How are US students classroom behavior compared to the students in other parts of the world?

Question

I like to hear from teachers who have experienced both US and other countries students. I know the teachers our district recruited from India and the Philippines are having hard times adjusting to the US student behaviors. I personally have had little behavior problems from my ESL students that just came to the US from Mexico, China, Africa, etc. compared to the numerous problems I've had with the US students (or even foreign student have have been here a while). I'm trying to figure out if or why there is a difference in behaviors?

Answer 1

I'm not a teacher. I'm a student. An Asian one.

Everyone puts studies at high priority. However, we do have cable, and most of us grew up watching Disney and Nickelodeon. The older generation completely respected teachers and took their word to be IT. However, we DO dare talk to the teachers and talk back at times. I've seen students who are rude to teachers. Students dare to speak up and voice their problems with what the teachers are saying.

In fact, interaction and voicing of opinions is encouraged in my school-not all schools though. (My brother went for a class out of school, and challenged the teacher. My mum got called up.)

However, some incidents that occured a couple of years back makes me believe that we are different from american students.

We had a white teacher from the US. It was his first time teaching in our local schools. So anyway, he taught us English. One day, we were having a test. Most students take tests VERY seriously.

The teacher was walking around the class playing with some stationery, hence making a little noise. A couple of kids got annoyed, and started making shushing noises. He got peeved and asked what the problem was. They kept shushing him, all the while scribbling furiously.

Whoa. He was peeved. "Can't you kids chill? It's JUST a test. A small test. Chill!"

The kids gave him dirty looks.

I suppose our attitudes might be a lot like those in the US schools- we don't exactly see teachers as Hitler figures, and we do dare challenge and talk to them.

However, when it comes to work, peeps get a LOT more stressed. I had a friend who went to the US to study. She turned up for her Uni exams with a whole pencil case full of pens and correction tapes. Her friends oggled at her. They had a pen in their pockets and were strolling into the exam halls.

So yeap. I suppose it's a bad mentality here that exams and tests are IMPORTANT LIKE HELL.

Answer 2

Well, I do think that students in the UK have a higher rate of teen pregnancies...

Answer 3

I've taught the 10-13 year-old range in Taiwan, then Washington, DC, then rural Hawaii.

In Taiwan, my students studied all the time. If they had a school break with no homework, they didn't know what to do with their time. Some of my students brought me flowers on Confucius's birthday. The families had high expectations for academics in particular, and they did not put up with any negative attitude from the student towards the teacher. I had parents tell me I could beat their children if they acted up, but I had no intention of doing so. My students were already studying for the competitive exams which would determine if they got to go to high school.

I did once pass a classroom in a private junior high school in Taiwan where each of fifty students was sitting straight up and staring straight ahead--like they were at West Point or something. No one was talking, and the teacher wasn't even in the room. I was wondering how he managed his class like that when he walked by with a big stick. I was horrified.

I was always trying--and failing--to get my students to participate in class. Then one day, I read an article about a teacher in Tainan who had been lecturing when a strange man walked into the classroom behind her, walked over to her desk, picked up her purse, and walked out again. Her students didn't dare interrupt her lecture to tell her. You just don't do that sort of thing in Taiwan. I gave up on my dream of lively class discussions.

I walked into a couple of classrooms at a junior college in Korea and found all the occupied desks scooted back to fill the back 20% of the classroom. The students blocked each others desks, practically sat on top of each other in an effort to make sure they were all as far from the teacher as possible. I had never seen anything like it.

The kids in rural Hawaii tend to be respectful to elders who are related to them, friends of the family, or well-established members of the community. That does not, however, translate to respect for teachers who come from some other place on the part of the student or the parent.

In the US, students sometimes address their teachers as if the teachers were wait staff in a restaurant and the students were customers. I have known students to spit sunflower seed hulls at a teacher, curse at teachers, elbow them, or call their home and leave obscene messages on their answering machines. If teachers point out students' bad behavior choices to them, they may get an angry call from the students' parents or grandparents later in the day. Or, the parents may take time off work to come yell at school staff in person, and they don't mind doing it in front of the students.

One day, an Ethiopian student of mine said, "If we are bad in Ethiopia, they beat us." Another student had told me it would happen at the morning assembly, in front of everyone in the school. It didn't matter if your parents didn't want you to be beaten--it was going to happen once you got in trouble. My student continued, "But here, if we are bad, you take away our recess? You call our parents? That's it?!?!"

The student who asked wasn't the type to take advantage of the difference in discipline. He was frustrated with the several East African students who did and maybe brought a little shame on his culture by doing so. But it didn't take some of the foreign students I knew long to start wearing the bling bling and being disrespectful to all adults in their life. They were cut off from their extended families and cultures and exposed to some of the worst parts of ours.

I grew up in a corporal punishment state, and I got paddled for things that wouldn't even get you detention in the schools where I work today. I am not any kind of way in favor of corporal punishment, but I do believe that we have come to a place where expectations at home and expectations at school are so different as to make it practically impossible to set and maintain clear and consistent consequences that mean something to the student. Garrison Keillor tells of the day when any trouble at school was automatically assumed to be the student's fault. Parents today are quick to believe the teacher had it in for their child "from Day One".

A good example is when you have a school rule against cell phones. Parents say their child needs to have a cell phone for emergencies, and school staff don't go looking for cell phones in kids' bags because they understand that. When a child in English class answers a cell phone call from his mother, however, you know you've got a problem!