WE ARE FAMOUS!!! (In China)

http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/cndy/2009-08/19/content_8585894.htm

Heading Home!

We are off to the airport in an hour! We are definitely excited to go home, but will really miss this incredible country. We have been so fortunate to meet such wonderful people while traveling. They have taught us so much about their culture and their education system. We are excited to go home, get some good rest and then process this entire trip and see how we can implement what we have learned into our classrooms.

And thanks for reading our blog!

Normal School #2

We had the honor today of meeting with an English teacher and Mr. Li, the retired headmaster of Normal School #2 in Beijing, the Middle School attached to the most famous teachers college in the country. They showed us around their beautiful, modern campus (which included an observatory and an Olympic pool!) Mr. Li was the principal of Normal School #2 when Yutong, Ellie's family's

Chinese exchange student from when she was four, attended the school
in the early 80's. The school has a partnership with The Sidwell
Friends School in Washington DC, which Ellie and her sisters attended
and where her mother taught. Yutong lived with the Terry family for a year, and
met Mr. Li twenty-two years ago. It was really special to reconnect
on his campus and for him to show us the tree that was donated by Sidwell
Friends. Yesterday, we spent the morning with Yutong's parents and
her English-speaking cousin and neighbor, everyone gushed over the
prestige of Normal School #2!!

When we asked the English teacher, Linda, one of our standard
questions, which was "How did you become a teacher?" she looked at us
and we knew we were about to hear a long complicated story. When she was 10, her
parents were sent to "camp" during the Cultural Revolution because
they were intellectuals. So we asked what she did when
they were sent away and she said she lived by herself (and her pet
chicken). She happened to befriend an English teacher and by the time
she was 17, she was teaching English to 1st graders. She eventually
went to college and became an English teacher to high schoolers, which

is what she has been for the past 30 some-odd years. Twenty years
ago, she spent a year as a public high school Chinese language teacher
in Olympia, Washington and has since created a teacher exchange
program there! As we have found with most teachers, she is energetic,

thoughtful, reflective and loves what she does. This school seems to
have a lot of the same amenities as a strong private high school in

the U.S. Students seem to be encouraged to express themselves
creatively through the arts and projects - - and Linda explained that
this school is much more progressive about their instruction -- moving
away from rote memorization and towards discussion and
discovery-based learning.

Ariel, Ellie's friend from Wesleyan, accompanied us on the tour. She
is working as a journalist for China Daily -- an English language
newspaper in Beijing. So look out for an article about us on
newstands across China!

The Most Positive Break-Up in History!

So our booking secretary (a.k.a. ourselves) made a mistake and double-booked us Tuesday night. At 11 am we realized that we had two dinner meetings, one with a teacher who has been teaching in Beijing for 30 years with her old student and his friend, and the other meeting with a graduate student at the University of Geo-sciences and his friend, who was an undergraduate math major.

We decided the only solution was to divide... and research!

Ellie's report: I braved the subway on her own and traveled to the University area of Beijing. I met up with Pengliang, a twenty -four year old graduate student who was also in charge of student affairs and his friend, Songpu, who is a nineteen year old Math major. They took me for a tour of a campus, showing me the outside of the teachers' dorms and then the much nicer student dorms -- and then to a traditional Chinese restaurant where I tried everything! Pengliang is a friend of Isabelle's, the woman who runs the English language program in the rural village of Fengyang that we visited. The three of us spoke about the Chinese education system, Math, College, the one child policy, and the Olympics.

Pengliang grew up in a small village in the northeast of China, and has always been very driven to go to college and be successful. At some point, he realized that his life had been all study-study-study, and he had not "interacted with society" enough. He translated an old Chinese saying, "If you walk 1,000 miles, it is much better than reading 1,000 books." He then began working for a gap year organization on the weekends, where he helped British students explore China during their gap years. Now, as a grad student, he works as a dean for first year undergraduates, where he counse -ls students who are having a hard transition. I thought I would get the juicy dirt on Chinese college students- but quickly found out that -- in his opinion -- a hard transition meant that the 18 year old Freshmen were spending too much time playing video games at the Internet cafe and not enough time on their studies. Both young men were serious about school. Pengliang explained that his parents were farmers and they wanted him to have a different life -- one where he worked in an office and wasn't physically exhausted at the end of the day, one where he made more money and was able to better support his family. Songpu, who went to the Middle school that is on the same street as our hotel, explained that Chinese children have one task -- to study. "As a math major," he said, "my life is study, study, study. I study and go to bed at midnight, then I wake up at 5 and study." He said it was the same for his roommates. When I asked about the future of Education in China, they said they were optimistic that it was improving in a way that teachers were becoming better trained and more educated because now it is more common for people to go to university. Most of Pengliang's teachers had not gone to college, but now the teachers at that school have gone to teachers' college. The boys also spoke of Barack Obama with high esteem, but made a good observation- "Obama speaks about how far America has come in 100 years. What about China? We've been progressing for thousands!"

Aneal's report: I went to have traditional Beijing Snacks with Chris (the teacher) and her old student Will and his friend Annabel. Who knew that traditional Beijing Snacks include cow stomach? (Ellie really missed out on that one!) We had an amazing conversation about the education system in China. Everyone agreed that the Chinese education model was incredible to a certain extent, but lacks in helping students develop a sense of creativity. Their fundamentals are rock-solid, but everyone said that students have a hard time solving problems that are practical because many of them are solving problems without really knowing why they are solving them the way they are solving them. I told them that my students lack a lot in terms of basic skills, but not in terms of creativity. We decided that if we could some how merge the intense cultural expectation and non-stop practice of the Chinese education system with the creativity and discovery model of the American education system that we would have some really incredible thinkers and problem solvers in this world. Now we just need to figure out how to do that....

"Cable car up, Toboggan Down!"

Sounds like the trip plan at a amusement park, right?

How about the Great Wall of China?!

When deciding which section of the Great Wall to go to, we made the decision based on one thing -- a toboggan ride.

Welcome to China in the 21st Century. Things have become so touristy that you can go on a super fun ride, even when you are at one of the 8 wonders of the world.

It was really incredible being here. It is something that we have seen pictures of our whole lives, and to actually stand on the Great Wall of China was pretty spectacular. We had a hard time walking up and down the stairs (after we took the cable car up the mountain) so to imagine the construction of the wall is mind-boggling.

Xi'an Adventures

We just arrived in Beijing after a wonderful visit in Xi'an. We were able to visit the Terracotta Warriors and the ruins of a local matriarchal village before meeting with Emily and Frank, our contacts in Xi'an. Emily is in school to become a teacher and Frank helps run a program that gets foreign teachers to China to speak English. We had another fascinating conversation with them about why the math education in China is so different than in the US.

But first.... The Terracotta Warriors

This was totally insane! Some crazy little kid back in the day who happened to be the emperor of China decided that for his death he wanted life-sized clay soldiers to protect him in his afterlife (or while he still continued to rule from the dead). He also invited the jesters, the servants, the cooks and the concubines (only if they were constructed of clay). Each soldier (there are 6,000 in one section) has distinctive facial features, some are skinny and some have beer-bellies.

We also learned that going to one of the wonders of the world in China on a Saturday is a pretty bad idea if you want to maintain any piece of your sanity. We were mauled over by old Chinese women countless times. But braving the strong 80 year-old ladies was worth it. So much of the museum makes your jaw drop, especially when you see things like the detail in the bottom of some soldier's shoe and then remember that they were all buried for centuries!

We have been talking about how we can make a math unit based on the Terracotta Warriors. Some ideas include having kids "construct" a shrine for themselves. They would have to figure out the cost of materials, the area they would need to create their shrine, the cost of employment and the amount of time they would need to make it. We hope to collaborate with a Social Studies teacher to create this project.

Back to our conversation about math... we met up with Frank Liu, a friend of Autumn's, a tour guide we had met in Guilin. Frank works for the Bruckland Group, an organization that trains foreign English language teachers in the cities of Guilin and Xi'an and then places them in rural schools. He brought us presents of Chinese math textbooks and invited us both to return to China as English language teachers -- next summer?!?

Frank brought Emily, a young math teacher in training at one of the many universities in Xi'an. She spoke to us about her training in the Xi'an primary schools and her plans of having her own classroom soon. We looked through the textbooks together, admiring their simplicity in comparison to our huge, hard-covered, glossy, and unnecessarily distracting American textbooks.

We asked Emily what kid of teacher she hopes to be -- "strict, of course" she responded. In many of our conversations about math education on this trip, the people we have spoken with have highlighted the intense nature of education in this country -- using adjectives such as "shame," "strict," and "pressure." Emily comes from a family of four, a large family by Chinese standards, and explained that she is one of 2 children who have gone on to college away from her small rural village. For her parents, going to college was not possible -- so it is a big deal for her family and community that she is going to become a teacher in the city.

When we asked Emily where most of the pressure comes from, she said "the mother, definitely." I (Ellie) was able to connect to that fact after many parent-teacher conferences where the Chinese mother asked their child, whose head was usually down, "Why do you have a 93% and not higher?" We spoke about the focus on education in the Chinese household -- how most children do not have household responsibilities such as cleaning or looking after their younger siblings -- their responsibility is their studies. I feel that I understand my Chinese-American students and the pressure they are under better after this trip.

We also asked her about something that we had been very curious about the entire trip -- the potty training rituals! Children under the age of two wear pants that have no inside seam -- it works as a slit. As tiny babies, the mothers use napkins to cover their bums -- and as the baby grows and the mothers learn their children's body rhythms, they know when the baby has to go to the bathroom. The mothers whistle when they know their baby has to expel and they then set the baby on the ground (very Pavlov) -- sometimes at the side of the street or on top of some spread-out newspaper. In short, there are no diapers. Babies' bums are viewable and there is much less plastic waste in the world. We saw this as very symbolic of the Chinese culture -- the children rise to the expectations of their parents. In America, children often wear diapers and pull-ups way past their third birthdays -- parents would hear about this Chinese practice and think -- my kid could never do that. The same goes, we believe, for math. Children are capable of a lot more than we give them credit for -- they are teachable and ready to learn. These babies are happier not walking around with a soggy diaper, just as the teenagers do their math homework without complaining and are able to tackle American college-level mathematical concepts at an earlier age.

Holding Baby Pandas in Chengdu

(7/23)

We don't think we need to say any more. Look at the pictures!