Getting Educated: ‘Pretend you’re in China…’
The Santa Cruz Sentinel has a good multimedia feature today on one school’s efforts to get out of No Child Left Behind sanctions after three years of missing the mark. There are 2,218 California schools receiving federal penalties this year (source), and Branciforte sounds a lot like the schools I used to cover. It has a growing immigrant population that needs to learn English fast. Requirements are tightening. The school is struggling.
Why am I writing about education reform in my home state? you may be asking. Isn’t this a China blog? Yes. That it is. Halfway through the first slide show (via Ryan Sholin, who built it) is this choice turn of phrase from Kathy Sandidge, an English Language Development teacher:
I think people aren’t empathetic to what it means to be in another country, learning another language. If I talk to adults I say, ‘Pretend you’re in China. You’re sitting in a classroom and everything’s in Chinese. The culture is different. The expectations are different. The language is different. It’s all foreign.’
A year ago, I would have processed that quote differently. China is a big, scary, complicated and maybe threatening place when you’ve never been there, and more so if you, like too many in the States, have never left comfortable American shores (I’d been around Europe, but that’s beside the point). Once you’ve been here a while, it’s still a big, sometimes scary, always complicated but not quite so threatening kind of place, but in a different way.
This is a long way of saying: Living here changes the way I see the world.
Globalization and æ±‰å— don’t frighten me like they used to. Pollution and crowds, more so. This country has a way of tempting me to oversimplify things, then reminding me why that’s a bad idea.
I haven’t gone all the way through this thought, but it’s got my mind going in the just-after-midnight haze. So here’s tonight’s question for the blogosphere:
How has China changed your thinking?
April 29th, 2007 at 4:17 pm
This is a late response, but…
I think the oversimplification issue springs from the complexity of experiencing a new country and culture. And it sometimes seems particularly easy to oversimplify a country like China because of its size and diversity.
But to answer your question, I think the first time I came to China, living here changed the way I thought about my own country. It was a much needed counterpoint to being raised in the US. Living in another Asian country, the Philippines, made me think differently about China and its place in the world.
My answer is vague, but you get the point. Not an easy question to answer, but a good one…