Central Chinese High School In America

My experience in rating this school is based on my two children attending it and my background as an award winning teacher, school administrator and board member of a language immersion school (before we moved to California). I have visited dozens of language immersion schools around the country and extensively read the research on language acquisition for second language learners.
Based on what I have seen, this is the worst language school I have ever seen and you are doing your child and your child’s ability in Chinese a disserve to send them here. It uses very poor language acquisition metholodogies and very poor teaching pedagogy.
Specifically, language acquisition research indicates that teachers need to engage primarily in the target language and expect the student to respond in the target lanugage to the extent possible. At this school, teachers mix Mandarin, Cantonese and English, sometime in the same sentence. This confuses kids, decreases student ability to learn the target language and also decreases the perceived need by students for learning the target language if they are constantly hearing a non-​target language they do know and get what they need to understand from hearing that.
In terms of teaching pedagogy, this school primarily uses a didactic style of teaching in which the teacher stands at the front and all focus is on the teacher with the teacher talking and students repeating or teachers calling on students and students responding to the teacher. Aside from breaks, students sit in their chair for three hours at a time doing these teacher centered activities. Just think — even if you don’t have a deep understanding of teacher pedagogy, does that sound like the best way to learn to you?
Our kids learned to hate learning Chinese by going to this school and their ability in spoken and written Chinese regressed because they didn’t understand and didn’t like it. We spoke to the Director of the school about having teachers not speak Cantonese and the Director basically explained that there were families who spoke Cantonese at home and the kids benefited from hearing Mandarin and Cantonese. Thankfully, we left the school and have found another optionn for our children to learn Chinese that is much, much better. If you are reading this, please do not harm your children’s ability to like and learn Chinese by enrolling them in this school.

I attended way back in the 1960s and graduated from 9^th grade. Looking back now, it was fun and I did learn some chinese. My sibling and I would walk from our house by the Broadway Tunnel to school everyday after regular school. The best part was the «assembly» in the auditorium and the «recess» period. Great time to hang out with classmates. I wish I kept in touch with everyone. It brings back memory each time I walk pass the school. I just did this weekend.

Ha oh wow… didn’t expect to find a listing for my chinese school.
aaahhh the good ol’ chinese school days when i used to ditch class during break time, walk over to downtown and kill a couple hours shopping for lip gloss.
those days are long gone and i’m so thankful for that. the kids at the school are rowdy and are all probably forced into chinese school. the teachers are stressed because of the kids.
everyone cheats. chinese school is a joke to most kids. i’m glad i took it seriously (on the days i actually stayed) because i’m thankful to know a second language. u get paid more and it’s a good skill to have.
before the renovation, this school was a hell hole. like a literal hell hole. the building was soo old and gross, the bathroom was disgusting — a hole in the ground was probably better.
haven’t been here in yeeeears so iono how it looks inside.