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Category Archives: university education

Everywhere …

16 Thursday Oct 2014

Posted by ZJShen-PSimon in education, Hungary, translation, university education

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China, education, Hungary, Netherlands, people's behaviour

I know you already have at least an inkling that wherever you are, independent of the country, things are bound to go wrong even after they look like going well. In this post, I only want to add to that roster of experience about the fickleness of life in various countries. I’ll start with the country that may be my favourite. Actually, I don’t have much to add after the Chinese Language Blog of Transparent Language has posted a discussion of bad things, and also of good things about China.

This is the correct attitude, but these post are general, whereas my examples are concrete, something that could happen to anyone on floor level. Although I could obviously add items to the negative list like there’s no real nature in China, all parks are fake, trees are mishandled, environmental pollution is rampant and growing faster than economic development, I’d like to tell you about an issue that a local leader I worked for experienced.

He was the Department Leader at the Economics Department of the university where I worked back in those days. He decided that at the rate of 16 hours of teaching a week, the ‘foreign experts’ cannot do enough preparation and provide enough quality for the students that he required, so he hired one more foreign teacher and unofficially reduced the number of hours allocated for each of us.

Actually, his plan worked well for me as I felt obliged to satisfy my students’ need and request for some extra activities, so we enjoyed watching and discussing several films over several weeks.

However, the Dean of the university found out about it in the middle of the second half-year, reprimanded the department head, and radically reduced the number of foreign teachers the following year. It didn’t have much impact on me as I was moving on, but it impacted the following year’s students substantially. Quality-wise, which is difficult to assess of course. I wholly enjoyed my following year at another branch of the same uni, but this case left a warning impression on me. Besides the lack of internet freedom.

In the Netherlands, I’ve been enjoying my life quite freely. A quiet country (if you forget about the rampage they go on on Queen’s (now King’s) Day, or at a football match, or about the sense of proprietorship concerning their own property even without fences), they smile at you a lot in the street except in Amsterdam, where people behave just like everywhere else on fashionable territory, well-organized, people behave, offices work efficiently, provide social security benefits for the needy … Fine, ain’t it?

It took some time for me to discover, through a friend, that I’m entitled for help for the money I pay for my rent and social security costs. I applied, got it and was happy. Ever after, right?

Not exactly. At the beginning of this year (2014), I was informed that I had to repay almost a thousand euros (the whole amount) that I was given for 2011, because I had lived at the same address as some other people: the person whose room I was renting back then, and his adult daughter, and another person who also rented a room there. So the office reckoned we were all the same happy family, our incomes were put together and, as a result, I had had no right for housing allowance. I should pay back. For those not really aware of the weight of money, this is an amount to the value of a teacher’s three months’ net monthly salary in Hungary.

This is insane enough, since I’ve been renting another room for more than two years now, I’m a man of Hungarian origin with my own son back in Budapest, not with a Dutch daughter of 22, who is from the owner’s deceased wife who had died a year before. Not to mention that I had no income during the period in question due to severe illness. And not to mention the fact that I never married that man after his wife had died …

But no data had been checked except the address. I was allowed to apply for redress. We had to explain the whole situation with a lot of documents about the family situation and the situation of the house. On top of this, although they wrote to me that, until the case is decided, I don’t have to pay, I haven’t received a decision until now – instead, I received another order to pay up two weeks ago. No reply yet to my second protest.

If this is not enough, my last case involves Hungary. Nobody may be surprised that when I had graduated and then applied to be trained as a Geologist, I was told I should be happy to have been educated enough at the cost of the working people and now I should be happy with it and work myself. No further education in the socialist system for me.

What did I have to do? I did what I had room for and became a teacher trainer, and a project member with the British Council, with a lot of excellent students in my schools along the way, quite a number of whom became English teachers themselves a couple of decades ago.

After three decades, however, the appeal I used to have for my students, and also the interests of students, have changed dramatically, and I have ended up with the same work I started to do more than two decades ago: I became a translator. I can’t complain about it, but I still don’t have the education about it, no degree, only experience, but with very little feedback, which I had very much rather get.

So I entered a university course in Budapest this autumn. I began the course, but before that, I had talked to the department head in July, who encouraged me to apply for an individual course of studies, practically doing the course over the internet. I live in the Netherlands, and I would like to stay here among my best friends instead of paying for my room and health insurance while living elsewhere. I was told to collect the signatures of my teachers allowing me to do it over the net, so I reckoned I should first go to lessons, then ask them to sign.

At that point, the head told me I should ask for a form to be filled in from the Students’ Office, where, however, I was informed that the application deadline had expired – at the end of the first week! I am still flabbergasted! At the best university of Hungary, one is expected to apply, as an unknown person to them, for special treatment by unknown teachers, who may even be absent in the first week, thus unavailable (one was in fact absent for two weeks).

Now it is my fault not to have checked upon the deadlines, but when you go to buy a chair at IKEA, do you check if they had packed all the screws and screwdrivers in the package right after you’ve bought it? I had been told by the department head that it’s alright, go for it, and when the deadline had passed, she told me I should just go ahead, she would help me with my application with the university leaders, I can quietly leave. Case closed with success.

After all this, she went to the deputy dean for students’ affairs and wrote a letter to all my teachers to scrap me from the roster because I “hadn’t even paid the fee”. Which I had paid two weeks before her letter. When she talked to the deputy dean, she didn’t even check whether I had paid my dues. I may even not get back the fee I had paid, let alone successfully finish my studies. I’ve been in limbo and in a lot of doubts ever since.

Up to this point, I didn’t have time to think about my application for writing my thesis. The rule is that this must be submitted before half-time of the last-but-one semester when the thesis is to be submitted, in our case, one-and-a-half months after we started the one-year course. Then I realize now that with the same sweep of her mind, thinking I hadn’t paid, the department head refused to sign my application earlier this week, so by now, I have also missed this deadline. Even if the dean consents to my request to carry on with my studies after all, it does not seem feasible for me to finish it on time.

This is not a system geared to work badly – this is only a system of formalities, keeping to deadlines no matter what. I can only personally re-claim the fee that I don’t need any more, and only a part of it. I’ve been told to behave like an adult by a clerk in the Students’ Affairs department, whereas it is the Department Head who has behaved like a child to me. I’ve been acting in good faith and am looking to loose almost as much as by the Dutch department for housing allowances. If only the department head had the guts to go ahead with what she told everyone, her teachers included, to do.

All in all, it’s usually not the system, but the participants in the system who make it feel …

by P.S.

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What Teacher Education Programs Don’t Tell You

10 Monday Jun 2013

Posted by ZJShen-PSimon in education, teacher training, university education

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Teacher education

I have just found a very interesting article about what teacher education does not do well enough in the USA. As I have similar experience from other countries, especially from my own, I recommend reading it. I hope some of my international readers will add a few remarks below about the situation in their own countries. The article, from Education Week, “What Teacher Education Programs Don’t Tell You” can be accessed here.

by P.S.

A big leap forward for me … where exactly?

09 Wednesday Jan 2013

Posted by ZJShen-PSimon in English teaching, language teaching, university education, work in Dutch education

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English as a foreign or second language, Netherlands, Secondary education

For those that already know my story from this blog or from elsewhere, I’m happy to announce that today I received the recognition (‘erkenning’ in Dutch) of my MA from Hungary for the Netherlands on the second level. For the sake of those who are nursing similar ambitions to mine to become active (and salary-earning) members of the Dutch education system, I’d like to elaborate further. It may give you a good laugh …

First of all, to clarify for those who still don’t know what a second-level degree (‘tweedegraads bevoegdheid’) means in this country, let me quickly point out that from now on I have a paper to prove that I’m legitimately able and allowed to give English lessons to students in the secondary system between the ages of 12 and 15, which means the first three years of secondary education. This also means that my MA has actually been accepted as a BA, or something like that. Furthermore, it means that those members of my profession from the former Eastern Block who have studied to get degrees in two subjects at universities for five years (I also read Geography), will also be recognized as having completed three years of study at an Eastern-European high school (‘főiskola’ in Hungary), which would qualify them to teach in primary schools. If you have such a double MA from there, you should also first ask for this second-grade recognition. You won’t get the first-class recognition straight away, but will get second-grade if you ask for it.

If you still want to have first-grade recognition, you can choose to apply for – supervised – practice teaching for a year at a qualified secondary school on that level, or apply to a university to make it possible for you to follow a short programme to reach the same. But this latter also involves practice teaching.

Today I’ve decided to consider my cup half full, instead of pessimistically saying it’s still half empty. If you wouldn’t under any circumstances like to admit that all coins have a second side, please don’t go on reading this. For others, I’d like to shortly explain why my other eye still has tears in it.

The tears may come from crying, but in my case, they may also result from laughing. Hard.

On the one hand, before this recognition, I was told that I can’t have followed enough education in English with two majors compared to Dutch students following one. I wonder what I didn’t read or discuss in my five years. Was there anything missing from Beowulf through Chaucer through Marlow and Dryden to Mary (or Percy Bysshe) Shelley to Laurence? Not to mention all the Americans? Or have I missed a rare use of a particle or preposition in the grammar course? Thirty-four years ago. Guess how much of that knowledge I have had to use through the decades of my career. If I have missed anything in grammar classes, I have definitely had to make up for it through teaching.

Anyway, if I want to get first-degree appreciation, I get the chance to brush all those up, and fast. Time is not on my side.

On the other hand, now I’m allowed to teach kids of ages that I mostly never taught – those under 14. This is where I have no experience and methodological background, nor psychological leanings or instincts. I’m not the playful type. I’m rather the logical and culturally and otherwise interested type. But I can’t teach those who I’ve been teaching for 30 years and more-or-less successfully have been working with. In short, I can’t teach those and how I am able to teach and can teach those and how I’m not able to teach because I may not have been educated enough 34 years ago in facts that a teacher hardly ever uses while teaching, although I’ve read almost everything important published since my graduation, which I doubt very much that a lot of Dutch English teachers ever read. I find this a lovely contradiction, don’t you? But, of course, I’ll do my best if I get the chance.

Finally, a little bit about the supervising we may get during practice teaching from my own point of view. I got training for, and did supervising, or mentoring, or coaching for would-be teachers in Budapest for a decade. It may be interesting to become a ‘mentee’ once again, perhaps supervised by somebody younger and less experienced than I am. However, I definitely have less experience in classes in the Dutch system, so I have to try to look forward to hearing “but we here in the Netherlands …” a lot, possibly followed by remarks like ‘I’ve never hear about Murphy’, or ‘What is First Certificate Language Practice by Vince? I’ve never used anything like that’, and ‘Where can I get Inside Out or English Panorama?’ On the other hand, I’ll have to brace myself to translate the Dutch in the English language tests.

If I survive an interview successfully first. And that has to happen in Dutch, to a large extent. My new paper also stresses that it’s at the discretion of a school to decide how much knowledge of Dutch they require from an English teacher. A few years ago I would have guessed, as much as an American or English colleague was required to speak Hungarian, or Chinese, in Hungary, or in China respectively. Now I’m not so sure. I guess I should go back to Hungary, kick out all those ignorant Americans and take over their jobs. They would be better off if they came here and learnt some Dutch, then earned five times as much. Do I have a future like that here?

by P.S.

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Trends in education and culture in Hungary

09 Sunday Dec 2012

Posted by ZJShen-PSimon in Hungary, university education

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Culture of Hungary, higher education in Hungary, Hungary

If anyone reads my previous posts, they may wonder why I don’t live and work in Hungary, instead of criticizing some features of education in the Netherlands. Instead of pointing to economics too much, I’d like to point out two of the latest ‘developments’ in Hungary, whereby, however, I have to turn towards politics first I’m afraid.

All through the sixties, seventies and eighties of the previous century I had to witness the power of politics over the lives of masses and individuals. As an individual, I didn’t have to witness much, we (I and those I knew) didn’t stick our necks out, and so we could get by. Promises for a brighter future remained the basic tenet of everyday life, but ordinary people had quite rich means of culture in the form of all classic literature properly published (except a few that overly criticized socialism, but we didn’t get to know about them for a while), a rich theatrical, operatic and music life, and a relatively good system of higher education for those very few (1-2% of school-leavers) gifted or fortunate enough to pass the entrance tests. We sang praise to the power of the people and of the Soviet Union in schools, but we also sang our rich heritage of folk songs, all adults could get jobs, and the best artists annually received their rewards for their achievements in prestigious prizes.

All this changed little with the change of the political landscape in 1989, except that the prizes inflated along with the prices. The ruling elite also changed somewhat but the methods of ruling changed little, which led many to point fingers to new forms of the same politicians as before, then back, and so forth. The lives of ordinary people didn’t change much, except that universities opened up their gates to a huge influx of the new young generations without receiving suitably more financial means to cater for their further education. Some campuses had to move over because the old ones had to be given back to former owners, mostly one of the churches, but personnel didn’t get boosted in numbers or finances and had to make do in about the same size lecture halls as before. Still, numbers of students have swollen to about 35% of the annual school-leavers.

It goes without saying I’m afraid that the quality of services rendered both by universities and their graduates have declined. I see a number of good reasons to reducing the number of entrants myself, largely because their job prospects after graduation are anything but bright, what with the slowly further growing unemployment rate (also among the young) and the also slowly further inflating salaries for them if they get into a job, and because good skilled workers are disappearing in large numbers, not only with the disappearance of whole industries but also because of the declining numbers and quality of school-leavers from technical schools.

Enter the new, rightist government with a huge bang and 2/3 majority in 2010. Gone is the influence (and balance) of opposition, common sense, ideas and methods of democracy. All is substituted with new laws and a new Constitution that requires any change to them with a 2/3 majority in the future. Besides political, economic and financial question-marks over their policies and their dealings with European and world institutions, about which the world gets briefed from time to time, they’ve now turned their hands on cultural decisions.

Their new law on the media has received lots of criticism first, at home as well as from abroad. Then a few weeks ago, the conservative government decided to invest most power in acknowledging artistic merit in the country to MMA, the Hungarian Art Academy, and this fact has been entered into the law as well. It’s not simply this fact that may irritate anyone interested in Hungarian culture, but mostly the ideas behind this organization. Its very outspoken leader has rushed to clarify to all that art and artists not conforming to their conservative ideals centered on Hungarian-ness, artistic merit and political and religious requirements will not receive space, funding and acknowledgement in the county.

Remarkably, the first criticism from abroad is already in, from the Rat für die Künste, the association of arts and artists in Berlin, which issued a public letter voicing strong criticism in the matter, mentioning, among others, that the issue fits into the line of impoverishing all independent theatres, museums and artists in Hungary. An interesting by-product of the ensuing debate is that a critique tried to find out who the new leader of the MMA as an artist is and why he received prizes in the 1960’s and 70’s, but mainly found very new pieces by the person, Fekete György, on a level which he wrote would mean he should be expelled from his own Academy on account of lacking artistic merit. The article shows a few pictures of his work here (the text is in Hungarian).

The latest ‘development’ on the cultural front is that the new conservative government has decided a drastic cut in state funding for university students. Although I mentioned above that a reduction in the numbers of university students would be prudent, but full funding for 10 thousand entrants following year instead of 38 thousand this year is outrageous. Equally outrageous is to make it seem a logical step for reducing state deficit. Education in general has never been a priority in Hungary, and although the education sector is one of the large sectors of the service industry to be funded from state and local government coffers, its cost is simply a result of the large numbers of people necessary to work there. But if a government seeks to rule by force and not through the ideas of its citizens forwarding the cause of the country, education becomes an obstacle to governance. It was so during the socialist regime and it seems increasingly so under the new one, which looks back to the history and nationalism of the country instead of looking ahead towards solving challenges of the future saying that the future can only be solved by looking back to our history. This in a small country that has had very little independence and success in the last 500 years.

To translate some of this from national level to the level of the common people, we have to understand first that university education used to be free in Hungary during socialism. After the ‘changes’, the right to a free degree became the right to a first degree, that is, if someone followed two major courses, which was compulsory at arts and sciences faculties before, he/she had to pay for the second course and degree. This, obviously, has reduced the flexibility of the graduate on the job market compared to those with two degrees from the old system. Now comes the drastically increased financial burden to getting even the first along with the complete lack of funding for law and economics and a very law numbers funded in technical subjects, informatics and science subjects. Almost everyone who would like to follow these subjects in higher education, would have to pay full, or in a small number of cases, half price of the education.

To understand the financial side, gross salaries in the service sector, mostly for those working in education and health services for state-run institutions, vary somewhere between €6000 and €10000 per annum in a country whose nominal annual GDP is around €10000. Most teachers and health service providers get by on a monthly net income of around €4-500. The new reduction of state funding for university studies means that a student willing to study but not getting state funding has to pay between €650 and €1200 a semester, but to follow medicine, one has to pay nearly €4000 per semester. This further means that most families where parents work in the intellectual sphere will not be able to finance their children to follow similar studies to theirs. Student loans can be obtained, though, resulting indebtedness for half a life, because student work, paid even worse than others, is hardly a solution for the masses with the growing unemployment.

One interesting side to the matter is that those using full or partial state funding have to sign a contract forcing them to stay and work inside Hungary for a period double the time for their studies. Similarly to serfs in feudalism, bonded to their places. Looking back to our history indeed.

Another interesting, political, side to it is that current Prime Minister Orbán Viktor has always maintained that he won’t introduce tuition fees, he won’t allow people to be hindered in their future by the burden of having to pay for their education. The article, which quotes him at the end saying such thing over the years, can be read here – Google may translate it well enough for my readers to understand the main ideas there.

That such contradictions prevail, and such laws can be brought upon Hungary any day, I’ve suspected for a long time. It’s not a war-torn country, civilian unrest is not yet on the horizon, but I’d prefer to try to find a place for myself somewhere more humane, logical and calculable.

by P.S.

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