So, Why Are We Doing This?

To start it off, some background information:

My daughter was born in the USA and is now eight years old. She had visited China only once last year, for three weeks. Both her parents were born in China but have lived in the USA for close to 20 years. Although her parents do speak Chinese to each other at home most of the time, she grew up speaking English exclusively. In fact, she was in daycare before her second birthday and has been "immersed" in English ever since. She is now a third-grader in our local public school.

Up till now, she had been going to our local Chinese School for two and half years, passing through the school's preschool, PinYin, and first-grade language classes. She is now in the second-grade language class.

She had never liked the Chinese school. This is not surprising since if you poll the kids in school you probably will get over 90% of them saying they dislike or even hate the school. They are there simply because their parents made them to. In the earlier years, we were able to bribe her into going with incentives that she got to see her best friend (who is no longer living in our neighborhood) and that she could also do dancing class there, etc.

But since the end of last year, she started to use the H-word, as in "I hate Chinese School".

The most significant difficulty she is encountering in school, according to herself, is that she could no longer follow the class instructions, which are entirely in Chinese. Her Chinese language level is just not good enough for the class. So she had to sit in the class for two hours staring at a teacher and not understanding anything she says. If she had learned any Chinese at all now, she says, it is all from doing homework at home with her Mom's help. So, in essence, we have already been homeschooling her with the school merely playing the role of providing weekly study materials in the form of homework assignments.

As most of the kids today, my daughter has a busy schedule for evenings and weekends. As she grows older, it is and will be getting worse. Her soccer and swimming, for example, now has practices or games three times a week when in season. She is also learning piano regularly and participating in other activities when available. Therefore, spending two hours in Chinese school every Sunday afternoon becomes a pretty big investment in her time. When the benefit could not justify the cost, we have to seek alternatives.

Equally important is her attitude. It's not going to be a big leap from "I hate Chinese school" to "I hate Chinese" (the language, of course). Right now, she is still geniurely interested in learning the language, something we need to nurture and protect.