Teacher training on Chinese culture (#76; Topic E)

As a part of their planned move to Michigan, our daughter and son-in-law looked into schooling for our two childchildren. When they came to visit around Thanksgiving time, they left a brochure from a private school with us. The school, with separate facilities for middle school and elementary school, with its own art gallery and museum for instructional purposes, is regarded as among the very best in the country. Upon reading the brochure, I was duly impressed. Still, I thought one element was missing: while offering German and Spanish as foreign languages to pupils, there is no mention of Chinese. Later, our daughter informed us that the school plans to offer Chinese this fall. Great. A week or so ago, in an e-mail, she gave us a link to on-line postings by a member of the school's staff traveling with two art teachers. In addition to touring some of the "must" sights, the diarist mentioned that they also visited a school in "Hutong province." This was new to me; I stopped, tried to translate the province's name back to Chinese, and drew a blank. As I read on, the diarist continued by adding "a suburb of Beijing." So the diarist meant "township", I said to myself. The thought suddenly occurred to me that having school teachers visiting China and learning things Chinese is indeed an excellent idea; not only they, but their pupils would be enriched by on-the-scene teaching materials. Indeed, last September, in visiting sites made famous by Admiral Zheng He (#8), a retired northern Virginia teacher in our group said as much. Perhaps a non-profit organization to undertake this -- along with sending Chinese teachers to visit USA -- needs to be established. Let's see what we can do.
Posted at 10:13 pm, Thursday, February 9, 2006