SOAR Newsletter
Issue-Feb-04
Volume 8, Issue
Important! _ Please Attend
SOAR's annual membership meeting on Sunday,
March 7,
All members will receive a
separate notice listing the names of nominees for the 2004 Board of Trustees,
as well as a proxy form for those who can't make it to the meeting. Please
return the proxy card in the event that you are unable to attend, as
20% of the voting power is needed to constitute a quorum. Thank you for
your support!
From the President
Dear Supporters:
As the year of the Lamb, a symbol of
stability and peace, turns into the year of the Monkey, a symbol of energy and
vibrancy, let me and the entire Board of Directors wish you all a happy and
prosperous New Year. And the same wish goes to SOAR as well!
To properly expend the funds you
have entrusted us, we would like to be able to accept more new students by
increasing the percentage of new awards or by taking in more applications,
instead of merely sitting on our reserves and watching them grow. However,
there are two problems. First, we are committed to students for their entire
secondary education, plus a one-time grant if they can be admitted into a
qualified college or university. Therefore, we need to make a careful
expenditure projection and take that into consideration. Second, more students
means we need more manpower to help handle the increased workload. Currently,
due to a lack of stable volunteers and available mentors, fewer than half of
our students have personal mentors. Won't you please consider becoming a
volunteer or mentor to a SOAR student?
As my two-year presidential term
comes to an end, before I step down at the conclusion of this year's March 7
General Meeting (see announcement in this newsletter — I encourage you to
participate even if you are not a member), I'd like to extend my gratitude to
members of the board for helping me understand SOAR's
operations, for carrying out the duties required of them to further the
interest of this meaningful organization, and for participating in numerous
board meetings where important decisions are made. I thank all committee
chairs, members, and volunteers for their daily painstaking work of handling so
many students, donors and mentors, with special thanks to MeiChi
Hua for her largely under-appreciated efforts in
designing, improvising, and instituting the many frustrating changes our
database users unknowingly demanded. And of course, I thank all of you, donors,
for your generous contributions, without which all our efforts would have been
stalled.
Although SOAR has accomplished a
lot, there are still areas that challenge us ahead: SOAR's
current structure is such that most board members are doubling as unpaid
working staff for SOAR. Many of us are retired or semi-retired because it takes
an enormous amount of time to get all the work done. It is difficult as it is
to find enough people with different areas of expertise to do the voluntary
work, let alone find a separate group of board trustees to function as
overseers. All of us currently on board are dedicated and well-qualified;
nevertheless, a varied board can be an added asset both in terms of reaching
out to the community and giving advice to the staff who carry out SOAR's internal day-to-day operations. I sincerely hope
that more of you can join us, especially those with corporate experience and
fund-raising skills. Otherwise, SOAR would have to remain as it is. Hopefully,
every time someone finds it necessary to retire from SOAR, a good replacement
can be found who can take over his or her work and carry on SOAR's
tradition of excellence.
— Albert Hu
Teacher Training: A
Fact-Finding Trip Report
(Note: Due to the SARS crisis
last year, SOAR did not have its annual October
8/29 p.m. Arriving in
80% of
8/30: I hook up with our
8/31: Meeting us at the rail station is
teacher Wu Yu Zhi, age 65, a seven-year SOAR
Nominator and one of the lecturers for the teacher training program. Deeply
involved with SOAR students, Teacher Wu has a student, Peng
Xiao Yong, who has been accepted by
Beating the intense 40°C heat,
we arrive at Huaihua's Teachers'
These 50 select teachers come
from 14 different junior high schools. 19 teach language, 17 math,
14 English. The youngest is 24 years of age, the oldest, 39.
All are college graduates in their own specialty fields, then assigned to their
respective villages to teach.
We open the discussion with
general topics:
A) Teachers feel pressure coming
from both parents and the school administration. A teacher's passing student
rate directly affects his or her cumulative score rating by administration.
Parents hand students over entirely to teachers, but can't work hand-in-hand
with teachers to educate students. Teachers, as a result, place their focus on
the passing rate. This is a natural phenomenon, a harsh reality that must be
reckoned with.
B) Schools should include music,
art, P.E. for a balanced curriculum to relieve some of the stress associated
with passing grades, but each school is struggling just to make ends meet.
There are no available funds to buy musical instruments or P.E. equipment. Art
and music faculty coming to teach in the village is virtually unheard of.
Students do have a weekly P.E. class, sometimes converted to self-study free
time. A few schools have an art interest class where students learn Chinese
painting and calligraphy.
C) Shouldn't students who are
unlikely to pass university entrance exams be counseled into entering
vocational schools to learn a usable trade? Every parent wants his or her child
to rise to the top, and will not give up trying. Even if the child fails to get
in a senior high, the parent would still rather the child not remain in the
village to do farming. Instead, the child is sent to work in a
As far as the training program's
perceived benefits, participants acquired the following new
perspectives on teaching:
(1) Dealing with deficient
students (both in conduct and academics): Due to academic pressures, teachers'
energies are focused on the 12% high-achieving students. How should
deficient, sometimes disruptive, students be dealt with? Formerly an
overlooked topic, youth psychology became a focal subject of interest during
this teacher training session.
(2) Capitalizing on students'
strengths: Shouldn't school design vocational classes for deficient students?
Most teachers feel this is fine in theory, but totally impractical. Vocational
high schools have the toughest time attracting students, and the typical high
school has no money to incorporate vocational classes into their curriculum.
(3) Method of instruction: Instead
of simply lecturing and expecting students to be passive listeners, strengthen
interaction with students through active give-and-take, collaboration, and
exploration. This teaching style stimulates their intellect, and allows them to
become lively and vocal participants.
These 50 teachers spent over 10
hours to get to Huaihua from the mountains of
I feel deeply their thirst for
teaching methodology. Teacher training is an indispensable component in our
endeavor to satisfy these village teachers' craving to learn.
Afterword
In big cities like
Public schools have sprung up
all over, willing to invest what it takes to attract high calibre
teachers.
Educational institutions have
also reaped the economic benefits of
I hope we can tailor our
teaching training program more to their needs.
I hope Baojing
can set up an audiovisual teaching learning center, and that
I hope to garner overseas
support to build dormitories for village teachers. The classrooms they now live
in, built in the 60's, have already been designated unfit and unsafe to live
in.
These simple, noble village
teachers deserve all our care and attention!
— Siu
Fong Huang
Special Projects Committee
The 50 select
This year, we have chosen 30 of
these 50 outstanding teachers to attend the Information Technology in Education
Conference, to be held in
Finally, the decision to select
conference participants from last year's attendees is based on continuity
considerations _ to make this opportunity their second year follow-up training,
and also to provide us with a better means of assessing the merits of this
relatively new SOAR program.
— Siu
Fong Huang
Program Committee
940 application packets for 2004 new
student scholarships were mailed to 63 nominators in
84 SOAR students got accepted
into colleges and universities in 2003. To each of them, SOAR awards a one-time
"entrance subsidy" grant. The chart on page 4 shows the gender and
geographic distribution of the 1458 scholarship awardees in 2003.
Our challenge for many years has
been to make sure that all our awardees not only receive our scholarship funds,
but receive them on time. Last year, we initiated a new system of direct
deposit: if a student's local post office provides savings account service, we
ask that the student's personal ID copy be mailed sto
our Jiangsu liaison office, who then opens a postal
account for the approved student and forwards the savings passbook and receipt
form to the student by registered mail. Upon receipt, the student notifies us,
and we deposit the scholarship money with 0.5 % more to pay for handling, plus
RMB $1, which is left in the savings account to keep it active for the
following year. In 2003, 1062 awardees had postal accounts and only 110 had to
use the old mailing method.
We regret to report that our
most valuable volunteer,
Since approximately 10% of our
students lose contact with us each year, or respond to us really late, tracking
them becomes a nightmare to our office volunteers. In response to pressure from
our treasured Mentors and/or Supporters, this month we are mailing three
separate letters — one to the student's parent at home, one to her teacher in
school, and the third to her original Nominator — to find out why we haven't
received the student's application form; or why we are unable to reach her
(mailed scholarship to her two to three times); or why the money was withdrawn
yet no acknowledgement of receipt form was mailed back to us; or why the
student neglected to provide evidence of registration upon notifying us that
she has been admitted into college / high school, etc. Besides helping the
student financially, we believe that responsible handling and management of her
own scholarship money will train and help the student deal with everyday
affairs later on in her life.
— Ben Tze
Volunteers:
SOAR's
Lifeblood
Having been a SOAR volunteer myself, I
constantly run into people who are interested in finding out what type of work
SOAR volunteers perform, and how much time they put in. Speaking from my own
experience, volunteers at SOAR's Union City
headquarters perform such assorted tasks as: answering and returning phone
calls; filing papers; sorting incoming mail and correspondences; duplicating
forms and documents using the office copier; taking down and relaying phone and
email messages received in the office; retrieving information from office
computers in response to sponsors and mentors; typing; assisting with bulk
mailing — collating, folding inserts, stuffing envelopes, etc.
Volunteers donate as much or as
little time as their schedules permit, and SOAR has volunteers staffed every
business hour, Monday through Friday. And you know what? These individuals are
really SOAR's lifeblood, for they are the ones
who help promote SOAR's good public relations and
image. Without them, SOAR would not be what it is today.
Wanna hear a true story?
Once there was this patron who was
both sponsor and mentor for a SOAR student. He had sent the student a letter,
but had received no reply. Following the suggestion of a friend, he got on the
phone, called the SOAR office, and was told that, unfortunately, the current
status of this student, in particular, whether or not he received a SOAR
scholarship, could not be confirmed. Hearing this, the sponsor got really
perturbed! He decided to head straight to the office to give the staff there a
hard time for not keeping information up-to-date.
When he got there, to his
surprise, what did he find but this poor man working all by himself on his
desk, immersed in piles of paperwork. Instead of
making the sponsor feel guilty for depriving him of precious work time, this
man, who introduced himself as Ben Tze, dropped
everything he was doing to accommodate the sponsor. From the records, it looked
like SOAR too, had been unsuccessful in establishing contact with the student,
either because he moved and did not bother to inform SOAR of his new address,
or chose not to let on his whereabouts for one unknown reason or another.
Seeing with his own eyes how
short this office is of manpower, the sponsor felt a tingling of sympathy and
remorse, and he wondered if there was something he could do to help. Sensing
this, Ben asked the sponsor if he would be willing to work with him as a
volunteer. After a little arm-twisting, the sponsor agreed. He started out by
contributing his services one day a week. Gradually, the sponsor found himself
getting more and more deeply involved helping other mentors and sponsors with
their problems. He now wonders whose arms he is going to have to twist next ...
I know for a fact that every
event in this story took place, because that sponsor was I.
— John Wu
