Special Exhibition
The World of Khubilai Khan: Chinese Art in the Yuan Dynasty
September 28, 2010–January 2, 2011
The Tisch Galleries, 2nd floor
This exhibition will cover the period from 1215, the year of Khubilai's birth, to 1368, the year of the fall of the Yuan dynasty in China founded by Khubilai Khan, and will feature every art form, including paintings, sculpture, gold and silver, textiles, ceramics, lacquer, and other decorative arts, religious and secular. The exhibition will highlight new art forms and styles generated in China as a result of the unification of China under the Yuan dynasty and the massive influx of craftsmen from all over the vast Mongol empire—with reverberations in Italian art of the fourteenth century.
Sunday, September 12, 2010
NY Times on Chinese Language Learning and Testing
From http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/12/weekinreview/12rosenthal.html?pagewanted=2&_r=2&sq=Testing,%20%20the%20Chinese%20Way&st=cse&scp=1
When my children were 6 and 8, taking tests was as much a part of the rhythm of their school day as tag at recess or listening to stories at circle time. There were the “mad minute” math quizzes twice each week, with the results elaborately graphed. There were regular spelling quizzes. Even today I have my daughter’s minutely graded third-grade science exams, with grades like 23/25 or A minus.
We were living in China, where their school blended a mostly Western elementary school curriculum with the emphasis on discipline and testing that typifies Asian educational styles. In Asia, such a march of tests for young children was regarded as normal, and not evil or particularly anxiety provoking. That made for some interesting culture clashes. I remember nearly constant tension between the Asian parents, who wanted still more tests and homework, and the Western parents, who were more concerned with whether their kids were having fun — and wanted less.
I still have occasional nightmares about a miserable summer vacation spent force-feeding flash cards into the brain of my 5-year-old son — who was clearly not “ready” to read, but through herculean effort and tears, learned anyway. Reading was simply a requirement for progressing from kindergarten to first grade. How could he take tests and do worksheets if he couldn’t read the questions?
But Andrew and Cara, now 16 and 18, have only the warmest memories of their years at the International School of Beijing — they mostly didn’t understand that they were being “tested.” As educators and parents in the United States debate new federal programs that will probably expose young children to far more exams and quizzes than is the current norm, I think often of the ups and downs of my children’s elementary education. What makes a test feel like an interesting challenge rather than an anxiety-provoking assault?
Testing of young children had been out of favor for decades among early-childhood educators in the United States, who worry that it stifles creativity and harms self-esteem, and does not accurately reflect the style and irregular pace of children’s learning anyway. (There may be some truth to that. My son, who suffered the flash card assault, was by age 7 the family’s most voracious reader.) Testing young children has been so out of favor that even the test-based No Child Left Behind law doesn’t start testing students’ reading abilities until after third grade — at which point, some educators believe, it is too late to remedy deficiencies.
But recently, American education’s “no test” philosophy for young children has been coming under assault, as government programs strongly promote the practice.
First there was No Child Left Behind, which took effect in 2003 and required states to give all students standardized tests to measure school progress.
Now, President Obama’s Race to the Top educational competition — which announced billions of dollars in state grants this month — includes and encourages more reliance on what educators call “formative tests” or “formative assessments.” These are not the big once-a-year or once-in-a-lifetime exams, like the SATs, but a stream of smaller, less monumental tests, designed in theory, at least, primarily to help students and their teachers know how they’re doing.
Some education experts hail the change as a step forward from the ideological dark ages. “Research has long shown that more frequent testing is beneficial to kids, but educators have resisted this finding,” said Gregory J. Cizek, a professor of educational measurement and evaluation at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Of course, the tests have to be age-appropriate, Professor Cizek notes, and the Race to the Top program includes funds for research to develop new exams. Filling in three pages of multiple-choice bubbles may not be appropriate for young children. Likewise “high stakes” tests — like the Chinese university entrance exam, which alone determines university placement — create anxiety and may unfairly derail a youngster’s future based on poor performance on a single day.
But Professor Cizek, who started his career as a second-grade teacher, said the prevailing philosophy of offering young children unconditional praise and support was probably not the best prescription for successful education. “What’s best for kids is frequent testing, where even if they do badly, they can get help and improve and have the satisfaction of doing better,” he said. “Kids don’t get self-esteem by people just telling them they are wonderful.”
Other educators recoil at the thought of more tests. “The Obama administration is using the power of the purse to compel states to add more destructive testing,” said Alfie Kohn, author of “The Case Against Standardized Testing” and many other books on education. “With Race to the Top the bad news has gotten worse, with a relentless regimen that turns schools into test prep courses.”
He said genuine learning in young children was a global process, while tests look at narrow and specific skills, and good teachers don’t need tests to know if a child is learning. He added that for young children, good test results were more a function of whether children can sit still or hold a pencil. “These tests are being added in the name of accountability despite the objections of early-childhood educators who say they have no place in the classrooms,” he said.
Rather than a “low-stress tool to identify gaps in the learning process,” he added, “they are used as a club to punish students who need help.”
I will not pretend that raising children amid a stream of tests is a Zen experience, for them or for their parents. In Beijing, both of my children had subjects or grades in which they performed poorly. There was an entire elementary school year in which my son got consistently mediocre grades in math, in English, in everything, it seemed. It took endless parental cheerleading to maintain his self-esteem. And there were times when — yes — I’m sure he felt bad about himself.
But let’s face it, life is filled with all kinds of tests — some you ace and some you flunk — so at some point you have to get used to it. “Schools do a lot of nurturing and facilitating, and then it’s a bit of a shock for children when they have to sit at a desk all alone and be tested,” Professor Cizek said.
When testing is commonplace and the teachers are supportive — as my children’s were, for the most part — the tests felt like so many puzzles; not so much a judgment on your being, but an interesting challenge. It is a testament to the International School of Beijing — or to the malleability of childhood memory — that Andrew now says he did not realize that he was being tested. Will tests be like that in a national program, like Race to the Top?
When we moved back to New York City, my children, then 9 and 11, started at a progressive school with no real tests, no grades, not even auditions for the annual school musical. They didn’t last long. It turned out they had come to like the feedback of testing.
“How do I know if I get what’s going on in math class?” my daughter asked with obvious discomfort after a month. Primed with Beijing test-taking experience, they each soon tested into New York City’s academic public schools — where they have had tests aplenty and (probably not surprisingly) a high proportion of Asian classmates.
When my children were 6 and 8, taking tests was as much a part of the rhythm of their school day as tag at recess or listening to stories at circle time. There were the “mad minute” math quizzes twice each week, with the results elaborately graphed. There were regular spelling quizzes. Even today I have my daughter’s minutely graded third-grade science exams, with grades like 23/25 or A minus.
We were living in China, where their school blended a mostly Western elementary school curriculum with the emphasis on discipline and testing that typifies Asian educational styles. In Asia, such a march of tests for young children was regarded as normal, and not evil or particularly anxiety provoking. That made for some interesting culture clashes. I remember nearly constant tension between the Asian parents, who wanted still more tests and homework, and the Western parents, who were more concerned with whether their kids were having fun — and wanted less.
I still have occasional nightmares about a miserable summer vacation spent force-feeding flash cards into the brain of my 5-year-old son — who was clearly not “ready” to read, but through herculean effort and tears, learned anyway. Reading was simply a requirement for progressing from kindergarten to first grade. How could he take tests and do worksheets if he couldn’t read the questions?
But Andrew and Cara, now 16 and 18, have only the warmest memories of their years at the International School of Beijing — they mostly didn’t understand that they were being “tested.” As educators and parents in the United States debate new federal programs that will probably expose young children to far more exams and quizzes than is the current norm, I think often of the ups and downs of my children’s elementary education. What makes a test feel like an interesting challenge rather than an anxiety-provoking assault?
Testing of young children had been out of favor for decades among early-childhood educators in the United States, who worry that it stifles creativity and harms self-esteem, and does not accurately reflect the style and irregular pace of children’s learning anyway. (There may be some truth to that. My son, who suffered the flash card assault, was by age 7 the family’s most voracious reader.) Testing young children has been so out of favor that even the test-based No Child Left Behind law doesn’t start testing students’ reading abilities until after third grade — at which point, some educators believe, it is too late to remedy deficiencies.
But recently, American education’s “no test” philosophy for young children has been coming under assault, as government programs strongly promote the practice.
First there was No Child Left Behind, which took effect in 2003 and required states to give all students standardized tests to measure school progress.
Now, President Obama’s Race to the Top educational competition — which announced billions of dollars in state grants this month — includes and encourages more reliance on what educators call “formative tests” or “formative assessments.” These are not the big once-a-year or once-in-a-lifetime exams, like the SATs, but a stream of smaller, less monumental tests, designed in theory, at least, primarily to help students and their teachers know how they’re doing.
Some education experts hail the change as a step forward from the ideological dark ages. “Research has long shown that more frequent testing is beneficial to kids, but educators have resisted this finding,” said Gregory J. Cizek, a professor of educational measurement and evaluation at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Of course, the tests have to be age-appropriate, Professor Cizek notes, and the Race to the Top program includes funds for research to develop new exams. Filling in three pages of multiple-choice bubbles may not be appropriate for young children. Likewise “high stakes” tests — like the Chinese university entrance exam, which alone determines university placement — create anxiety and may unfairly derail a youngster’s future based on poor performance on a single day.
But Professor Cizek, who started his career as a second-grade teacher, said the prevailing philosophy of offering young children unconditional praise and support was probably not the best prescription for successful education. “What’s best for kids is frequent testing, where even if they do badly, they can get help and improve and have the satisfaction of doing better,” he said. “Kids don’t get self-esteem by people just telling them they are wonderful.”
Other educators recoil at the thought of more tests. “The Obama administration is using the power of the purse to compel states to add more destructive testing,” said Alfie Kohn, author of “The Case Against Standardized Testing” and many other books on education. “With Race to the Top the bad news has gotten worse, with a relentless regimen that turns schools into test prep courses.”
He said genuine learning in young children was a global process, while tests look at narrow and specific skills, and good teachers don’t need tests to know if a child is learning. He added that for young children, good test results were more a function of whether children can sit still or hold a pencil. “These tests are being added in the name of accountability despite the objections of early-childhood educators who say they have no place in the classrooms,” he said.
Rather than a “low-stress tool to identify gaps in the learning process,” he added, “they are used as a club to punish students who need help.”
I will not pretend that raising children amid a stream of tests is a Zen experience, for them or for their parents. In Beijing, both of my children had subjects or grades in which they performed poorly. There was an entire elementary school year in which my son got consistently mediocre grades in math, in English, in everything, it seemed. It took endless parental cheerleading to maintain his self-esteem. And there were times when — yes — I’m sure he felt bad about himself.
But let’s face it, life is filled with all kinds of tests — some you ace and some you flunk — so at some point you have to get used to it. “Schools do a lot of nurturing and facilitating, and then it’s a bit of a shock for children when they have to sit at a desk all alone and be tested,” Professor Cizek said.
When testing is commonplace and the teachers are supportive — as my children’s were, for the most part — the tests felt like so many puzzles; not so much a judgment on your being, but an interesting challenge. It is a testament to the International School of Beijing — or to the malleability of childhood memory — that Andrew now says he did not realize that he was being tested. Will tests be like that in a national program, like Race to the Top?
When we moved back to New York City, my children, then 9 and 11, started at a progressive school with no real tests, no grades, not even auditions for the annual school musical. They didn’t last long. It turned out they had come to like the feedback of testing.
“How do I know if I get what’s going on in math class?” my daughter asked with obvious discomfort after a month. Primed with Beijing test-taking experience, they each soon tested into New York City’s academic public schools — where they have had tests aplenty and (probably not surprisingly) a high proportion of Asian classmates.
Friday, September 10, 2010
NY Times: Following Workers' Trails of Tears in China
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/29/movies/29home.html?_r=2&ref=movies
IN the quietly devastating documentary “Last Train Home” Chinese migrant workers huddle together in an overcrowded railway car, sweating through their annual ride home for the New Year holiday. One nattily coiffed young man inveighs against the West, complaining bitterly that American consumers who buy the cheap Chinese goods he makes also get to spend most of their higher salaries on discretionary items, while he, who makes those goods, must send most of his earnings home to support his family.
Lixin Fan, who shot, edited and directed the film, might have chosen to stick with this feisty representative of the new China. Instead his camera cuts away to a middle-aged couple who sit in silence. Zhang Changhua and Cheng Suqin, who make this trip every year to visit the children they left behind nearly two decades ago, belong to a mostly ignored generation of roughly 130 million migrant workers who have sacrificed their productive years, and possibly the integrity of their families, in service to China’s headlong rush into global economic supremacy.
“Many times I was in tears at all this misery,” Mr. Fan said, seated in an anteroom at the Los Angeles Asian-Pacific Film Festival, where “Last Train Home” played in May after winning praise at the Sundance Film Festival. “If you were on this train with hundreds of migrants around us — it stinks, it’s dirty and everyone’s trying to survive, just to see their kids.”
In 2006 Mr. Fan and a skeleton crew of three began documenting the effects of industrial change on this family, with whom he spent three years, on and off.
Mr. Zhang and Ms. Cheng left their village in Sichuan — Mr. Fan’s home province and the country’s largest exporter of labor — to work in Guangzhou, the world’s largest manufacturing source of denim jeans. The film cuts between the factory where they toil seven days a week, and the bucolic but chronically poor countryside where they visit their little boy and teenage daughter, who are raised by a careworn yet uncomplaining grandmother who suffered even worse privation under Mao Zedong.
Mr. Fan, a slender 33-year-old who cheerfully attributes his fluent English to “fighting with my Chinese-American girlfriend,” showed a sociologist’s grasp of the broad shifts that have afflicted workers like this couple. The lack of farm subsidies and expropriation of farmland for urban construction have crippled agriculture, while an outdated housing registration system that denies education and social services to rural migrants in the city has created a sharp class divide and placed untenable strains on the traditionally close-knit Chinese family.
The film’s unnerving railway station scenes — panoramic views of frustrated crowds surging forward, barely contained by nervous police officers with truncheons — underscore these changes and the growing specter of civil war. “The government does not have a perfect track record of dealing with dissent,” Mr. Fan said carefully. “So civil war would be a terrible thing. While I was making this film, it was difficult to figure out where to point the finger. At the government? The factory owners and corporations? The West? I’m not in a righteous place to answer, but I hope to raise this question for my audience.”
Mr. Fan encountered little serious official opposition, perhaps because of his accommodating demeanor, or because national issues are kept mostly in the background of this intimate film, which opens Friday at the IFC Center in Greenwich Village.
To gain the family’s trust Mr. Fan and his crew ate with them in their dormitory in Guangzhou, taught them how to manage their own wireless mikes, which they wore constantly, and would sleep on the pile of warm jeans the couple made while the crew waited to tag along after they finished their shift at midnight. “So 15 minutes into the film, after that first train ride,” he said proudly, “we’d already known each other for a year.”
“The mom once told me that they worked for 29 days, 15 hours a day straight,” Mr. Fan said. “The dormitories are right across the street from their factory, so it takes one minute exactly to go from their sewing machine to their bed. So that’s what they did for that month — sewing machine, bed, sewing machine, bed.”
At home Mr. Zhang and Ms. Cheng encountered their deeply resentful daughter, Qin, 17, who rebels against her parents’ pressure to get the grades they see as her passport to a better life. At one point the simmering tensions come to a boil, forcing Mr. Fan to decide on his feet whether to intervene. “The kids want more attention, and the parents are never around,” he said. “The parents know that education is the only way to, as we call it, jump out of the dragon’s door, out of poverty. But Qin, who is rebellious, independent and smart, did it her own way.”
Still, Mr. Fan doesn’t believe that the Chinese family is close to collapse. “Down deep we are still very family oriented,” he said. “When Qin gets a little older, she will come to understand that.”
He added, laughing, “I still call my mom every other day.”
If Mr. Fan belongs to a new generation of Internet-savvy filmmakers schooled in Western liberal ideas, his spiritual, intellectual and cinematic influences reflect both ancient tradition and modernity. His father was a college professor and projectionist, and Mr. Fan grew up watching foreign films. Like many of his generation, he broke with tradition by leaving home for Beijing, then gave up a prestigious job (“My mom thought I was crazy”) with the CCTV network, briefly relocating to Canada before working as a sound man and associate producer on the well-received 2007 documentary “Up the Yangtze,” about the mass displacements caused by the building of the Three Gorges Dam.
“Lixin is not from the foreign-influenced cultural centers,” said Daniel Cross, president of EyesteelFilm company in Montreal, which produced “Up the Yangtze” and co-produced “Last Train Home” with the ITVS television and cable company, which holds the North American television rights. “He comes from the sticks, and that’s what makes him unique.”
Mr. Fan said he is a committed Taoist, and his eye for the interplay of beauty and ugliness is influenced by what he calls the “epic poetry” of the director Jia Zhangke, whose 2004 feature “The World” centered on the youthful staff of a giant theme park that replicates the world’s famous tourist spots.
“I see a lot of Chinese philosophy in Jia’s film,” said Mr. Fan, who added that he hopes to seed his next project, a documentary about China’s green initiative focusing on a state-financed wind farm on the Silk Road in the Gobi Desert, with his earnings from “Last Train Home.”
“I’ll shoot there and in a remote mountain school where Taoist philosophy originated, where they recruit peasant children to teach them Tai Chi with martial art,” he said. “It’s yin and yang, keeping the balance between human desire and what nature can give you
IN the quietly devastating documentary “Last Train Home” Chinese migrant workers huddle together in an overcrowded railway car, sweating through their annual ride home for the New Year holiday. One nattily coiffed young man inveighs against the West, complaining bitterly that American consumers who buy the cheap Chinese goods he makes also get to spend most of their higher salaries on discretionary items, while he, who makes those goods, must send most of his earnings home to support his family.
Lixin Fan, who shot, edited and directed the film, might have chosen to stick with this feisty representative of the new China. Instead his camera cuts away to a middle-aged couple who sit in silence. Zhang Changhua and Cheng Suqin, who make this trip every year to visit the children they left behind nearly two decades ago, belong to a mostly ignored generation of roughly 130 million migrant workers who have sacrificed their productive years, and possibly the integrity of their families, in service to China’s headlong rush into global economic supremacy.
“Many times I was in tears at all this misery,” Mr. Fan said, seated in an anteroom at the Los Angeles Asian-Pacific Film Festival, where “Last Train Home” played in May after winning praise at the Sundance Film Festival. “If you were on this train with hundreds of migrants around us — it stinks, it’s dirty and everyone’s trying to survive, just to see their kids.”
In 2006 Mr. Fan and a skeleton crew of three began documenting the effects of industrial change on this family, with whom he spent three years, on and off.
Mr. Zhang and Ms. Cheng left their village in Sichuan — Mr. Fan’s home province and the country’s largest exporter of labor — to work in Guangzhou, the world’s largest manufacturing source of denim jeans. The film cuts between the factory where they toil seven days a week, and the bucolic but chronically poor countryside where they visit their little boy and teenage daughter, who are raised by a careworn yet uncomplaining grandmother who suffered even worse privation under Mao Zedong.
Mr. Fan, a slender 33-year-old who cheerfully attributes his fluent English to “fighting with my Chinese-American girlfriend,” showed a sociologist’s grasp of the broad shifts that have afflicted workers like this couple. The lack of farm subsidies and expropriation of farmland for urban construction have crippled agriculture, while an outdated housing registration system that denies education and social services to rural migrants in the city has created a sharp class divide and placed untenable strains on the traditionally close-knit Chinese family.
The film’s unnerving railway station scenes — panoramic views of frustrated crowds surging forward, barely contained by nervous police officers with truncheons — underscore these changes and the growing specter of civil war. “The government does not have a perfect track record of dealing with dissent,” Mr. Fan said carefully. “So civil war would be a terrible thing. While I was making this film, it was difficult to figure out where to point the finger. At the government? The factory owners and corporations? The West? I’m not in a righteous place to answer, but I hope to raise this question for my audience.”
Mr. Fan encountered little serious official opposition, perhaps because of his accommodating demeanor, or because national issues are kept mostly in the background of this intimate film, which opens Friday at the IFC Center in Greenwich Village.
To gain the family’s trust Mr. Fan and his crew ate with them in their dormitory in Guangzhou, taught them how to manage their own wireless mikes, which they wore constantly, and would sleep on the pile of warm jeans the couple made while the crew waited to tag along after they finished their shift at midnight. “So 15 minutes into the film, after that first train ride,” he said proudly, “we’d already known each other for a year.”
“The mom once told me that they worked for 29 days, 15 hours a day straight,” Mr. Fan said. “The dormitories are right across the street from their factory, so it takes one minute exactly to go from their sewing machine to their bed. So that’s what they did for that month — sewing machine, bed, sewing machine, bed.”
At home Mr. Zhang and Ms. Cheng encountered their deeply resentful daughter, Qin, 17, who rebels against her parents’ pressure to get the grades they see as her passport to a better life. At one point the simmering tensions come to a boil, forcing Mr. Fan to decide on his feet whether to intervene. “The kids want more attention, and the parents are never around,” he said. “The parents know that education is the only way to, as we call it, jump out of the dragon’s door, out of poverty. But Qin, who is rebellious, independent and smart, did it her own way.”
Still, Mr. Fan doesn’t believe that the Chinese family is close to collapse. “Down deep we are still very family oriented,” he said. “When Qin gets a little older, she will come to understand that.”
He added, laughing, “I still call my mom every other day.”
If Mr. Fan belongs to a new generation of Internet-savvy filmmakers schooled in Western liberal ideas, his spiritual, intellectual and cinematic influences reflect both ancient tradition and modernity. His father was a college professor and projectionist, and Mr. Fan grew up watching foreign films. Like many of his generation, he broke with tradition by leaving home for Beijing, then gave up a prestigious job (“My mom thought I was crazy”) with the CCTV network, briefly relocating to Canada before working as a sound man and associate producer on the well-received 2007 documentary “Up the Yangtze,” about the mass displacements caused by the building of the Three Gorges Dam.
“Lixin is not from the foreign-influenced cultural centers,” said Daniel Cross, president of EyesteelFilm company in Montreal, which produced “Up the Yangtze” and co-produced “Last Train Home” with the ITVS television and cable company, which holds the North American television rights. “He comes from the sticks, and that’s what makes him unique.”
Mr. Fan said he is a committed Taoist, and his eye for the interplay of beauty and ugliness is influenced by what he calls the “epic poetry” of the director Jia Zhangke, whose 2004 feature “The World” centered on the youthful staff of a giant theme park that replicates the world’s famous tourist spots.
“I see a lot of Chinese philosophy in Jia’s film,” said Mr. Fan, who added that he hopes to seed his next project, a documentary about China’s green initiative focusing on a state-financed wind farm on the Silk Road in the Gobi Desert, with his earnings from “Last Train Home.”
“I’ll shoot there and in a remote mountain school where Taoist philosophy originated, where they recruit peasant children to teach them Tai Chi with martial art,” he said. “It’s yin and yang, keeping the balance between human desire and what nature can give you
Autumn Moon Festival
Mid-Autumn Moon Festival
Sara D. Roosevelt Park
9/19, 12pm - 4pm
Boxes of mooncakes are everywhere in Chinatown, and the Better Chinatown Society will be holding its annual festival at Sara Roosevelt Park (Canal and Forsyth Streets) to celebrate the Mid-Autumn Moon Festival (aka August 15th on the Chinese calender).
It's hard to believe that this harmless-looking bun was used to incite rebellion against the Mongols who ruled China.
Nowadays, mooncakes signfy unity and perfection, and are indispensible gifts, this time of year, for friends and family.
Traditional mooncake fillings are still made from lotus-seed paste (lían róng), and bean paste, but anything goes with innovative bakers with flavors such as green tea, durian, egg custard, and XO brandy. Mooncakes are labor-intensive to make at home, so sample some at local bakeries when you stop by the festival.
The Museum of Chinese in America has also prepared a day-long program of activities on September 19th to celebrate this significant Chinese holiday.
Sunday, August 22, 2010
CLSC Programs at Georgetown Community Center
Program to familiarize kids with Mandarin Chinese
Posted on 07/28/2010
From the Wilton Villager: http://www.wiltonvillager.com/story/489558
By DANIELLE CAPALBO
Villager Staff Writer
WILTON -- You're never too young to learn something new.
That's the prevailing philosophy behind a growing program designed to familiarize pre-school children with Mandarin Chinese through play and cultural activities.
Called Chopstix, the program is offered by the Chinese Language School of Connecticut and, this fall, the Greenwich-based institute will be hosting two free classes at the Georgetown Community Center.
"It's a different way to learn," said Susan Serven, the mother of two adopted Chinese girls and a co-founder and president of the school.
Rather than teaching the language outright -- the way a student might learn French in school, for instance -- instructors at Chopstix guide children through games and art projects while speaking Mandarin Chinese almost exclusively. Eventually, the pint-size pupils respond to -- and replicate -- the commands, as if it were second nature.
"We want them to feel comfortable, and we use a play-based model because that's how most kids are able to learn the best," said Katy Myers, who was born in Taipei, Taiwan, and moved to the states as a pre-teen. "For the most part, they really don't even know they're learning -- they think they're playing a game."
Myers has been teaching at the Chinese Language School for seven years -- she's the director of arts and culture -- and will guide the demonstration classes.
The school itself was founded in 2002 by a group of area parents, including Serven, inspired to promote awareness of Chinese culture and to give children and adults of all backgrounds an opportunity to learn the most widely-spoken language in the world, Serven said.
"About 23 percent of the world speaks Mandarin Chinese as a first language," she said. "Not only people in China and Taiwan, but in Malaysia, Singapore, the Phillipines."
Chopstix was integrated into the school's curriculum a year later, adapted from a nonprofit program that Serven ran in the late-90s. She said the importance of teaching the language at a ripe age is manifold. For one thing, she said, younger children are more likely to retain the structure of the language and to retain it longer, making it easier to revisit as teenagers or adults.
There's an element of global practicality, too, she said.
"Most parents, especially in this area, recognize China's growing emergence in the global economy," she said. "Many business people in Shanghai, Hong Kong -- they speak English, but it's important to understand their culture and their language moving forward."
Myers said the program represents a possibility that hasn't always existed for second-generation immigrants or Chinese children adopted into English-speaking families: to learn the language of their heritage.
"I realized that, growing up, there were no places for Chinese children to get together, for families to get together, and celebrate their heritage," she said -- in part because immigrants spoke different dialects and couldn't easily create communities or schools."
It's also a way to create a cross-cultural community of Asians and Americans, she said.
"Hopefully we can create an Asian-American community -- a way to foster more understanding of our different cultures."
Chopstix classes will be held at the Georgetown Community Center, formerly the Gilbert and Bennett School, at 49 New Street, Wilton. Demo classes will be held on Aug. 28 and Sept. 4: ages 2 to 3, from 10 to 10:45 a.m.; and ages 4 to 5, from 11 to 11:45 a.m. For further information, visit www.chineselanguageschool.org/.
Posted on 07/28/2010
From the Wilton Villager: http://www.wiltonvillager.com/story/489558
By DANIELLE CAPALBO
Villager Staff Writer
WILTON -- You're never too young to learn something new.
That's the prevailing philosophy behind a growing program designed to familiarize pre-school children with Mandarin Chinese through play and cultural activities.
Called Chopstix, the program is offered by the Chinese Language School of Connecticut and, this fall, the Greenwich-based institute will be hosting two free classes at the Georgetown Community Center.
"It's a different way to learn," said Susan Serven, the mother of two adopted Chinese girls and a co-founder and president of the school.
Rather than teaching the language outright -- the way a student might learn French in school, for instance -- instructors at Chopstix guide children through games and art projects while speaking Mandarin Chinese almost exclusively. Eventually, the pint-size pupils respond to -- and replicate -- the commands, as if it were second nature.
"We want them to feel comfortable, and we use a play-based model because that's how most kids are able to learn the best," said Katy Myers, who was born in Taipei, Taiwan, and moved to the states as a pre-teen. "For the most part, they really don't even know they're learning -- they think they're playing a game."
Myers has been teaching at the Chinese Language School for seven years -- she's the director of arts and culture -- and will guide the demonstration classes.
The school itself was founded in 2002 by a group of area parents, including Serven, inspired to promote awareness of Chinese culture and to give children and adults of all backgrounds an opportunity to learn the most widely-spoken language in the world, Serven said.
"About 23 percent of the world speaks Mandarin Chinese as a first language," she said. "Not only people in China and Taiwan, but in Malaysia, Singapore, the Phillipines."
Chopstix was integrated into the school's curriculum a year later, adapted from a nonprofit program that Serven ran in the late-90s. She said the importance of teaching the language at a ripe age is manifold. For one thing, she said, younger children are more likely to retain the structure of the language and to retain it longer, making it easier to revisit as teenagers or adults.
There's an element of global practicality, too, she said.
"Most parents, especially in this area, recognize China's growing emergence in the global economy," she said. "Many business people in Shanghai, Hong Kong -- they speak English, but it's important to understand their culture and their language moving forward."
Myers said the program represents a possibility that hasn't always existed for second-generation immigrants or Chinese children adopted into English-speaking families: to learn the language of their heritage.
"I realized that, growing up, there were no places for Chinese children to get together, for families to get together, and celebrate their heritage," she said -- in part because immigrants spoke different dialects and couldn't easily create communities or schools."
It's also a way to create a cross-cultural community of Asians and Americans, she said.
"Hopefully we can create an Asian-American community -- a way to foster more understanding of our different cultures."
Chopstix classes will be held at the Georgetown Community Center, formerly the Gilbert and Bennett School, at 49 New Street, Wilton. Demo classes will be held on Aug. 28 and Sept. 4: ages 2 to 3, from 10 to 10:45 a.m.; and ages 4 to 5, from 11 to 11:45 a.m. For further information, visit www.chineselanguageschool.org/.
Tuesday, August 3, 2010
China Becomes Second Biggest World Economy
http://www.cnbc.com/id/38482538
Depending on how fast its exchange rate rises, China is on course to overtake the United States and vault into the No.1 spot sometime around 2025, according to projections by the World Bank, Goldman Sachs and others.
China came close to surpassing Japan in 2009 and the disclosure by a senior official that it had now done so comes as no surprise. Indeed, Yi Gang, China's chief currency regulator, mentioned the milestone in passing in remarks published on Friday.
"China, in fact, is now already the world's second-largest economy," he said in an interview with China Reform magazine posted on the website of his agency, the State Administration of Foreign Exchange.
Cruising past Japan might give China bragging rights, but its per-capita income of about $3,800 a year is a fraction of Japan's or America's. (Check the latest US GDP report here)
"China is still a developing country, and we should be wise enough to know ourselves," Yi said, when asked whether the time was ripe for the yuan to become an international currency.
Can It Be Sustained?
China's economy expanded 11.1 percent in the first half of 2010, from a year earlier, and is likely to log growth of more than 9 percent for the whole year, according to Yi.
China has averaged more than 9.5 percent growth annually since it embarked on market reforms in 1978. But that pace was bound to slow over time as a matter of arithmetic, Yi said.
Slideshow: Countries With the Most Foreign Investment
If China could chalk up growth this decade of 7-8 percent annually, that would still be a strong performance. The issue was whether the pace could be sustained, Yi said, not least because of the environmental constraints China faces.
In an assessment disputed by Beijing, the International Energy Agency said last week that China had surpassed the United States as the world's largest energy user. If China can keep up a clip of 5-6 percent a year in the 2020s, it will have maintained rapid growth for 50 years, which Yi said would be unprecedented in human history.
The uninterrupted economic ascent, which saw China overtake Britain and France in 2005 and then Germany in 2007, is gradually translating into clout on the world stage.
China is a leading member of the Group of 20 rich and emerging nations, which since the 2008 financial crisis has become the world's premier economic policy-setting forum.
In one important respect, however, China is still a shrinking violet: anxious to shield itself from the rough-and-tumble of global markets, it does not permit its currency to be freely exchanged except for purposes of trade and foreign direct investment.
And Yi said Beijing had no timetable to make the yuan fully convertible.
"China is very big and its development is unbalanced, which makes this problem much more complicated. It's difficult to reach a consensus on it," he said.
In the same vein, China was in no rush to turn the yuan into a global currency.
"We must be modest and we still have to keep a low profile. If other people choose the yuan as a reserve currency, we won't stop that as it is the demand of the market. However, we will not push hard to promote it," he added.
No Big Rise in Yuan
China has been encouraging the use of the yuan beyond its borders, allowing more trade to be settled in renminbi and taking a series of measures to establish Hong Kong as an offshore center where the currency can circulate freely.
But Yi said: "Don't think that since people are talking about it, the yuan is close to becoming a reserve currency.
Actually, it's still far from that." He said expectations of a stronger yuan, also known as the renminbi, had diminished.
There was no basis for a sharp rise in the exchange rate, partly because the price level in China had risen steadily over the past decade. "This suggests that the value of the renminbi has moved much closer to equilibrium compared with 10 years ago," he said.
Slideshow: Asia's Most Expensive Cities
Yi's comments are unlikely to go down well in Washington, where lawmakers have scheduled a hearing for Sept. 16 to consider whether U.S. government action is needed to address China's exchange rate policy.
China scrapped the yuan's 23-month-old peg to the dollar on June 19 and resumed a managed float. The yuan has since risen only 0.8 percent against the dollar, and economists calculate that it has fallen in value against a basket of currencies.
China would stick to the principle of holding its $2.45 trillion of official reserves in a mix of currencies and assets.
The stockpile — the world's largest — was so big that it was impossible to adjust its currency composition in a short space of time: "We won't be particularly bearish on the dollar at a given time or particularly bearish on the euro at another time."
Depending on how fast its exchange rate rises, China is on course to overtake the United States and vault into the No.1 spot sometime around 2025, according to projections by the World Bank, Goldman Sachs and others.
China came close to surpassing Japan in 2009 and the disclosure by a senior official that it had now done so comes as no surprise. Indeed, Yi Gang, China's chief currency regulator, mentioned the milestone in passing in remarks published on Friday.
"China, in fact, is now already the world's second-largest economy," he said in an interview with China Reform magazine posted on the website of his agency, the State Administration of Foreign Exchange.
Cruising past Japan might give China bragging rights, but its per-capita income of about $3,800 a year is a fraction of Japan's or America's. (Check the latest US GDP report here)
"China is still a developing country, and we should be wise enough to know ourselves," Yi said, when asked whether the time was ripe for the yuan to become an international currency.
Can It Be Sustained?
China's economy expanded 11.1 percent in the first half of 2010, from a year earlier, and is likely to log growth of more than 9 percent for the whole year, according to Yi.
China has averaged more than 9.5 percent growth annually since it embarked on market reforms in 1978. But that pace was bound to slow over time as a matter of arithmetic, Yi said.
Slideshow: Countries With the Most Foreign Investment
If China could chalk up growth this decade of 7-8 percent annually, that would still be a strong performance. The issue was whether the pace could be sustained, Yi said, not least because of the environmental constraints China faces.
In an assessment disputed by Beijing, the International Energy Agency said last week that China had surpassed the United States as the world's largest energy user. If China can keep up a clip of 5-6 percent a year in the 2020s, it will have maintained rapid growth for 50 years, which Yi said would be unprecedented in human history.
The uninterrupted economic ascent, which saw China overtake Britain and France in 2005 and then Germany in 2007, is gradually translating into clout on the world stage.
China is a leading member of the Group of 20 rich and emerging nations, which since the 2008 financial crisis has become the world's premier economic policy-setting forum.
In one important respect, however, China is still a shrinking violet: anxious to shield itself from the rough-and-tumble of global markets, it does not permit its currency to be freely exchanged except for purposes of trade and foreign direct investment.
And Yi said Beijing had no timetable to make the yuan fully convertible.
"China is very big and its development is unbalanced, which makes this problem much more complicated. It's difficult to reach a consensus on it," he said.
In the same vein, China was in no rush to turn the yuan into a global currency.
"We must be modest and we still have to keep a low profile. If other people choose the yuan as a reserve currency, we won't stop that as it is the demand of the market. However, we will not push hard to promote it," he added.
No Big Rise in Yuan
China has been encouraging the use of the yuan beyond its borders, allowing more trade to be settled in renminbi and taking a series of measures to establish Hong Kong as an offshore center where the currency can circulate freely.
But Yi said: "Don't think that since people are talking about it, the yuan is close to becoming a reserve currency.
Actually, it's still far from that." He said expectations of a stronger yuan, also known as the renminbi, had diminished.
There was no basis for a sharp rise in the exchange rate, partly because the price level in China had risen steadily over the past decade. "This suggests that the value of the renminbi has moved much closer to equilibrium compared with 10 years ago," he said.
Slideshow: Asia's Most Expensive Cities
Yi's comments are unlikely to go down well in Washington, where lawmakers have scheduled a hearing for Sept. 16 to consider whether U.S. government action is needed to address China's exchange rate policy.
China scrapped the yuan's 23-month-old peg to the dollar on June 19 and resumed a managed float. The yuan has since risen only 0.8 percent against the dollar, and economists calculate that it has fallen in value against a basket of currencies.
China would stick to the principle of holding its $2.45 trillion of official reserves in a mix of currencies and assets.
The stockpile — the world's largest — was so big that it was impossible to adjust its currency composition in a short space of time: "We won't be particularly bearish on the dollar at a given time or particularly bearish on the euro at another time."
Chinese archaeologists' African quest for sunken ship of Ming admiralSearch for remains of armada which came to grief on a pioneering voyage to Kenya
Chinese archaeologists travel to Kenya this week to begin work unearthing what is believed to be the remains of a Chinese treasure ship, piloted by ancient Chinese captain Zheng He.
Zheng He mapped out many continents in the early 1400s. He is widely believed to have arrived in North America before Christopher Columbus, according to retired British submarine commander and and writer, Gavin Menzies.
Please see the full article here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jul/25/kenya-china
Zheng He mapped out many continents in the early 1400s. He is widely believed to have arrived in North America before Christopher Columbus, according to retired British submarine commander and and writer, Gavin Menzies.
Please see the full article here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jul/25/kenya-china
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
The 