THEME: Cultural Differences

" I have some of the native speaker parents, who talk negatively about me at home to their kids because they think that my class should be harder, and I should be more like a Chinese teacher. (…) I understand where they're coming from. This is exactly what I hear from my (Asian) husband, and my mother-in-law, but I still hold that no matter what race background they are, American students are different kids than students who grew up in China. Like they have different ways to take information. Americans in our schools, we talk a lot about mental health, and we talk a lot about how are you feeling right now, and how do we control our emotions, you know. Whereas I feel my husband, he's like ‘You just don't pay attention to them. You just push them down. You do what you're supposed to do.’ (…) I know some Chinese teachers will literally have two different classes within a class. Like we're going to force these ones to go further, and I'll give the native speakers extra work to work on, and I'll grade it, and I'll help them if they have questions. But then that puts them out. That means well, they're different than you guys are. And I feel that's not really helpful for building community. So that would be the only thing that’d be like native-speaker parents’ expectation of what Chinese class should be like in the suburbs." (Nina, Interview)

REFLECTION QUESTION:
在你接触到的华人和非华人学生家庭里，你是否也注意到了这种文化差异呢？面对不同家长的要求，你会如何处理呢？