Teaching Chinese Kids to Be Bloggers

This is more of an observation and not a cultural criticism. Chinese formal education tends to encourage passive learning, rote memorization, and studying for tests like Zhong Kao and Gao Kao that could potentially ruin your life. There isn't that much of an emphasis on creativity, and the liberal education concepts laid out by theorists like Piaget and Dewey are somewhat alien here. So, it was fun to take a bunch of kids on one rainy weekend day and teach them some of the concepts that goes into blogging.  It should also be noted that some of the after-school language centers take a more active approach. However, it should be also noted that those students are the children of the middle class an upwards -- parents who can afford expensive language centers with foreign teachers. So, the idea was to take the children to a park that has notoriously bad Chinglish and utter weirdness. 

They were to find as much bad English as possible. Also, they were given a list of vocabulary words and were told to find examples. To do this, they were armed with cell phones and told to take as many photos as possible. You could say this was "blogging," but you could also call it a photographic scavenger hunt. 

There was a meeting afterwards to discuss results. But, during the whole escapade, there was a "sort of" blog that they could post their photos to. It was a WeChat discussion group. 

All in all, this was a fun activity. I look forward to doing it again soon. And, you know it had to be successful if the kids enjoyed themselves DESPITE the fact that it was raining.