Mexican School Education ?

I can see why you'd be proud of her, Steve, that's excellent work! I don't know much about the education afforded to little ones, here, I just see the university end of things, and I understand that K-12 education was almost nonexistent in Cancun, if you go back far enough, which could partially explain what I see at the university level.
_____________________

The university students in my classes who seem to be performing "normally" are the exceptional students in the class, and represent no more than about 20% of the total, if I'm generous.

All of those who do well, and perform at the top of their class, are products of private preparatory schools in Cancun, and had parents who put value on education and who, more often than not, assisted them with their homework when they were young, instilling the notion that education, and the processes that getting an education required, were important. (I know, because this is one of the subjects that I research with my students' help.)

These best students would probably be no better than average at university- in the states, for example. Their teachers simply didn't know enough about the subject matter they teach, in some cases. For example, in my class of International Business students, only two knew that the function of an import letter of credit was to guarantee payment. (That happens to be what we're studying, at the moment.) The best of my students, and she is almost 2X better than the next nearest, was educated in private schools in Mexico City, and UNAM, before her family moved to Cancun: she came with them. She doesn't study in my classes, she assists me in teaching them.

I would say buy your daughter the best education you can, even if it means studying abroad, or at another Mexican institution that is known to produce superior outcomes, if a time ever comes when you begin to suspect she could be getting more out of her education than she is in Cancun.
____________________

In my work I've encountered Mexican professionals the equal of those anywhere: most of them are graduates of Mexican universities with well deserved reputations for excellence, who have then done postgrad studies abroad: they have combined an opportunity to learn with motivation to excel at whatever they do- an unbeatable combination.

 

In speaking with friends with kids in Canada and the US, it seems our little ones are more advanced in a few things here. Max just turned five and is doing just about all the things that Dani is, starting to read in Spanish (harder for him in English, those darned vowels have so many sounds, Spanish is much easier to read), writing, doing addition and subtraction, telling time, knows all his shapes/colours/etc in English, Spanish and French. He gets computer classes and is quite proficient, able to identify all the parts of a computer and navigate through webpages. (Yesterday he told me he needed to update his Facebook but he thinks Twitter is stupid).

They do push in the schools and there is LOTS of homework. Too much really for this age. On one hand I am really happy with the quality of the academics, on the other there are days where I wish he could just be a kid who doesn't have to write five pages of words everyday or do 2 hours of homework. Max has exams every month (last week he received "excellent" on all his exams, math, English, Spanish, French and Culture). We're proud of him and certainly feel like he is getting a good education. They do "projects", for example he's done a model of the solar system, a presentation on Benito Juarez and a big presentation on marine animals. These projects are often more work for mommy and daddy, but he does learn a lot and remembers everything they cover!

We have been seeing a child psychologist (long story) and she went for a meeting with Max's school last week. She feels that there is too much homework and too much pressure on kids in kindergarten but acknowledges that the academic level is high. Pushing kids to "work, work, work!" can cause them to resent school, even the brightest kids need to "play, play, play". Max "acts up" when pushed, he's quite capable of the work but sometimes he just doesn't want to sit down and do it. (He's improving though, or so they tell us).

I think the level of academics in kinder and primary are good here, there are many options for good education. Some people theorize that because many children don't make it past the primary level (economics don't allow everyone to continue) that they pack in a huge amount of education in those first few years. I don't know much about the high school levels, but I hope by the time Max is ready that advancements have been made. We've got a few years yet.

You should be very proud of Dani Steve, that's a great piece of work she has there!

 

I don't know anything about elementary or middle school levels.

My fiance worked as a prefect at a public high school for a semester. Even when most of the kids failed the semester in certain classes, the administration would push the teachers to give them more final exams until they passed. This doesn't seem like a good idea to me at all, since the kids should learn that they need to do the work if they want to move forward.

I did four years studying tourism administration at La Salle University here in Cancun (probably one of the better universities... it's private). Nearly all my professors had very good jobs in their field. The information given to us was great, and we had to do 6 internships throughout the four years. I probably learned more at my internships than in class. I feel like I got a really great education.

I will say that my classmates were very different than what I experienced in the States (even in public high school). They wouldn't shut up for four years. Most of them failed exams frequently. Many didn't care about homework or projects. When somebody had a spelling/grammar question (for the Spanish language) they would ask me. Seriously.

There were a few students who were very hard working and very well-prepared (much more so than I was), but they seemed to be the exception.

Any class that had to do with the arts or math was seen as torture for nearly all my classmates. They actually went to the administration to complain about art history class because it was a "waste of time". Most of them got Ds and Fs in math, although a few of them were brilliant in math.

Also, since most of our professors had other jobs (sometimes high-profile), there were quite a few who frequently missed class. One professor only gave us 3 classes the entire semester.

Overall, I think in the end my classmates learned a ton and most of them are doing very well at their new jobs. My guess is that being tourism students, they're more geared toward practical education than a classroom environment. They're all impressively creative and intelligent, I just thought it was a miracle that they passed math class.

 

My experience, exactly, Gringation. Without my exercising a level of control I've never had to employ before, my classes would simply descend into a big party, with no one studying anything. Normally, I deal with motivating students by offering challenging and interesting classes: that hasn't been enough, here, and it took a while for me to accept that. Now, I start quizzes at 6 PM, sharp, with time limits, to deal with tardiness; give a zero on class work from which they were absent; and practically mark everything they do, in an effort to get them moving. It works, but its a lot of extra effort for the teacher to try to compensate for their lack of effort.

I also teach postgraduate students with whom this is much less of an issue, but I find I must still exercise control, even with them, or things get just a little too "relaxed" for anything worthwhile to be accomplished.

 

My experience with education here is only with older kids, not kids Dani's age.

My daughter went to school here for two years. When she went back to the US she was two years ahead in Math. While here she had two math classes, one in English and one in Spanish. Her English math teacher was absolutely brilliant, her Spanish math teacher seemed like a dolt to me, but I know that getting math concepts drilled into her in two languages helped her learn them more deeply. It should be noted that my daughter's dad is a mathematician, so math ability is in her genes.

She got a very strong education in both US and Mexican history when she was here. And she was able to become somewhat bi-cultural, which will benefit her forever.

But with the exception of math she was maybe a little behind in other subjects when she returned to the US. And she was VERY behind socially.

My experience with the school she went to here (IAS) was that it was very linear. Subjects were separated, teachers didn't talk to each other about her, the school seemingly wasn't concerned with (or capable of being interested in) her overall development as a person. The emphasis here was on her grades, her performance, her behavior. The emphasis wasn't on the development of this whole person into someone who thinks for herself and is curious about the world. The education my daughter received here was piecemeal, it wasn't holistic. She learned subjects, she didn't really learn.

We now have her in an experiential learning program. She's building rockets in her calculus class. She's going to Nicaragua for two weeks to study Spanish. Each school year begins with a 2 week backpacking trip, this builds teamwork and gets the kids to really know each other. During the backpacking trip they have a 24 hour solo journey where each kid leaves the group and spends 24 hours alone in the wilderness, building their own shelter (no tents), cooking their own meals, etc.

Each year the kids do some kind of major social project. Once they came to Mexico and worked (illegally, haha) in an orphanage to help it build a wall and a playground. They spent a week sleeping on the floor of that orphanage, eating with the kids there. My daughter fell in love with a two year old boy there whose mother has sold him as a sex slave to buy crack, fortunately the orphanage director was able to buy the boy before he went into slavery.

Two years ago her class studied where Colorado gets its food, they studied the history of it, the future of it, the present of it, the economics of it, the social and moral issues involved in it, they went to a slaughterhouse to see a cow get slaughtered (there was lots of vomiting that day), they spent weeks working on an organic farm, they went to see how a major supermarket warehouse works.

Last year their big subject was watershed issues, they studied everything related to water in the western half of the US. They went through the history, the laws, the future, the social impacts of policies, etc. And they went and recreated part of the Lewis and Clarke expedition spending 12 days in the wilderness on the river.

This year their major field of study has been biomimicry. They've been studying the design of natural shapes. They've been learning about why airplanes stay up in the air, and how a bird's flight differs from the flight of a bee or of an airplane. They got to fly gliders as part of this year's studies. They've been designing buildings that use biomimicry and comparing them to buildings that do not. My daughter is currently saying she wants to become an engineer and build high-speed trains and/or bridges...that's this week's life plan.

All in all the school she's in now is doing a far better job of preparing her to live up to her potential than the school in Cancun was. Her present school is preparing her as a whole person. I think her time in a school in Cancun was valuable, it gave her a good grounding in math and it gave her a wider cultural perspective. But if the school she's in now is a 9 or a 10 then IAS was a 2, and that's giving IAS a lot of credit.

My personal feeling is that when kids are young you have a lot more leeway in their education. I see that schools for little ones in Cancun are rigorous, probably too rigorous. But as kids get older I think it's critical to move them toward schools that really help them develop as whole people. It's not about subjects, it's not about getting A's, it's about learning how to think for yourself, learning how to do real research, learning the scientific method. It's about learning how to learn and learning how to teach yourself what you don't know. It's about teaching kids to grow up to be curious adults who never want to stop learning.

 

V- I think Mexicans are highly intelligent... it just seems from our experience that the classroom environment isn't for them. They frequently picked up on things that I would never have even thought of. Have you had to deal with copy pasting on projects as well? It seemed every powerpoint presentation given was copy-pasted from the internet (with the links still highlighted in the texts) and nobody seemed to care!

RG - That sounds like an awesome school, even by American standards! I'm kind of jealous (except for the cow part).

 

Perhaps you meant "intelligent", as I don't think you'll find a significant difference in the intelligence of any two, sufficiently large groups of human beings.

If there are differences between the classroom behavior of people from Mexico, and those from the U.S., for example, I'd attribute it to a cultural difference.

Having adapted to the expectations of my students in terms of how much I exert control in the classroom, they have responded well, and we are getting the job done, together.

 

WOW RG!!! That is some education your daughter is getting. I went to a HS outside Philly, that is larger then most Community College campuses, and we had NONE of the great programs that Colorado seems to offer. Mind you since we were so large, it got a large amount of State money to give some programs, but Socially, it sucked and I thank god that I had cultural support from my Dad...dance and theater.
Not that it's relevant, by my bf parents were both college professors in DF, and both he and his one sister never went to college. I think that is bizarre. But he is very intelligent, both worldly and street.
Steve...congrats on raising a smart girl. I remember being 5 and taking lots of naps at school. Things have sure come a long way.

 

For some reason countries like Mexico have children that are better able to excel in their education. My parents come from Guyana in South America and were very focused on education.

When I had cousins come to Canada to visit they were always well ahead in their subjects that we are here.

Maybe it has something to do with less distractions or maybe parents take a greater interest in their children... who knows.