Tuition To Revise Tuition ?

 

We had enrolled the kid in a Chinese class as our grasp of the Mandarin language is really pathetic.

We had enrolled the kid before but the kid could not catch up as every week is a different lesson and new words to learn by heart. 

So we enrolled the kid in another Chinese  language centre for kids. Read glowing reviews that this is more playcentric and kids will learn the language easier.

Well, it seemed that the system is like the previous centre.

You learn a new lesson every week and you need to do short homework after every lesson at home.

When you return to class the next week, the teacher will go through the previous week's lesson before doing the current week's lesson.

Whether you know your lessons / words or not, new lessons will have to carry on as the teachers have to follow the syllabus. If you don't know, too bad for you.

I've been told by the teacher twice that we, the parents, need to revise/go thru the lessons with the kid as he didn't know how to read the Chinese words when the teacher asked him to read. 

The class also had a kind of test recently - a test to read the different Chinese words and my kid only recognised one word.

HELLO! I don't understand something. 

The reason why I enrolled my child in your Chinese centre is so that your teachers can teach him Mandarin.

Your class size is small not like in mainstream school where there are so many students that the teacher could not help everyone and thus most students have tuitions on their weak subjects.

Why do I still have to teach him at home? Then what is the purpose of sending the kid there ? I might as well buy some Chinese books, flash cards n teach him myself. 

Why do I want to pay hundreds of dollars to you and I still have to go through the lessons/words with him. 

We send him to you is becos our Mandarin sucks and we are unable to read the words - yes, can't even read pre-primary Chinese (only some). 

So how? It is really tedious to look up every word in the dictionary.

It's like you have tuitions for your kids in maths/science etc and you still have to tuition what the tuition teachers had taught the kid. 

So do I need to get a tuition teacher to teach/revise with the kid what the current teacher is teaching?

Are all Chinese centres using this kind of methods - that is new lessons/words every week. Go through previous week's lesson before starting new lessons regardless whether the children know the words or not. 

Really makes no sense to me.

The kids who are able to cope, from what I can see is becos they have a Mandarin speaking home environment. How I know? Sometimes met the grandparents of my kid's classmates and they were speaking Mandarin.


Whenever Eugene spoke a word or two of Mandarin, I will ask him where he learnt the words from, and he always said from his kindy class (his kindy class have Chinese lessons everyday for about 45 mins, but I enrolled him in the current Chinese centre as I thought he could do with more immersion in a Chinese speaking environment) and not from this Chinese centre.


We will be taking Eugene out of the Chinese centre after the term is over.