Students In Hong Kong example essay topic

806 words
Cultural Difference between Hong Kong and the U.S. Hong Kong has been one of the most prosperous cities in the world for many years. The idea of Hong Kong being returned to China was frightening many Hong Kong people in the early 80's, but the handover turned out to be a memorable moment for most of the citizens. Today, Hong Kong is no longer a colony of Britain and Chinese are holding most of the top positions in the government. Not only the political and economic issues have been changed a lot, but also the school system has.

Before 1997, most subjects at schools were taught in English. Although it has been hard for students to learn materials with their second language, they have been pushing themselves to move along with it. However, after Hong Kong was returned, many of the secondary schools had been forced by the Chinese government to change almost all the subjects to Chinese. It is true that the contents of the books would be more understandable for the students, but the sad thing was that everything would be changed back to English at universities, which would course a pain for the students. Also, the studying style in Hong Kong is different from the one in the United States. Most of the people in the U.S. pay more attention to the process while Hong Kong students mostly focus only on the result of the courses.

In average, students in Hong Kong usually do not have much work to do between the first day and the final two weeks of a semester, but they will put all their afford on the last couple weeks to study for the exams. It is because the schools do not really pay a lot of attentions to their students on how they look at the courses, as long as the kid can achieve a high score, he or she will be an A student. It is true that having good scores on exams is what every student should do, since they are sent with money; however, the schools in the U.S. seem to have more genuine- human-warmth than the Asian schools. Many teachers pay attentions to the learners' thinking skills. The final outcome is somewhat less important than how to go through the task, as we can see there are many A projects but with failing products. Most of the teachers are looking for ideas and affords that the students have spend on.

The experience would be more worthwhile to gain. Therefore, there are more projects and work that needs teamwork in the schools here than the ones in Hong Kong. I came to the U.S. when I was fifteen. The first thing that surprised me very much was the quantity of group-work assignments and presentations. I thought it was kind of stupid, beginning to suspect the quality of the teachers, thinking it was lazy that rather than reading every paper or correctly exams, they prefer to just listen to what the students presented.

It also wasted a lot of time meeting with group mates when they mostly spend more time chatting with each other than actually doing the work. After practicing couple times on those silly things, however, I found out that what I learned was not the materials from the book, but the courage and the way how you presented yourself in public instead. And this is what I think is better than the way to learn knowledge in Hong Kong. I believe that mostly students in Hong Kong will not have much chance to practice presentations until they go to the colleges. For myself, even though I am not an excellent student, I had been really pushing myself hard to achieve my goal for the first couple years after I came to the U. S; from high school to college. Since I was not a native English speaker, it was pretty hard for me to understand every little detail when I talked to the local students in my first high school year, which made me even feel embarrassed sometimes.

For this very reason, I joined clubs, sport teams, and tried to be involved in a new community. My life during that time was tight and busy according to the problem of communication. Because I did not want to be too behind, I worked twice amount of time than my teammates when doing both homework and projects. When those local students saw your face become serious, they would automatically make themselves involved quickly so that the quality of the work would be much better than the teams that always need to rush at the end.