Good morning. Well, it has been a while since you've heard from me. It was the
beginning of April, I think.. The demands of ending the semester, a literal
meltdown of my computer, preparing for a keynote at SUNY Stonybrook, worrying
about my Susie and taking her for treatment in Atlanta at Emory, a month of
Maymester teaching in China, struggling to figure out how to save fifteen years
of work, getting my backup drive to be read, transferring all the data from my
melted PC to my new IMac, learning a new e-mail system adoptedby the
University, and learning a new computer system explains it all. Anyway, I
thought I'd do something a tad different for a while. I kept a diary while I
was in China in which I generally reflected on a bunch of stuff about students,
American and Chinese, in particular
and on education and teaching in general. I thought I shared bits and pieces of
it. Here's my first entry:
May 11th or 10th. Its our first day in China, over 7,000 miles and fifteen
hours flying time from Atlanta. Add a nearly four hour car drive from Valdosta
and a three hour wait in Atlanta before the plane took off for me. It's 1 a.m.
here, but it's 1 p.m. yesterday as far as my body is concerned. Whatever it
is, I'm out of sync. In any event, it's late and early, and we have an early
and late call yesterday this morning to climb the Great Wall. As soon as we
had stepped off the plane in Beijing and went through customs, I could see that
a lot of the 43 students were on an adrenalin rush that washed away their plane
fatigue and muscle aches. They were a walking combination of excitement,
anticipation, confusion, and anxiety as they inhaled the polluted newness. So
many have never been outside Georgia, have never flown, much less have been in
another country. I had prepared the Valdosta contingent with monthly "getting
to know you" and "all you wanted to know but didn't know what to ask" community
building and "getting ready" get-togethers at my house. Nevertheless, they
weren't prepared for the reality of it all. So much was strange to them: the
language, the currency, the food, the odors, the toilets, the hard beds,
unhygienic conditions, and a host of alien cultural habits. They don't know
the half of it. They will be tested. And, unlike the classroom, the lessons
come after the test. They will have so much to take in, so much to experience,
so much to which to adjust, so much upon which to reflect, so much to
understand, so much to appreciate, so much to be awed by, and so much to enjoy.
Even more so, if they see rather than merely look, listen rather than merely
hear, reflect instead of shop; if they accept challenges to their
preconceptions and presumptions; if they escape the trap of their assumptions
and overcome the solid rock obstacles of their pereptions; if they venture out
into the uncertainty and unknown; if they greet this newness with open hands,
minds, and hearts; if they accept China and its people on their own terms free
of any judgmental likes and dislikes;. China, like everything else, is not
what someone tells them it will be. It is precisely what they make of it and
make it. They will just have to look at the same things in different ways or
different things in the same way. After all, what begins in their hearts,
travels to their mind, and ends up in their lives.
There's a lesson here for both life in general and the classroom in particular,
as all this is true for these students in China on both this first and
following days, it will be true throughout all aspects of their lives, and it
is true for me as a teacher in the classroom on the first and following days of
a new semester.
Make it a good day.
--Louis--
Louis Schmier
http://therandomthoughts.<http://therandomthoughts.edublogs.org/>com
Department of History http://www.therandomthoughts.com
Valdosta State University
Valdosta, Georgia 31698 /\ /\ /\ /\
(229-333-5947) /^\\/ \/ \ /\/\__/\ \/\
/ \/ \_ \/ /
\/ /\/ \ /\
//\/\/ /\
\__/__/_/\_\ \_/__\
/\"If you want to climb
mountains,\ /\
_ / \ don't practice on mole
hills" - \_
---
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