A Letter to My Son

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

gift bags before leaving.

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

and less regret.

Love

Mom

March 16, 2017

Reference

1. The Harmful Effects of Watching Too Much Television ... (n.d.). Retrieved March

18, 2017, from http://www.bing.com/cr?

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

Dear 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

market, we need to reform our assessment system to be on-going and multi-dimensional.

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

again and again.

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,

creative and critical thinking instead of cultivating them as test-cracking machines.

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

system and leading quality and competitive international education in China.

Sincerely,

Xiaojing Hou
English Teacher in Beijing Royal School

March 18, 2017

References

1. Jerald, C.D. (July, 2006). Teach to the Test? Just Say No. Washington, DC: The Center

for Comprehensive School Reform and Improvement. Retrieved March, 11 from

www.centerforcsri.org.

2. King, L. M. (1963). Letter from Birmingham Jail(PDF).

A Letter to Dr. Young

Dear Dr. Young,

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

if we dont change current evaluation system to supplement with on-going multi-dimensioned

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

that which still bore great significance in the letter.

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

educational message as simple and relatable as possible. Otherwise, he wont be able to

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

adventure and bears puzzles about education at school.

 Good teachers inspire and empower students. You are such a great professor. I have been

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

March 23, 2017