在英國，沒有一個老師敢隨隨便便帶自閉症兒童出遠門
An eight-year-old boy, reportedly on the autism spectrum, went missing on a summer camp climb in Yunnan; by the second day more than three hundred people, two search dogs, four drones and five thermal imagers were looking for him. Dr Zhihao Yan's first reaction was that after months in an English state school's autism provision he would not have accepted that job. He describes what the provision actually looks like: classes of no more than eight, a specialist teacher and four assistants, door handles mounted out of reach, safety scissors, craft materials chosen to be edible. Even there a boy under one-to-one supervision swallowed something and was taken to hospital. Residential trips in England normally start around Year 5, and for autistic children often not at all. He is blunt about the camp organisers' belief that autism is caused by absent fathers and cured by more male staff.
教師出海記：不去公辦學校，你永遠不知道英國的課堂有多難
"Miss Liz is off tomorrow." "Oh, then they'll definitely kick off." Dr Zhihao Yan, with eight years of international-school teaching behind him, took a London state primary class alone for a full day — 8:30 to 3:15, English through maths to art and computing, no other adult in the room, about a quarter of the class with special educational needs. He spends more than half his energy on behaviour. A boy goes to the toilet three times, then reappears in a comic hat; a second child starts crying and the first announces to the class that the teacher made him cry. The next morning the class teacher explains the invisible architecture she runs the room on: never correct that boy, never make him the focus, never let him sit beside another child who needs support, and seven pupils who must be kept apart. Twenty-seven children, seven of them with additional needs.
警惕教育中的偏見：什麼樣的老師還在教室裡製造刻板印象
The last week of Dr Zhihao Yan's first placement carried no teaching target, only a TED talk to watch and write up: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie on the danger of a single story. He takes her point past the obvious one. Adichie was not only the object of a single story — an American roommate pitying her for Africa, asking about her tribal music, receiving a Mariah Carey tape — she was also its author, knowing Mexico only through coverage of drugs and migration. He applies that to teachers, who shape how children see themselves and each other, sometimes more than families do, and then to his own upbringing in Chaoshan and the assumptions about gender and household roles he had to examine. The rest is what an English state primary does about it: Black History Month across subjects, shared reading chosen for who appears in it, and picture books with animal protagonists for the youngest.
特殊教育在英國：公辦學校能為特殊孩子兜底嗎
A boy runs into a phonics lesson, punches a classmate and starts hammering on the visitor's laptop. He cannot tolerate noise or bright light, and he is in a mainstream Year 1 class, because England places children in inclusive settings rather than separating them. Dr Zhihao Yan spends a placement week with the school's SEND coordinator, one of the busiest people on the staff: 40 children on her list out of about 300, eight of whom cannot work independently at all. He follows the harder part of her job — the families. Parents often refuse the label first; in some households the father blames the mother. Even with a diagnosis, special-school places are scarce and the assessment can take twenty weeks. He asks whether parent volunteers could fill the gap. She says no, and explains why.
看學習障礙門診不是新鮮事，難的是教師該不該區別對待
A learning-difficulties clinic at a Shanghai children's hospital drew a wave of comment from parents hoping a prescription might fix a bad report. Dr Zhihao Yan points out that such diagnoses are routine in Britain — and that the British worry runs the other way. There, the fear is that a label licenses a teacher to expect less. He reports from an East London primary where a class of thirty may include two or three pupils who cannot follow the lesson and one teaching assistant to support them, and from a classmate placed in a class with eight; a teacher cannot designate a child as having special needs, only a doctor can, and the application for more support can take two years. He then takes apart learning-styles theory, which he argues turned respect for difference into a licence to lower the bar.