiaojing Hou
English Teacher in Beijing Royal School
References
1. Jerald, C.D. (July, 2006). Teach to the Test? Just Say No. Washington, DC: The Center
www.centerforcsri.org.
I appreciate so much for your creative way of teaching Young Adult Literature and
composition. You create ample opportunities for us to express concerns and voices, and reach out
to professional teaching and writing groups by social media, such as journal writing, blogs and
twitter. You make me see another better myself dwelling on my body with exceptional potential.
You are an incredible professor who synthesizes many kinds of technology into class in the most
efficient way, such as wiki, padlet, videos and other digital tools. Your clear, well-graphed and
informational prep-sheet for each class is amazing. I have never met a professor who is more
well-organized and more dedicated than you do. Even though you assign us various assignments
each time, you have never got confused and skip reading our work and giving us feedback. I can
imagine how heavy the workload is. You model us strategies of teaching composition and
teaching reading in the most natural way such as group presentation, book talk, book trailer, free
writing, cubic activity, etc. Collaboration is highly required and practiced in the class. We do
learn a lot from our peers. Your expertise in integrating technology to solve digital learning and
teaching problems blows me away. You are so creative in assigning group assignment and
individual work.
Take assignment of three letters for example. It is such a smart idea to deal with the same
issue by writing to different audiences to reflect on the nuances in writing process and writing
style. In the advocacy letter to principal Wang, I have to consider about how to express my
motivation in writing such a letter at the beginning in a polite and relatively personal way as he is
our principal who is both familiar and unfamiliar to me. I rephrase the sentences in the beginning
many times in order to make it sound sincere while at the same time expressing my personal
gratitude. The main issue I am addressing in the letter is reforming our schools student
evaluation system. In the body part, I back up the information of current evaluation system
adopted in our school and highlights its downsides. Then I propose solutions and also address
counterarguments of this issue. Therefore, the letter to our principal is more logically structured.
In the personal letter to my son, I mainly take it as a channel to recall and comb through my
sons recent departure and experience here with me. Meanwhile, I want to convey my concerns
and worries about him concerning his reading habit and problems he might encounter when he is
going to start primary school, such as scores and assignment problems which are discussed in the
advocacy letter as well. Why do I choose to write a letter to our principal and one to my son?
Well, I am thinking about the root cause of our teaching to the test problem in China lies in
evaluation(College-entrance-examination). I am also thinking about how we are going to
transform our classroom by adopting project-based and inquiry-based learning in our school. But
evaluation, we might encounter huge difficulties. Because evaluation system decides on the
general teaching climate at our school. Therefore, we need to reform our evaluation system to
ensure our new way of teaching can thrive. But to change the already planted evaluation system
must be complicated and tough, thats why I choose our principal as recipient. Regarding the
process of writing a personal letter to my son, I just couldnt get him out of my mind while
working on the assignment. I have rehearsed many times of inner dialogue with my son about
why I sent him back so suddenly and pictured what kind of school life he was going to have. If
evaluation system wouldnt change in public schools, he would face the same problems I was
talking about in my letter to our principal. He would have boring crammed teaching, super
important formative exams in the mid and final of the term, and countless memorization
assignments. Thinking about that, I was chilling. Then I wove the same issue into my personal
letter even though I didnt put a lot of ink on that concerning his cognitive ability to understand
By doing this assignment, I realize writing a personal letter is quite different from writing an
advocacy letter or a formal letter. For example, it is relatively colloquial, more emotional and
more picturistic in wording and selecting facts while writing a personal letter. But writing a
formal and public compelling letter needs to be very logically-structured, analytical, rational,
objective, persuasive and data-based. As in a formal letter, we have to use evidence or facts to
support our statement and concerns and usually we need multiple perspectives and resources to
frame our statements. Also, I find I repeat using very intimate words in personal letters and many
private settings as well, like names and places such as my beloved son, Gui, Paw Patrol, Beijing
Airport, Ms. Ava, etc. Further, because my son is only five years old, I need to make my
understand. Personal letter is more like a private dialogue while public letter is like a public
audition, where I need to persuade and convince diverse population with various perspectives
and doubts. There is commonality as well. For instance, both letters need sincerity and strong
emotion to give life to our voices to either move or convince the target audience. As powerful
persuasive writings are not only compelling, they directly connect to heart and truly influence
decision-making.
I think my personal letter both functions for recalling and apologizing but also for parenting
and educational purposes. I hope it has been cut out as expected. I like the last paragraph in the
letter very much as it is moving to me. But I can tell the lessons I want to share with him kind of
hard and boring to him even though I want to make it more relatable and powerful, but it may not
turn out to be. Another problem might be I didnt focus on one issue in the personal letter as what
I did in the public letter, even though I include the issue discussed in the public letter as one
lesson I want to share with my son. I wonder whether it is a problem. Why I address it like this is
because it is difficult to connect the issue with my son, a special audience too much. Meanwhile,
it is weird to talk too much about that without personal stuff to back up.
I will send this public letter to my principal if current evaluational system remains the same
when I go back to our school. I wont send my personal letter out as my son cant read English.
But I will wait until he is probably 8 or ten years old when he is more mature and get used to
school life. Or I guess I need to read to him whenever he complains about this short American
always loving to read your remarks on each assignment which are just food to the soul,
encouraging and to the point. I envision myself to be a teacher like you, highly creative,
accessible and professional in the future. I look forward to learning more from you.
Sincerely,
Xiaojing Hou