Session 6 - August 7, Brian Bernards, USC

[Nira Sun]

I absolutely agree with your thoughts on the significance of building connection with students. That was my lesson learned when I taught Chinese in a high school with 99% of Latinx. There are so much difference between the two cultures yet so much similarities as well. At that moment, how I could make my students willing to stay with this subject trumps how deep of content knowledge I can provide in that classroom. Understanding their cultures and values helped me so much in building and maintaining the connection with my students. So when I heard one of our Spanish teachers claimed that she couldn't relate to non-heritage Spanish speaking students, I was speechless. 

Sometimes, I feel like we are educating young souls more than feeding knowledge to them. From the connection we build with them, it not only makes classroom management easier, it also creates opportunities to introduce righteous characters and values to students who are still molding their mindsets. 

 

[Gerlinde Goschi]

Thank you to Prof. Bernards for the wealth of resources he shared with us today.  I now want to watch all the movies and start reading Chinese literature regularly as well as incorporate it into my classes. I am a fan of the director Zhang Yimou.  I watched a few of his films including To Live and Flowers of War, which I both recommend to my colleagues.  To Live (released in 1994) is a great story and a powerful movie that takes the audience through the Chinese Civil War, the Great Leap Forward, and the Cultural Revolution and explores the hardships, trials and challenges a family perseveres through.  I think the book To Live by Yu Hua would be interesting to read and I am grateful for the suggestions by Prof. Bernards.  The author of the book Waiting,  Ha Jin, wrote about the book: “Yu Hua writes with a cold eye and a warm heart,  His novels are ingeniously structured and exude a mythical aura. Though unmistakably Chinese, they are universally resonant.”  This is true, I believe, of the film Late Spring directed by Yasujiro Ozu.  Many of the scenes remind the audience of experiences in one’s own life and  its daily tribulations. 

[Gerlinde Goschi]

I’ll be able  to use the stories by You Jin in many of my lessons.  I love the positive messages within the stories as young students as well as older ones are able to relate to these.  I would bring the morals of stories like An Orchid in Bloom during carpet time in my class.  For example, in this story, the teacher goes out of her way to help Lan Hua,a girl who uses vulgar language in class and breaks the rules.  This is a very common situation for many teachers. Lan Hua’s teacher goes out of her way to put her in a leadership position. This causes a transformation in Lan Hua and she doesn’t use vulgar language or breaks the rules anymore.  Instead of reading a story,I would retell An Orchid in Bloom to my younger students and ask them what they learned?

 

[Jonathan Tam]

I'm going to build upon the comment that I made in class by saying that it is a little surprising how science fiction does not derive as much from our own cultures as one might expect in books and stories. But, the themes that Professor Bernard was able to derive from The Wandering Earth made a lot more sense than I initially thought. He connected the idea of mass mobilization in China's history to moving Earth and also changes in faith to the sun to China's religious history. It definitely makes the story seem a touch more characteristically Chinese compared to how American stories of space tend to be - which are these solo missions of great heroics and human domination of nature (ex. Interstellar, Armageddon, First Man, Gravity, etc.).

[Zoey McKinney]

I think this is a really great point - that international fiction does not always *seem* international on a surface level. I think sometimes we read foreign literature expecting the characters to eat foreign food or wear foreign clothes or live in a setting vastly different from our own. In reality, what we often find is that there is more universality to our stories than we thought. Authors are more likely to focus on those universal interests than cultural differences (depending on their genre and purpose), reminding us of how much we have in common as humans. On the other hand, Professor Bernard's lecture demonstrated how "culture" goes much deeper than food, holidays, language, etc, though these are often the aspects that are easiest for us to fit into our curriculum. The ideas he brought up of mass mobilization, the relationship between religion and nature, and the utilitarian view of emotions and relationships are also part of Chinese culture, though they are less obvious. If we look deeper in our reading and teaching, we can help students understand this point about culture as well.

[Celeste Modster]

I will forever treat my words with the care I would give my pets! I loved You Jin's relationship development in this story. Not only will I be able to relate this short story to my students but I will be able to share the analogy of words as pets. I believe it will be a great way to engage my students in falling in love with the power of words. I can's wait to share with them!

[Celeste Modster]

I will forever treat my words with the care I would give my pets! I loved You Jin's relationship development in this story. Not only will I be able to relate this short story to my students but I will be able to share the analogy of words as pets. I believe it will be a great way to engage my students in falling in love with the power of words. I can's wait to share with them!

[Celeste Modster]

I appreciate You Jin's short stories as a teacher because she reminds me of the importance of meeting our students where they are. The boy with the golden hair is a personification of the children that we often serve and the value that each brings. For every child that enters our classrooms with a chip on their shulder, there is a back story that reveals their disposition. Sometimes it is just a matter of reerving our judgement, watching and listening. I will share this story with my classes asking them for their perspective on tolerance and empathy.

I'd also like to engage them in conversations about constructive criticism and raising better teachers. I have found that I relate more easily with my male students. How can I be more attentive and responsible to female students who are displaying unfavorable behaviors?

It will be interesting to share the cultural origin of these stories and to discuss how students respond to life experiences in universal ways.

 

 

[Sophia Kang]

I also found You Jin's short stories to be relevant to my classroom in that they are about three types of challnges in the classroom--apathy, rebellion, and a mature child who shows inconsistency from his normal behavior. A running theme in all these stories was teacher as the savior, and parent as the antagonist who is irresponsible and harmful to the child. The children often call their parents something along the lines of "parasites" and teachers in the stories blame the parents as being bad influencers in the students' lives. I liked the teachers approach to becoming more curious about her students, but I felt to a certain extent, it was one-sided.

[Sophia Kang]

Folding Beijing is a captivating story about the more detrimental effect of the environment to those of lowest economic status. In You Jin's stories as well as this novel, economic hardship is a repeating theme. What I found shocking was that poor parents in the Third Space without money might be unable to guarantee spots for their children's education even after waiting 40 hours in line. I might use this detail to connect to the more severe impact that environmental and economic degradation has on especially lower-income students in current events suvh as economic recessions. 

[Jonathan Tam]

Hi Sophia. After reading Folding Beijing, I had a similar realization to the point that you brought up about how harming our environment creates a much more profound effect on those in poverty. Folding Beijing portrays this by a showing how each layer has a different amount of surface time, but I think that students can definitely empathize with how this affects LA when it comes to earthquakes / wildfires, emergency preparedness, and even the urban island heating effect. I think that those offers a great opportunity for social commentary and bringing to life a future that doesn't seem too far from where our society is idealogically.

[Marcos Rico]

Midori, thank you for sharing this pdf, I had never hear of the Environmental Literacy blueprint. It was published in 2015, and now in 2019 I finally get a copy of it.

I want to take some time to read it and see how I could teach my 1st graders about the environment. Here is the link to the 1st grade Science standards

https://www.cde.ca.gov/pd/ca/sc/documents/cangss-gr1-topic-mar2015.doc

I am glad to learn that I have covered some parts of  Environment Literacy while teaching about the effects of the Gold Rush on the physical environment, among many other things. We talked about the damage caused by the water cannons used for hydraulic mining to wash away hills looking for gold.

 

[Ann Huyhn]

 

Poems by Woeser is about the turmoil of Tibet and the government’s control over the people.  In the poem, “You Must Remember This,” the author uses a lot of speeches and talk about the conflict.  There are not many published authors that are women. For my class, I want to use this poem because it is written by a woman.  Tibet is a really interesting region and beside the Dalai Lama, not much is known about it to outsiders. I want my students to look at poetry and think about how it can be used to convey a deeper meaning than writing an entire story.  

 

[Ann Huyhn]

The story of “The Boy with Golden Hair,” is about a boy named, Li Long, who dyed his hair to help his grandma who was struggling to make ends meet.  However, at school, it is illegal to dye his hair and his teacher told him to redye his hair back to black. He told her he would do it, but he never did.  The teacher ended up showing up at his house and learned that he needed money. She told him that she secured a stipend for him, but he initially refused until she explained to him that it was not charity.  This story talks about a family who is struggling and it will resonate with my students because they come from households that are also struggling. I would like to use this story to start a discussion about how family. 

[Nelson Ta]

I recently did a lesson on Al Gore's Inconvenient Truth which is a documentary primarily focused on global warming and the dangers of the path humans are currently heading.  The Wandering Earth brings up interesting dilemmas about the future of civilization and I could see how it would interest kids in the class, especially ones who are interested in Science. I am curious how you would be able to do the current events while tying in the rest of the themes. 

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