Chinese-language classes full, but teachers scarce in US

The shortage has school officials traveling to China for recruits and offering guest-worker visas.

from the March 27, 2007 edition

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"In China or Taiwan, you don't talk back to your teachers. What the teacher says goes," says Heather Lin, assistant to the head of school at the Chinese American International School (CAIS) in San Francisco. "We have had one of our teachers who came to CAIS after having taught in China for nine years. She came from a classroom of 60 students in China, to a class of 16 here, and she said it was so much more work to teach the 16."

The American model emphasizes "talking back" in the good sense of interactive learning. And the smaller number of students means that the teaching should be more individually tailored. That's a tall order for some foreign teachers, especially when classrooms have students with widely different abilities, backgrounds, and behaviors.

Permanent solution: US-based teachers

Most observers agree that temporary foreign teachers are not a permanent solution. Instead, they look to the roughly 6,000 teachers and 150,000 students in the Saturday schools to eventually fulfill the demand for teachers in public schools.

But several factors keep the Chinese-American community from playing a bigger role in bridging the cultural gap, says June Gordon, an education professor at the University of California at Santa Cruz. Many, especially in the San Francisco area, come from families who either speak Cantonese, an entirely different Chinese dialect, or an imperfect version of Mandarin.

Meanwhile, more recent immigrants have high aspirations that lead them to dissuade their children from teaching, according to surveys by Dr. Gordon. While traditionally teachers were held in high regard in China, she says, these immigrant parents left the country after respect for the profession had begun to drop dramatically as incomes from private- sector jobs eclipsed teacher pay.

Those former students and current teachers of Saturday schools who are interested in full-time teaching often lack modern education training and state certification, say Dr. Wang. To fill in these gaps, the federal government is pouring money into programs to help Chinese speakers get certification, and states are working to standardize their requirements.

Some universities, like Rutgers in New Jersey, offer teacher training for mid-career professionals.

The vast majority of students taking the language in US public schools are not of Chinese heritage, according to an ongoing survey by the Chinese Language Association of Secondary- Elementary Schools. The difficulty of the language – ranked among the hardest for English speakers and requiring the memorization of thousands of characters – is part of the attraction for some students, say teachers.

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