Monday, November 3, 2008
November 3, 2008
- I’m still having to pinch myself to realize that I am in China.
- The conference is into full gear right now. There are probably 200 people in attendance at the Forum. I’m guessing 70% are from the Jiangsu Province and the rest of us our from the US, Canada, Australia, England, and Italy.
- After a breakfast buffet that included fish and corn on the cobb, we had our offical group picture taken, and then spent the rest of the morning listening to 12 different speakers from all of the participating nations. Each explained why they felt it was important to be attending; the world is truly flat, and how honored they are to be able to participate.
- Several speakers represented "independent" a euphemism for "private" schools. There presence isn't surprising considering how costly it is just to get here.
- I've spoken with a number of educators from Manchester...Manchester, England that is.
- The closing keynote speaker for the morning session was the equivalent of the
commissioner of education for the Jiangsu Province which has a population of 74 million. Each Chinese province has a declared focus or speciality, and the focus for Jiangsu is education! The Commissioner identified 5 aspects of school leadership, the first of which was to stay in compliance with their federal, provincial, and municipal regulations. This focus certainly reflects the nature of their government and society; i.e. follow the rules. The second was to manage schools democratically, so they took are talking about developing collaborative cultures. He also said that the principal was the “sore of the school”, I think he meant soul! - All in all, the challenges of all schools, no matter where you live, seem to be the same. I am very anxious to tour the local schools. We won’t start that until tomorrow.
- I think I’ll go for a walk and burn off all of the calories I’m consuming. I haven’t
really seen Yangzhou yet other than from the window of the bus. - We listened to 4 different speakers this afternoon. Every speaker’s presentation is translated into either English or Mandarin, depending on his/her native language. So that means that we hear each speech twice.
- I started to nod off during the last two…I wasn’t the only one.
- I realized that there has been no one attempt at humor in any of the presentations. I realize most jokes don’t translate into another language, so I asked for the English speakers if he was cautioned about using humor and he said “no”. He did tell me however that every presentation is edited for both politics as well as commercial names, i.e, his presentation was on technology but he was asked to remove all references to specific software titles and company names.
- Although each speaker was ignorant of what the others were presenting there were a number of common themes. The presentations were on school culture, leadership, and technology, and the concepts of collaboration, assessment, and shared leadership were repeated in almost every speech. PLC’s and the Dufours were even mentioned!
- My favorite saying for the day was: “we can’t measure everything with one ruler.”…and this was mentioned by the president of China’s National Institute for Educational Research.
- During tonight’s banquet we had assigned seats and the purposely mixed the Chinese principals with the visiting principals, as they refer to us. I was asked if principals in America influence how teachers vote and how they invest their money!
- We’ve learned that almost no special needs or 504 type students go to their high schools. All students take middle school entrance exams and the middle schools, since the middle schools are very selective, they all become very homogenous, with the brightest going to specific schools. Their class sizes are very large compared to ours, but they have few discipline problems and all kids do their homework. The middle and high school entrance exams are not standardized, only their college exams are. They have nothing like NCLB and nothing like IDEA, and their citizens don’t vote on the town’s yearly budget, although the local government officials do decide how much money each school gets. I’m very anxious to visit schools which we will do on Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday.
- The food at the banquet was delcious. It was true Chinese food, and the food from this city, Yangzhou, is very well known for it’s quality and creativity. Fortunately, an assistant principal from Souzhou sat next to me and she explained everything that we were eating.
- The Chinese do use each diners individual chop stocks to serve themselves from the common platter, so there’s a lot of “double dipping” as they say on Seinfeld. And they do not cover their mouth when they cough…so I’m probably caught SARS already.
- After dinner I’ve been too exhausted to go out, jet lag is still killing me. Maybe I’ll be able to start tomorrow
