On a slow boat...

In exactly 10 days I'll be in China! On Mom's birthday, I'll fly from Chicago to Beijing, then on to Xi'an for some tourist action, and I'll finally end up outside of Shenyang to visit some schools. I'm really excited to experience China firsthand. I never thought I would make it to Asia, but there are many things I am excited to see and experience - the Great Wall, the Terracotta Soldiers, Tianamen Square, and the Forbidden City in addition to experiencing the northern Chinese culture in Shenyang and Anshan. I've been working on Mandarin phrases and am able to speak a couple of phrases (at least I think I'm saying them right!) so hopefully I'll be able to try them out in a market and I won't end up saying something I shouldn't! We've had a couple of visitors from Anshan visit our school and the few phrases I feel pretty confident about were understood (or more likely our visitors were very polite!).

While I'm in China, the main focus of my visit is to see a couple of schools in Anshan. We'll be interacting with teachers and administrators at a high school and conversing about teaching and assessment practices in our respective schools. This trip is part of a broader goal in our school corporation of creating a cross-cultural exchange between our two schools. We're hoping to send students and receive students within the next school year. During the visit, I'll also be "teaching" a couple of English classes about American history - mainly an overview followed by a question and answer session. I'm looking forward to this experience, but at the same time I'm a little nervous about this aspect of the trip as it requires making a connection within the first couple of minutes with students from a different educational culture. I'm hoping the students will open up with questions during the Q&A portion and we can talk about the similarities and differences between our cultures. I think this part of the trip will be a wonderful learning experience for me.