Wuhan English Class

This is a picture of a 1st grade teacher teaching English (yes they start in 1st grade and it is incredibly effective).  This particular teacher is considered the best primary English teacher in Wuhan and after sitting through her entire class, I would have to believe that she is.  She is an absolute dynamo who kept, get this, 48 1st grade students ACTIVELY engaged in the lesson for 45 minutes!  The students were learning to say, "Mama, what's for breakfast, I'm hungry for milk and corn flakes/orange juice/ a roll/ ham/toast and jam/etc."  The entire class was conducted in English at first grade! It was very impressive.  The primary classes are organized just like our MS abd HS, the students change classes every 45 min. And the teachers specialize in a subject area.  I have heard/read many times that this is not possible or advisable at the early grades, well China obviously hasn't heard that and it works very well for them.

Wuhan Badminton School

This is a picture at what they call a primary school, which is grades 1-6.  This is a unique primary school in that it specializes in teaching the students how to play, get this, badminton!  Yes, the students are sent here because their parents want them to learn badminton from amateur and professional badminton players who are their badminton instructions.  The students spend 1.5 hours per day learning badminton.  In this picture, the students are all out in the activity area in front of the school doing their morning exercises in unison led by two of their students who have proven to be the best at it.  Before they went out, all of the students had to do a 5 minute eye massage ritual to protect their vision which is strained from all of the required reading.  What is interesting is that I haven't met anyone who thinks it is useful.

Wuhan MS #26

This a picture of Mr. Zhu's Wuhan MS #26 where I spent the day on Monday.  I was very impressed with the administrators, teachers and students.  The staff is very professional and curious about America, and contrary to the media portrayal that America is universally despised, the Chinese demonstrate and verbalize a very deep and genuine appreciation and respect for America and Americans.  Now we just need to disabuse them of the Hollywood image of America, which is all many of them know about us.  I'm working on it but I probably won't get to all 1.3 billion of them by Sunday! 

Wuhan

I arrived in Wuhan on Saturday evening, April 17.  It is a large, bustling city of 9 million people.  It is the stereotypical large Chinese city you tend to have a picture of in your mind.  There are modern high-rise buildings right beside buildings that are being torn down by hand with sledge hammers.  There are a million little shops, and I don't mean places where you go shopping, but little holes in the wall where there is constant activity but it is impossible to tell what anyone is really doing or trying to accomplish.  The city is continuously shrouded in either fog or smog or both, and I don't think there is a light bulb anywhere with more than 25 watts, which with the sm(f)og creates this very dingy atmosphere.  Finally, their traffic is absolute chaos; there are no rules and no traffic lights, they don't believe in them.  They pull out into oncoming traffic to force them to stop so they can't get to the other side of the rode.  Pedestrians have no right of way; might makes right!  There has to be a lot of people killed here by being run over - It's crazy, and the horn is the most frequently used part on the vehicle, even though blowing the horn has been outlawed!   

Having given that description, there are several beautiful landmarks and some places of incredible natural beauty.  I can't share any pictures with you yet because I have no internet access via the computer; I am typing this email on my Blackberry for Wes Weaver to post.  I won't have internet again until Friday when I go to Shanghai.

I spent all day yesterday in Mr. Zhu's school and what a great experience that was!  They told us that we would be treated like rock stars in the schools by botht the teachers and students and that is exactly how it was.  The first thing we did was the flag-raising ceremony, after which Mr. Zhu and then I addressed the 3000 students and staff.  Following the welcome and speeches, I had a meeting with all of the school administrators and Communist Party officials, who select the principals, and they had many, many questions for me about how our schools are structured and operated.  The students, teachers, principals and party officials have many misperceptions about American education and America in general.  They see American movies and TV shows and think that is reality.  I enjoyed debunking the myths, which is one of the main reasons for this exchange program.  Everyone was very welcoming and genuinely excited for my visit, the hospitality is first class!  I'll post more when I can.

Great Wall

Today, Friday, April 16, we visited the one and only Great Wall.  Like many of you, I have been reading about and seeing pictures of this monument to human achievement since my early days of elementary school and honestly never expected to actually see it and touch it and walk on it; but I did, today!  It is a surreal experience.  I am not going to tell you the history of the Wall, that is well documented by much smarter people than me, so I am just going to share some pictures with you from my 3 hours on the Wall.

Believe it or not, and I did not know this until we got to the Great Wall, but you take a cable car up to the wall because the hike up would take several hours and by the time you got there, you would be too exhausted to walk the Wall.  This is a short video of our ride up on the cable car.

Dave

Flat Stinger at the Great Wall!

Videos - Great Wall and Chinese school

Chinese Education

In one day, Wednesday, April 14, we saw the best and worst of Chinese education. In the morning, we went to the Beijing National Day School (BNDS), named for the day in 1952 when it was officially opened. The BNDS is the best of the best in Chinese Schools. It educates 5,000 of the top 6% of Chinese students. It sits on a 156,000 sq. meter campus that has the best of all educational resources, including 400 teachers. In the afternoon, we went to a migrant children's school just a few miles across town. This school educates the children of migrant laborers who have migrated to China's cities to escape the abject poverty of its rural farming villages. These migrant workers have to work 15 to 18 hours per day, mostly in construction. I know they work these kinds of hours because we have witnessed them begin work at 5 am and still be on the job at 11:30 pm! Their children are educated in buildings that in the US would be condemed as completely unsafe, let alone be used for school buildings, because there isn't room for them in the regular public schools, so individuals who want to help educate them start what we would call charter schools and they receive no funding from the government so they have to make do with whatever resources they can scrape together. This migrant school building was one of the worst physical structures I have ever been in and yet there was a very high level of instruction occurring. I think the pictures tell the story of the difference between the two schools.

Flag Raising

Yesterday morning, Wednesday, April 14, we went to the famous flag raising ceremony at Tiananmen Square here in Beijing. Every morning at the exact moment of the sunrise, the military ceremoniously raises the Chinese Flag. It was an amazing display of patriotism; there were at least 10,000 people there and as we walked to the Square from our hotel, which was a 30 minute walk, many, many Chinese citizens ran past us to the square to ensure that they were there on time for this daily ritual - that was impressive!

Peasant Art

These pictures come from the Peasant Art Gallery in Xi'an. On our way out of the ancient city, we stopped at this art gallery that is filled with beautiful paintings from the regions peasants. Back in the 1950s, becasue the peasants, who were mostly uneducated, could not express themselves in writing or speech, they were encouraged to express themselves via paintings. This tradition continues today, and in fact peasant children are actually trained in this form of expression so that they can continue the tradition. The artist that you see in the one photo is one of the most successful peasant painters and he now runs the gallery. He has traveled around the world sharing the story of the peasant paintings, in fact, in conversation with him via translator I learned that he was at Ohio State University in 1993, my senior year there, presenting and teaching about the peasant artwork. I bought two of the paintings!

Beijing

This is a picture of me and my new friend and roomate Kevin Miller, Superintendent of Hicksville Exempted Village Schools (and you thought we lived in Hicksville, didn't you!) at the National Education Ministry in Beijing where we received a very interesting presentation from several National Education ministers.  It is very impressive the lengths China has gone to scour the earth for best educational models, and also impressive the efforts they have made to implement the best practices that fit their immediate needs.

I'll send more later - we are in a rush to leave for the day.

Thanks - Have a great day

 

Terra Cotta Warriors, Part 2

These are pictures of 1/2 life size bronze chariots that were found with the Terra Cotta Warriors.  The archeologists were baffled as to why there would be 4 horses pulling the chariots and when they recreated the chariots and tried to have four horses pull them, it wouldn't work because the four couldn't be coordinated to pull together, which is what they suspected would be the case.  What they discovered was that the two horses in the middle pull the chariot and the two on the outside are riding horses brought along for scouting purposes.  It is kind of like the RVs you see going down the road with a small vehicle attached to the back for the vacationers who want to be able to go sightseeing once they reach their destination, but not in the RV.  The detail on these chariots is remarkable!

World-Famous Terra Cotta Warrior Museum

These are pictures from the world famous Terra Cotta Warrior Museum.  This site is listed as a World Heritage Site by UNESCO, making it one of the most important archeological sites in the world and it is referred to as the 8th wonder of the world.  The site was discovered by a peasant digging a well in 1974.  Since that time over 7,000 life-size terra cotta warriors, horses and chariots have been painstakingly unearthed.  The site was constructed 2,000 years ago at the direction of China's first Emperor, Qin (pronounced Chin) who believed that he would live in an after-life world and wanted to make sure he had his army with him.  The peasant who discovered the first shards of the warriors is now employed at the museum where he daily autographs thousands of books that tell the story of the discovery.  He is now 80 years old and signs his name in calligraphy - I purchased and had him autograph one of the books.  TEACHERS: if you are doing social studies and have never taught your students about the terra cotta warriors, they would absolutely eat up the story!   

Dave

The highlight of our trip?

On Sunday, April 11th, we had a very special opportunity that may well end up being the highlight of this incredible journey. Our tour guide, whose American name is Richard, who has been with us during our entire stay in Xi'an is a very special man with an incredible life story. He was born a peasant about 20 miles outside Xi'an in 1950 and lived through some incredibly difficult circumstances as a result of being a peasant. He has risen well above his birth to own his own tour guide agency in Xi'an after being selected to go to the US to study the travel agency business due to his hard work as a student. When he began working with the China Exchange Initiative a few years ago, he began taking the American educators back to the village where he was born so that they could see the rural areas and the life of the peasants who stil live there. We got to visit the village school, where they held school on Sunday just so that we could meet the students and see them in their classrooms. Richard even arranged for us to eat lunch with the peasants in their homes. Richard has not forgotten from where he came. He may be the best living example I have ever experienced of the Woody Hayes adage of "Paying Forward". He buys all of the coal for the peasants to heat their homes and the school in winter; by bringing the educators here, he has started a perpetual charity for the village school in which the educators make donations to help the school buy supplies and needed educational materials for the students and the teachers; he has gotten the government to build them paved roads so that he can continue to bring the "American educators" to the village on his tour bus, etc. These pictures and videos will not do the experience justice, you have to see how these people live to even believe you are in the 21st century when you are there, but it is the only way I can share it with you, so enjoy!

Dave

This is the wonderful and delicious lunch that the peasants fixed for us; I've honestly never had better nor more Chinese food anywhere!

Dinner in Xi'an

On Saturday evening, we had dinner at a local restaurant where we had what is called a dumpling banquet.  Dumplings are dough wraped meat or vegetables that are steamed, and they are delicious, in fact they have become my favorite Chinese food.  At the banquet, they bring you about 12 courses of dumplings and each course is different.  For example, we had duck dumplings, cabbage dumplings, fish, crab, etc., etc.  I literally ate over two dozen!  After the banquet, there was a performance of an ancient musical play about the Emperor Qin and his favorite concubine.  This is a photo from that very colorful and spectacular performance.  It was a wonderful evening in Xi'an!

Xi'an Museum of History

These are middle school students that we met at the Xi'an Museum of History.  They were very excited, even giddy, to meet Americans.  They treated us like rock stars, asking us to take pictures with them individually and in small groups with their friends.  It was fun!

The first couple stops on our trip

This first picture is of our group having lunch at the Beijing Airport, which is a massive and spotlessly clean facility.  We are eating the ever-populat Chinese noodle dish.  There were seven different flavors so we ordered one of each and shared - delicious!

 This is me with Flat Stinger near the Gate Tower at the south entrance to the wall around the city of Xi'an (pronounced She-an).  When Zhu Yuanzhang, the first Emperor of the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644), captured Huizhou, a hermit named Zhu Sheng admonished him that he should 'built high walls, store abundant food supplies and take time to be an Emperor,' so that he could fortify the city and unify the other states. After the establishment of the Ming dynasty, Zhu Yuanzhang followed his advice and began to enlarge the wall built initially during the old Tang dynasty (618 -907), creating the modern Xian City Wall. It's the most complete city wall that has survived in China, as well as being one of the largest ancient military defensive systems in the world.  Our group was able to take a bicycle tour of the wall, which is about 9 miles in circumference.  It gave us a real glimpse into the city life of Xi'an, a city of 6 million people.

 On the wall at Xi'an

 Asleep on the job on the wall at Xi'an

 This is called Hot Pot lunch.  The stainless-steele pots on the table sit atop burners that boil the water at your table.  You then take some of each vegetbale and different meats, and even eggs, and put them in the water to boil briefly.  In the meantime, you go make a sauce of your own creation.  When you get back to your table, your food has boiled and you use chopsticks to pull it out of the pot and dip it in your sauce, which cools it down so you can eat it.  We loved it!

We've arrived!

Dave has arrived in Xi'An, China!

No the change in time zones hasn't made Dave suddenly start referring to himself in third person...this is Wes Weaver, and he asked me to update the blog today as he does not yet have internet connection at his hotel!

As for the flight, Dave said   "It was obviously a very long trip, but not as bad as I had imagined."

At the time of this blog post, it is 6:38 p.m. in Xi'An, 12 hours ahead of Eastern Standard Time. Dave had hoped to get internet connection today. Please check back soon for news.

Dave's Itinerary for April 7 - April 25

U.S. – China Principal Shadowing Project, 2009-2010


Xian Option
Date Activity
Wednesday, April 7 Departure from the U.S.

Thursday, April 8 Arrival in Xian by CA 1211 at 8:20pm. (Note loss of one day crossing the International Dateline.) Stay at the Huamei Gold Tang International Hotel.
Tel.: 011 8629 8761 6666
Add.: 126 West Street, Xi’an

Friday, April 9 Sightseeing: The City Wall and South Gate Tower with bicycle tour, the Museum of Forest of Steles, Hot Pot Lunch, the Big Goose Pagoda, the History Museum, a Dumpling Banquet and show.

Saturday, April 10 Sightseeing: Huatang Hot Springs, the Terra Cotta Warrior Museum, workshop with various Chinese handy craft making.
Lunch at the local restaurant in Lintong Town.
Dinner at a local noodles restaurant with local snacks as well.

Sunday, April 11 Visit Pangliu School. Lunch at farmers’ homes. Afternoon: Return to the city and see the Mosque and Bazaar, along with a traditional house complex.
Evening: Muslim dinner by the Bell Tower

Monday, April 12 Visit Huixian Art Gallery with exhibits of the peasant paintings and the art village with a painter’s home.
Lunch at airport.
Depart from Xian to Beijing CA1210 at 01:30PM.
3:20PM: Arrive in Beijing.
Stay at the Wang Fujing Grand Hotel.
Tel: 011 8610 6522 1188
Add.: 57 Wang Fu Jing Da Jie, Beijing
Tel. numbers in China:
Peihui Wang: (011 86)132 8112 5093
Richard Wang (our guide in Xian): (011 86)139 0926 8393
China Education Association for International Exchange
37 Damucang Hutong, Beijing, 100816 Tel:+86-10-6641-6080 Fax:+86-10-6641-6156

Itinerary for Sino-US Principals Shadowing Program

Apr.12th -23rd, 2010

April 12 Monday
Afternoon Arrival, Checking in Wangfujing Grand Hotel
Address: No.57 Wangfujing Street, Beijing
Tel: 011 8610-6522 1188
18:00 Dinner at Dawanju
Address: No.37 Dong’anmen
Tel: 010-65137599

April 13 Tuesday
10:00-12:00 Visit Ministry of Education
37# Damucang Hutong. Xidan, Beijing
Basic Education Reform and Development
Mr. Yu Changxue, Director, Ministry of Education
Migration Children’s Education
Professor Li Renzhu, National Education Development and Research Center
12:00-13:30 Lunch at Xiangyuchu
Address: 5th Floor, Tonggang Plaza, Xidan
Tel: 010-83988888
13:30-18:00 Visit Tian’anmen Square and Forbidden City
18:30 Peking Duck at Bianyifang Duck Restaurant
Tel: 010-82081019

April 14 Wednesday
9:30-11:30 Visit National Day School
Chinese Principals’ Roles in School Management
Teachers’ Selection, Education and Evaluation
School Curriculum Design and Students’ Evaluation
Students’ Moral, Psychological and Physical Education
11:30-13:00 Lunch at National Day School
13:30-16:30 Visit a School for Migrant Workers or disabled students
17:00-18:30 Dinner

April 15 Thursday
9:30-11:00 Visit Beijng Normal University
Topic：Chinese Society Change and its impact on Chinese Education system
Presenter: Prof Wang Yingjie, Past Vice President of Beijing Normal University,
11:30-13:30 Lunch in the school cafeteria
14:30-16:30 Hongqiao Market
17:00-18:30 Hutong Tour & Dinner

Apr. 16 Friday
9:00-16:00 Visit the Great Wall (Mutianyu)
16:00-19:00 Free shopping
18:00-19:30 Optional dinner

Apr. 17 Saturday
8:00-10:30 Temple of Heaven
12:00 Leave for Shadowing Schools

Apr. 18 -22
Shadowing at host schools

Apr. 23 Friday (Noon or early afternoon) Leave for Debriefing
Telephone numbers in China:
Charlotte: (01186) 136 1128 1901
Peihui: (01186) 132 8112 5093
Our colleagues at CEAIE in Beijing
1、Yu Yougen （011 86）139 1059 2537
2、Sun Xiaoqing （011 86）138 1107 3616
3、Xiao Lei （011 86）134 2606 0806
The China Exchange Initiative
140 Brandeis Road, Newton Centre, Massachusetts 02459 U.S.A.
Tel: 617 559 6730; Fax: 617 559 6701; Web: www.TheChinaExchangeInitiative.org

Mr. Zhu gets a lesson from Bill Weaver, 2009 Flint Ridge Atlatl Champion

Mr. Zhu with Hayden Hile at Hayden's basketball game

Mr. Zhu showed great affection for our children, Hayden and Ethan.  He taught them new Chinese words every day and by the time he left they could count to 10, say hello and China!

Mr. Zhu in 3rd Grade at LV Intermediate School with Ethan Hile

Mr. Zhu at the Longaberger Basket

Mr. Zhu and LV Board Members

Mr. Zhu with LV School Board members after the reception.  Our Board members have shown great enthusiasm for my participation in the China Exchange Initiative.  They understand the value of bringing the world to The Valley!

Smoked turkey and all the trimmings!

Mr. Zhu at Thanksgiving dinner with my family.  He found most American food quite bland and used a lot of RedHot to spice things up, including the turkey!

Mr. Zhu with the LVHS Choir

This is a picture of Mr. Zhu with the LVHS Choir.  The Choir perfromed beautifully and breathtakingly at the formal reception the School Board hosted to welcome Mr. Zhu to Licking Valley.

Wuhan Celebrating the New Year of the Tiger, February, 2010