Right before school started this year, our Chinese tutor of 2.5 years quit with no notice. She was good, really good –she had a master’s degree in foreign language education and everything. Then, suddenly I had to try to find a new tutor.
You know how hard it is to find a well-qualified Chinese tutor here with no notice? It is hard. It involves a lot of talking to people I don’t know about a subject I am stupid about. And despite my inability to speak any other languages, I have strong feelings about the exact way I want my kids to be taught (full or nearly full immersion, focus on practical vocabulary and speaking, not much focus on writing or reading).
And if the teacher quitting wasn’t bad enough, the boys who had been doing an immersion class with M found a new tutor who wouldn’t take a third kid into their sessions. So we lost our class too.
As I was looking for a new tutor, I also had to try to find other kids to create a small classes for L and M. I posted on the FCC mailing list looking for intermediate and beginner Chinese students to do a class with us after school one day a week, only to have my post immediately deleted. (I assume because it competes with their very low intensity saturday Chinese classes? I don’t know.) This made me really upset also, because A) once again FCC was more worried about their own self-interest rather than helping expose adopted kids to actual Chinese cultural stuff as and B) it just drove home the point that we can not expect any kind of camaraderie or support from other adoptive families here, or at the very least, not from FCC.
Teaching the girls Chinese is really important to us (Mr. A and I), but there is no way we can really expect any kind of success living here. There is no Chinese immersion program. There are no language schools besides Chinese school (and a similar Taiwanese school) which we already tried repeatedly and deemed too much effort and frustration for the inadequate outcome and poor quality teaching.* If they are going to learn in a kid-focused way that does not make them absolutely hate everything about Chinese, it is going to fall to me to find someone to teach them and kids to learn with.
If we could find a way to outsource Chinese, I would pay through the nose for it. I would get a job to pay for it if there was any the girls to get full-immersion instruction with other kids 3 times a week. I have even considered getting a job to pay for a Chinese au pair (an idea Mr. A adamantly refuses to consider).
Now that we know L’s family, teaching the girls Chinese is no longer optional. It can’t just be one more extracurricular activity. They actually need to learn to speak and understand it.
The pressure to achieve something that is pretty much unachievable is absolutely overwhelming.
(To be continued… part two)
* I know this sounds contradictory, but the Chinese School community is a bad fit for us because it is mostly 1st generation immigrant parents who speak Chinese at home.
Very fortunate to have Chinese Immersion programs in our backyard here. Our daughter is in full immersion – she doesn’t know school any other way, and it’s fantastic. The English reading comprehension is on our shoulders in many ways – and that’s hard enough. Would be so hard the other way around. Good luck – and that blows about your shitty FCC.
I know there is a part 2 but there is a woman who does Skype tutoring in. VN and I bet there are Chinese ones, too. I never hired her as a tutor but was friendly with her. She came to America and we even got to take her out for the day!!!!
Oh, it would be so much easier if you were in CA.
But here’s what I would do if I were you: contact a local university ESL program and put up a flyer there. You could even barter English help for Chinese lessons. Or you could be a host family. It’s not always a long commitment.
You might (?) consult with someone in DEALL at the Big University Down the Road…? I still know a couple of Chinese language pedagogy types there – email me if you’d like some help contacting them. Even though their emphasis is on post-secondary language acquisition, someone might have a lead, or there could be a grad student willing to work with you…?
i dont want to be a drag, i apologize in advance,
but the au pair programs i have seen were pretty darn cheap,
not neccessarily requiring another full time job,
and you dont have to overwork the poor woman, so even if the program seems abusive (45 hours a week?) you could require a lot less of her. My friends hired someone from Thailand, and a decade later they are still friends with her (and the year after au pairing she made aprivate arrangement with them, and lived in their lower level in exchange for some cooking and babyminding, without the agency fees). again, apologies if it is really obvious why this is a bad idea.
Have you reached out to local universities? I am taking Chinese class and have a tutor. She is a student here as an exchange student. She is responsible to do community service while she is in the US… so she tutors some of us adoptive Moms for no charge. We provide a meal and a place to study. Best of luck!!
Guys,
I know you are trying to be helpful, but I don’t need help figuring out how to find a tutor. We have a new tutor who is fine. We have a tiny class for M and a tiny class for L.
I am writing this in several installments because it is too long to put in one post (no one would read the whole thing). I am trying to get around to explaining why I checked out of my blog for a while…the chinese tutor thing is just a starting point for that. The tutor is just one way of illustrating a bigger struggle I have been working through this year.
Also, I *know* there are better language options other places. It doesn’t help to hear that again, because we live here. Our lives are here. If we were going to move for more language accessibility we would move to Asia…which we discussed and considered at length and have decided we do not want to do right now. Right now, we have to do the best we can HERE.
I know you all mean well, really I do, but just let me have a chance to spew all this out and then you can give me all the advice you want.
HI all
No advice here just commiserations. Just started mandarin school with my 5 year old and am running up against the same issue you have about how it doesn’t work as most have chinese speaking parents. The only plus is that a Chinese friend is sitting in the same class to help out with her 5 year old. The teacher is native cantonese speaker, the tones are wrong and there is zilch we can do until they move up to the next level. I’ve got to find a tutor etc like you had and someone to do it. Plus there is the issue of my 5th grader who needs/wants to restart…All really frustrating.
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This causes me heaviness, too. With every day that passes, I feel like the window is closing for my son (adopted from Taiwan) to learn Mandarin. But at age 5, he still is extremely delayed in speech and I can’t add another language right now. I hope the new tutor is working out! We plan to do the same once the time is right. You’d think in So. California there’d be tons of immersion schools around, but there aren’t. And Chinese Saturday school is a joke.
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