Doors and Windows

There is a saying something to the effect of "Sometimes when God closes a door, He opens a window."

The Door:
In February I applied for a five-week summer institute/study tour of China through the Fullbright-Hayes program funded by the U.S. State Department. I've had a couple of other teacher friends participate in previous versions of this program, along with other Fullbright-Hayes seminars in other countries, and it was highly recommended. A friend who went last summer received her acceptance in late March of last year; when March came and went and April was nearly over I began wondering what was going on. Contact with the program's organizers communicated that there was a delay in letting people know about acceptance into the program but that it would be coming. I had not applied for any other programs, including domestic teacher professional development, in that I didn't want to have to turn something down if accepted into multiple programs. Finally, in mid-June, I received a letter letting me know I had not been accepted into the China program. While the information provided information to help make a future application stronger, it did seem as if a door was closed into an international trip for Summer 2014.

The Window:
Through my church, I attend a Sunday evening Bible study and fellowship group. Although we are on a summer break, we did meet last night for dinner. In our discussion. I mentioned that my summer plans were now wide open and if anyone had any trip suggestions to let me know; this was fairly "tongue-in-cheek" and several laughed or smiled. Before leaving we made some prayer requests until we were to meet again. One of my friends, Jerry Regier, asked for prayer as he traveled to Switzerland for an international conference. He has been heavily involved in government work and consulting, especially on an international level, and currently works for Water4, an NGO seeking to equip areas within developing countries with the means to hand-drill their own fresh water wells. At the Geneva Institute for Leadership and Public Policy, organized by Global Hope Network International and held at the UN's building in Geneva, Jerry will be speaking engaging development and growth through public policy, including a session called "Rule of Law and Nation Building."

It was humorous that as Jerry is making his prayer request faces/eyes from several in the group start darting back and forth between Jerry and me. As if those looks sparked something, Jerry says "hey David, you should go with me!" We spoke for a few minutes after we dismissed. He then emailed me some information last night and we had another conversation by phone. The conference looks like it will have some great connections with the AP Human Geography class I teach and visiting Geneva sounds just awesome. So, as of my purchase of airline tickets today, a window has opened!!!

This video is from last year's institute:

위로 이동 Gutenberg

(title translation: "Move Over Gutenberg")

While I've known this before, Johannes Gutenberg was not the first to invent a printing process based on movable type.  Such information was even included in the Gutenberg Printing Press Museum I visited in Mainz, Germany in 2011.  I know this is shocking to many of my readers who are so steeped into the lore of Western History's slant on the existence of the planet.

About 600 years before Gutenberg developed a movable type printing press in central Europe, the Chinese were transitioning from carved wooden blocks to ceramic blocks for printing purposes.  Then 400 years later, still 200 years prior to Gutenberg, the Koreans took this Chinese technology and made it even more modern by creating metal blocks for their alphabet.

Regardless of who did it "first", the ability to produce reading material in an ever increasingly rapid manner has had a significant impact on the increase in literacy, education, and thus economic development throughout the world.  When more can read more understand.  When more understand they act.

For more information on the historic importance of metal movable type within Korea, check out this World History unit from the Annenberg Foundation.  If you watch the pop-up Video on Demand, the portion on Korea begins at the 10:50 minute mark.

Cousin Peter in China

I received an e-mail early this morning from one of my dad's first cousins who lives in the Houston area.  She knows that I love to travel and to explore new locations so in the e-mail she included a link to her grandson's blog.  Peter Lambert has an eight-week internship in China as part of the World Food Prize Program.  His research while in China is part of an international program to help improve the quality, quantity, and availability of food throughout the world.

The last couple of lines from his July 17th entry grabbed my attention as they relate to the ideas of Global Education (the whole concept of the Teachers for Global Classrooms program I am in). "I am growing more and more fond of this country each day and am discovering many similarities between it and the states.  It just goes to show that people are people no matter where you find them."

Feel free to join me in roaming the remote roads of China as we read Peter's Adventure Blog.

Brunch with Amy Tan

For some background on this posting, please read my posts titled The Joy Luck Club (my review of the book) and "At Southmoore..." (faculty book study luncheon).

As I logged in to my school e-mail account on Thursday morning I was greeted with a message subject of "SEE ME ASAP".  This message was from Michelle, one of our media center specialists.  Apparently the Moore Public Schools Foundation had sponsored a table for a brunch with Amy Tan and they were providing tickets for some of the teachers at Southmoore who had participated in our faculty book study of Tan's The Joy Luck Club.  My name had been drawn from "the hat" and I immediately said YES.



So, this morning at 10:30 I joined two other Southmoore teachers and one of our students, along with several hundred other guests.  We dined on a lovely brunch of puff pastry, mandarian orange & almond salad, spinach quiche, and fruit in creme along with coffee and white grape juice.

Of course the highlight of the morning was a presentation by best selling author Amy Tan.  Tan spoke about her experiences in writing.  She read for us her very first published piece: a short essay she wrote in 3rd grade for a competition on why the library is important to you--she won 1st prize.  Tan also shared that much of her inspiration for The Joy Luck Club, while still a work of fiction, came from the experiences of her mother's and grandmother's lives.  She read a passage from her memoir, The Opposite of Fate, which displayed an example of her mother's broken English.  This example served to show why Tan has often struggled, especially earlier within her writing, to write with proper grammar in that she heard one thing at school and another at home.  The inspiration for characters in most of her books is routed within some aspect of the life experiences of her family and friends.  Her newest novel to be released soon is also based on a photograph she found of her grandmother in an outfit which appears to be traditional for a courtesan.

It was a both a matter of luck and an experience of joy to be able to attend this brunch today.  Tan is one of the best examples of a writer who seeks to explore and make sense of the experiences of culture within one country through the prism of cultural perspective within another.  I am excited to read more about her life (each guest received a copy of The Opposite of Fate) and her other works.  It is through the literature and perspectives of authors like Amy Tan that most people find the opportunity to roam the roads of lands remote even if their physical journey may never or rarely leave home.

"At Southmoore..."

Michelle Grogan, media specialist, presents "At Southmoore..." part one

Here are some pictures from the luncheon that was catered as part of our faculty professional development meeting in which we discussed Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club.  As we ate we visited in small groups about our respective experiences, thoughts, and ways to apply what we learned form the reading into our classrooms.  For more information regarding the reading and faculty discussion of the book please visit my blog posting for The Joy Luck Club.

to help guide discussion within your group "take out" a question

center pieces at the tables along with copies of the book;
red/black paper back copies provided by NEA's Big Read grant

lunch provided by Ground Floor Cafe inside OKC's Leadership Square

faculty gathered for discussion within in the media center during lunch;
media center personnel decorated the area with Chinese lanterns

The Joy Luck Club

Under the leadership of our media specialists, Southmoore's faculty recently participated in the Pioneer Library System's 2012 Big Read.  The Big Read was funded by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts and featured an emphasis on Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club.  The NEA grant allowed the PLS's new South Oklahoma City Public Library branch to provide a copy of  the JLC to each Southmoore teacher interested in participating in reading the book and discussing it as part of a  multicultural focused professional development session.

The overall story is told using the backdrop of a group of four Chinese-American women who regularly gather to play mahjong.  In part one, Tan relates the experiences of each of these four women while growing up in diverse settings within pre-World War II China.  In part two, she recounts the relationship each of these women has with her own American born daughter as told from that daughter's perspective.  In part three, again from the perspectives of the daughters, Tan relates the experiences each pair has once the daughter has reached adulthood.  Finally in part four, Tan returns to the perspectives of the mothers in which she seeks to reconcile each mother's childhood in China, the daughter's childhood in San Francisco, and the life circumstances which each pair currently finds themselves involved.

Initially I had difficulty "getting into" the JLC.  As I went from part one to part two I had trouble keeping straight which mother-daughter pair's story I was currently reading.  However, once I began skipping chapters so that I could read the entire strand of one mother-daughter relationship and then move on to each of the next three strands I was able to make more sense of what was going on.

The JLC is a wonderful story of parent-child relationships.  But it is much more than this.  The JLC also provides great insight into the cultural experiences of the mothers as they were raised within their homeland.  It presents a cultural quandary for each mother as she seeks to hold on to raising her children as "Chinese" within an environment unlike that in which she was raised.  It presents the lure of "American" values and materialism which the daughters each find to be attractive.

From the perspective of my career, I find the JLC to be a book that every teacher should read.  Most of us, especially those within public schools in a more urban (even suburban) setting, have had students within our classes who have parents born in another country.  There are often language barriers in trying to communicate not only with the students in our care but also with their parents who may have even less of a grasp of English.  The students often find themselves in that cultural paradox of trying to be "American" with out sacrificing the culture of their parents' homeland.  The lessons for a teacher to be found within the JLC are many that should help us be better able to reach out to and make connections with such students and families.  The JLC helps to open our minds into understanding cultural cues with which we are not otherwise familiar.

I would encourage each of you, teacher or not, to read either The Joy Luck Club or some other book that presents a family from a cultural background different from your own.  By roaming such a remote road through the images conveyed through the written word we allow our minds to experience the world from new eyes.