The Price of a Good Education

“Hey, I’m gonna need that hundred dollars by the end of the day,” Max said as he double-checked the owed amount on his collection sheet. “Look Max,” Sam replied, “you know I’m good for it. I just don’t have it right now. It’s been… tough these last couple days.” Max, usually known for working by the book, felt unusually generous that day, “Get it to me by the end of the week. I don’t want to have to have this conversation again.” Sam sighed audibly, took a large bite of his snickers bar, put his backpack in his cubby, and hurriedly made his way over to his desk in the third row. Okay, time for a bit of context. Max and Sam were in second grade. I was their teacher, but  I was not really a “trained” teacher. My senior year of college, I’d wound up realizing that after eighteen years of schooling, tens of thousands of dollars towards a liberal arts education, and majors in both Asian studies and Chinese, I had no prospects for a real job. I’d always loved the idea of living abroad, and after talking to a good buddy of mine, Addi, who shared both my majors and my predicament, we decided to move halfway across the world to start a new adventure. We consulted our favorite Chinese professor, Pin Pin Wan, who told us there was only one place to go- the land of amazing food, beautiful mountains, and his hometown: Taiwan. So it was settled. Now all we had to do was find a job. It turns out that if you’re from America, have no skills whatsoever in teaching or any real grasp of the mechanics of the English language, you’re a perfect fit to be a teacher at a Taiwanese “cram school.” Cram school, or as it’s known in Taiwan, “補習班 (bu-xi-ban)”, is the place that students go after a full day of school, to sit in even more classes, trying to get ahead in their English abilities.  I knew that my first year of teaching would be a challenge, but I had no idea what I was getting myself into. Addi and I had taken a job at the largest cram school chain on the island. We’d been placed at a school in a suburb of a mid-sized city that was known as the Taiwanese Silicon Valley. It was a tough transition, as there were few people our age and almost no foreigners besides our co-workers.  There was no public transportation, no easy way to make friends, and as we worked in the afternoon and evening, all restaurants were closed by the time we got off.  Trying to find solace and put our passion into our work seemed our best bet to get adjusted to this new way of life. We’d signed a one year contract, and we were both determined to stick it out. The cram school I worked at was a three story brick building, with four to five classrooms per floor.  Each class had a primary Taiwanese teacher, whose English was nearly fluent, who would teach the students for the majority of the week.  These teachers were always amazing in their craft, well trained, and held the students to high standards. Most of them had been at the school for years. Once or twice a week, a foreign teacher would come in and spend roughly two hours working with the students, while the Taiwanese teacher assisted. Most foreign teachers didn’t last more than a few months at this school, as they’d either move to a bigger city or find a higher paying job, which meant that by the time students reached third grade, they’d already spent time with more than a dozen foreign English teachers. On top of that, most of their foreign teachers had, like us, no real teacher training, and no experience leading a classroom. To make matters even worse, the curriculums we were provided to teach  consisted of the same blueprint on repeat. This was great for teachers with no to little teaching experience, but terrible for trying to inject creativity or ingenuity into the classroom. Each class culminated with a long written test that determined the vast portion of a student’s overall grade.  The students were well behaved, and did what you asked of them with no fuss, but they were tired after a long day and  of doing the same things in class over and over, year after year. Behaving in class and getting good grades was of the utmost importance to their families, but there was no time for play or personal engagement with what they were learning. The students in that classroom had learned to succeed at “school” but hadn’t been taught how to be curious to learn. At around the six month mark, I decided I needed to mix things up. I’d learned the system inside and out, and could predict the regurgitated formulas for the lessons: sing a song, dance a dance, play a game, take a test. I was good at it, and my colleagues were happy to see me catch on so quickly. Unfortunately, I felt like a fraud. It was difficult  seeing these extremely bright kids be fed the same type of lesson every day, without exception, where little deep learning or critical thinking was possible. My favorite class of the day was a group of twelve second graders who were full of energy and loved to learn, so I decided this would be the class where I’d try to spice things up.  Instead of rewarding students with stars on the whiteboard like I usually did when somebody shared a correct answer or helped a friend, I decided to reward them with fake paper money instead. They couldn’t buy anything with the money, and it was useless by the end of the class, but they loved it. I had never seen them so engaged, and even the shyest kid in class was raising his hand with all his might hoping his contribution to the class discussion might lead to a crisp new hundred NTD (New Taiwanese Dollar) bill. At first, the money played a small part in the reward system, but it soon took over the entire curriculum. After the introduction of the money was such a hit, I decided to allow students to buy a small piece of candy if they’d earned enough cash.  Harmless enough I thought. One of the great parts about continuing to improve my Chinese was that I was able to understand the conversations students had with each other during breaks.  It was actually perfect: at that time my Chinese was near a second grade level and I was teaching second grade students. I’d introduced the candy rule on a Monday, and that Friday I heard a conversation between two students during their last break of the day.

Louis: “Mark, Can you please give me $50? I really want that last piece of candy.”

Mark: “Hmm, I’ll give you the $50 today, but next week you have to give me the first $300 you make.

Louis: “300? No way. How about $100?

Mark: “250”

Louis: “Come on man, please?”

Mark: “250”

Louis: “Fine.”

Mark hands Louis the $50 and they both walk back to their seats, unaware that I have any idea what sort of transaction they’d just made. These were kids who were singing songs about animals at the zoo in their English textbooks, but behind the scenes they were making deals under the table. They were capitalist masterminds, bargaining with interest rates, and were testing their loyalties and their word. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. That night I kept wondering how I could bring this level of engagement and depth into our classroom? By the end of the weekend I’d devised a plan to start our own mini-economy. I started by introducing fake money as a means to buy certain needs you might have in class. Needed to turn in homework late? Gotta pay a fine. You wanted to sit next to your friend during reading time? A small fee. There were ample ways to make money as well: Anything from turning in your assignment notebook with a parent’s signature to picking up trash on the floor without anyone asking could earn you cash. Each student worked to make money. Everyone had a job that rotated each week. Jobs included candy sellers, selling candy each day at the beginning of class, desk inspectors who made sure everyone’s desk was clean, and tax collectors who collected a certain portion of all student’s income towards the bank that would go towards a pizza party at the end of the year if a fiscal goal was met. Each day, students would get a basic income at the beginning of class, usually in the ballpark of $300. The income would cover a number of standard expenses. For example, buying a piece of candy cost $100, going to get a drink of water outside of break time was $50 and going to the bathroom was $20.  I never said no to a kid asking to go to the bathroom, however if they didn’t have enough money for a bathroom pass, they would take on debt. Sam, an outgoing student with big yellow and blue glasses,  was infamous for spending money he didn’t have, trying to nurse  an insatiable sweet tooth. Each day, without fail, as soon as he walked into class and received his daily stipend, he’d buy three pieces of candy. The class would cheer at his bravado as they knew the comedy of errors about to unfold. Like clockwork, twenty minutes later, he’d need to go to the bathroom, and without any money he’d try to figure out a way to get some. Making deals with friends nearby or promising to sweep the floor afterschool, he’d get the twenty dollars and race off to the bathroom. Sam was an exception. Most of the students adapted quickly to the financial rules of the class, and enjoyed the process of saving, spending, and working together to make the classroom a (literally) more enriched learning environment.  Students proposed rules, and if I thought they seemed fair, I would try them out. We would watch a movie on Fridays for the last hour of class  if everyone turned in their homework on time for a week. Some of the more capable students would stay after school and help those who were struggling to make sure their homework was submitted on time. We’d have extra “No Homework Mondays” if the classroom met a certain standard of cleanliness by the end of class each day the previous week. Students worked together to make sure all the glue sticks were back in the glue stick box, the markers had their caps on and the glitter (the ultimate danger to a clean second grade classroom) was placed far out of reach in the back of the cabinet. The whole economy seemed to be going great, but I doubted whether I was truly helping these kids out. Like any capitalist society, the rich seemed to get richer, and the poor remained poor.  Students were kind to each other at first, but once it was known that someone wasn’t good for their word at paying money back, that student lost nearly all social (and financial) credit. The irony in all of this was starting to become very clear to me. In the first six months of my teaching, I’d felt that the whole educational system felt transactional. I would tell students to do something, they’d do it, and I’d give them a good grade. They were doing their work for their grades, not for their own education. From first sight it may have seemed like this was a place of education, but for most of the students, they were just playing the game they’d been taught to play. Now, even though the class seemed richer (no pun intended), the transactional part of the lesson had gone from being implied to being explicit. The student were literally doing what they were asked to do so they could earn, invest, and spend money however they wanted. Was I really making class better in any way? Or was I just enforcing a financial system on a group of seven year olds during the one time in their life they didn’t need to worry about it? Though I went back and forth on the morality of introducing an economy into class, it started to take on a life of its own, and it was working: the pervasive sense of exhaustion and going through the motions was lifting. Kids arrived excited for class to start and ready to learn in a way I’d never seen before. Students were proud of the work they did together and held each other accountable for getting their work done in a timely fashion. They were diligent, hard-working and knew that together they could accomplish far more than what they could alone. It was unlike any classroom I’d ever seen before. Unfortunately, the parents didn’t see it that way. My first inkling of a problem was my Taiwanese co-teacher, who always made sure to scrub any evidence of a private economy before another teacher needed to use the room. At this school, foreign teachers had no interaction with parents, and feedback was given directly by the foreign head teacher of the school. About three weeks before the end of the year, my head teacher sat down with me, explained that introducing money into the classroom did not follow the values of the school, and though didn’t explicitly fire me on the spot, told me that the company would not be hiring me at any of its locations going forward. Looking back on my memories of my first teaching experience and the economy I’d created with my class, I know the system I’d setup was flawed in many ways. Students were still learning in transactional ways, only this time the transaction was for fake money instead of for validation from the teacher and good grades. I was so focused on the rules of the economy that I didn’t give proper time and effort to making sure the students were learning what they were supposed to learn to be successful with their next teacher. I was trying to teach students about the consequences of their actions with spending and saving, and to prepare them for the world of financial decisions, but I didn’t have the experience or the knowledge to fully unpack with the students the emotions they felt when they’d made a purchase they regretted or didn’t have enough money to spend. There was also, to state the obvious, an equity issue: I’d literally divided my class into “haves” and “have-nots.” Much like the capitalist system in which we all live, my classroom was not designed for everyone to thrive. Before I’d started teaching these second graders, they may not have been interested in the content they were learning, but they were kind to each other. I had created a system that rewarded savvy financial decisions over kindness and empathy.  Students stopped being kind to each other out of the goodness of their hearts if there was no financial incentive. In one instance, a girl named Debbie refused to help her friend Arthur pick up glitter he’d spilled until he’d promised to pay her for the deed. Moments like these made me stop in my tracks and think about if this system I’d put into place was doing more harm than good. The class was so alive, but the values were fading.  Through all the problems of the system itself, I’d created a class that was fully engaged and present in the classroom, hungry for any chance to learn, work together, and succeed. I guess you could say they had fully bought in. I wondered how I could improve a second iteration of the economy the next year, but for better or worse I never got that chance. When I started the year, I just wanted a job that would allow me to live in Taiwan. At the end of the year I lost the job, but found a vocation: I knew I wanted to keep teaching, it was just going to be a challenge to find the right setting where I could put my imagination and zany ideas into practice. Some friends of mine put me in touch with Patrick McMahon, a long-time High Tech High teacher who had relocated to Taiwan with his family. He was designing curriculum for Very Interesting School (VIS), Taiwan’s first Project Based Learning school. VIS was exactly what I’d been looking for. I loved PBL from the minute I started, and though I never brought fake money back into the classroom, I was able to put to practice a world of other ideas I’d cooked up over the years. After two years at VIS, I was hungry for more, and now am in the High Tech High Graduate School of Education, teaching ninth grade humanities with the awesome Juli Ruff. I’ve kept the fake money out of the classroom but sometimes, when a student asks to go to the bathroom, for a split second I see Sam, holding three candy bars without a cent to his name, making a deal with a student to get the obligatory 20 dollars for the all sacred bathroom pass.