What Happens When School Feels Like a Processing Plant: A Parent’s View from Taiwan
The first time I noticed it was a Tuesday, and it was the tree.
My son brought home his sketchbook from first grade. On the page was a tree: brown trunk, three branches, five green circles fanned out at the top. It was the same tree that hung on the classroom wall, photocopied and laminated, the one the teacher had asked them to copy during art period. Two years earlier, before he started school, he’d drawn a tree that looked like a purple octopus falling over. I’d taped that one to the fridge for a month.
I asked him why he drew it this way. He said, “Because that’s the correct one.”
That sentence stayed with me longer than I expected it to.
I grew up here, so I know the machine from the inside. The 6:20 bus, the contact book with its columns of red stamps, the Saturday morning cram school where the windows were fogged and the teacher wrote the same formula on the board eleven times. I did all of it and came out fine, mostly. What I didn’t expect was how early it starts now. Seven years old. First grade. There’s a worksheet packet in his bag every night, and a small test every Friday, and a number printed at the top of that test that everyone in the class can figure out if they compare.
His teacher isn’t cruel. She’s tired. There are twenty-nine children in the room and a curriculum that assumes she gets through a set amount of material each week, so she does. Recess gets shortened when a lesson runs long. Art becomes copying. Music becomes singing the same song correctly. I don’t blame her. The sorting starts young and the entrance exams are still a decade away, but the shadow of them is already in the room.
What I noticed after a few months wasn’t sadness. It was quiet. He stopped volunteering answers in class. He started asking me, before he wrote anything down, whether it was “right.” He asked me once if he was the best at math, and when I said I didn’t know, he looked genuinely unsettled, like I’d refused to tell him the time.
Here’s what we changed at home. None of it is dramatic.
First, the car ride home. For the first ten minutes after pickup, we don’t talk about school. Not as a rule I announced, just something I started doing. I ask about the dog two floors down, or the smell in the stairwell, or whether the bubble tea place was busy. He talks. Then, usually, without being asked, he tells me something about his day anyway. The difference is that it comes out sideways, as a story, not as a report.
Second, an hour of nothing. Not a class. Not a sport. Not “enrichment.” He digs in the dirt behind the building with a plastic spoon and a broken chopstick. Some days he just lies on the floor with his legs up the wall. It took me a while to stop feeling like I was wasting his potential. The hour is the point.
Third, dinner questions with no correct answer. Not “how was school.” Something like, “What was the loudest thing you heard today?” or “If the elevator could talk, what would it complain about?” He answers. Sometimes he doesn’t. Either is fine.
Fourth, I stopped asking about scores. Not forever — I still look at the tests. But for a few weeks I asked instead what he thought was tricky, and the first time I did that, he stared at me suspiciously, waiting for the trap. Then he explained a subtraction problem where he’d gotten confused about borrowing. He talked for four minutes. He never talks for four minutes about a score.
Fifth, and this one mattered more than I expected: I let him be slow. His Chinese characters are neat but they take forever. His homework ran past nine o’clock some nights. I told his teacher I’d rather he finish three lines carefully than ten sloppily, and she said okay. That was it. I’d braced for an argument that never came. I’ve started to wonder how many of the rules I’m afraid of are actually just habits.
At school, I’ve seen teachers do small things that help. One lets the class write in journals on Friday without correcting anything on the first pass — she reads them, then hands them back, and only fixes spelling the following week. Another starts the day with a question that has no wrong answer, written on the board, and lets kids call out whatever they want. It takes four minutes. The room changes.
I want to be honest about what this doesn’t fix. He still cried over homework last month. He still asks whether he’s the best. Some weeks we just get through it, and I hand him a snack and we watch something dumb on the couch. I’m writing this with a laptop on my knees while he’s at the after-school program, because I work and someone has to watch him between four and six, and that program is more worksheets. I know the irony. Plenty of families here can’t do any of this — the schedule is what it is, and the grandparents help, and everyone is doing their best with the hours they have.
The system isn’t evil. It was built to move a lot of people through a small number of doors, and it does that efficiently. The cost is harder to see, because it doesn’t look like damage. It looks like a tidy drawing of a tree.
He drew another tree last week. Purple, again. The trunk goes off the edge of the page and the branches are mostly scribbles. He didn’t show it to his teacher. He showed it to me at the kitchen table while the rice cooker clicked off.
I don’t know yet whether that’s enough. But it’s something I can see, and I’m keeping it.
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