[Deirdre Harris]

Hello,

I would like to receive the 2 salary points for LAUSD.

I am Deirdre Harris - My school is Apperson Street Elementary School

My employee Number is: 639741

I am really enjoying this course.  It's my first about East Asian Studies.  I teach 4th grade, and am excited to share many of these new ideas with my students.  Thank you for the information, and eye-opening materials, and opportunities you have offered to us.  

[Deirdre Harris]

I must say I have thoroughly enjoyed listening to the videos, and the lectures about Japanese Origins, and how their culture began.  There are so many interesting dichotomies, and wonderings that were shared with us, it is exciting to learn about cultures of the past.  From the Joman period, and wondering where they came up with such an ornately decorated container, with a rope-pattern, while also looking at the Pit house and realizing these were from the same time period.  While the container seemed ahead of it's time, the Pit house surely did not.  From the Dogu, clay figure that surprised us all in the slide, to when the professor told us to google  eye-gear of early inuit peoples, we were wowed by the fact that these people wore sun-glasses at all.  These early cultures found ways to adapt to their surroundings.  This would make a great lesson for my 4th graders, comparing how the 49'er's adapted with their clothing choices to the Gold Rush, during the harsh conditions they put up with to mine for gold back in 1849 and later.  The creation of Levi's to have stronger pants to wear, and wearing of bandanas to keep the dust out of their mouths, could be compared.  

I also found the Tomb Mound from the Kofun Period to be very interesting.  I would like to ask our visiting professor more questions about this, and how it relates to the Egyptian pyramid burial chambers.  I wonder what the details look like closer up in the mound, and whether the deceased was also buried with other objects.  In our study of fossils, and archelogy, we are teaching our students to always be looking for clues to the past through fossils, and what discoveries the earth reveals to us.  Just today, we were discussing the layer of clay with the metal iridium which many scientists feel came from an asteriod 65 million years ago, and how it reveals clues to how the dinosaurs disappeared. 

Japan's ancient age seems to be a period of radical and political change during which time it seems that the Japanese leaders were feeling pressure to create an empire based on the Chinese-style.  They were borrowing ideas from China.  Japan then moves into the Heian era and period, where artistic, creative literary creations, and architectural achievements then emerge.  It's all very focused on the fleeting philosoph of life, and it's diffuculties, with the Mappo idea underlying everything.  All so interesting.    I am very much looking forward to our next week's lecture.  Thank you.  

 

 

[Deirdre Harris]

How does China achieve "World Domination?"  With the New Silk Road of course.  (Thought of by none other than  Xi Ping himself.)  What an eye-opening view of how China has created and begun implementing plans to build new railways, and ports that begin in China, and pass through three major cities in order to deliver merchandise, goods and services to European customers.  Rather than ship these goods via air, or sea, they have decided to invest in a cheaper railway / port system, in order to deliver these goods more economically.  China has heavily invested billions into Djibouti (South Africa), parts of Ethiopia, and Pakistan, it seems with or without their government's permission.  The goal seems to be to redesign the political and economic roadmaps of the world no less. 

I think this film would be easily understood by students even as young as in my gifted 4th grade class.  I think that children need to think globally as well as focusing on our typical social studies topic of California.  The Elementary student's education has been somewhat limited to National topics, rather than World-Wide topics, until this past year, when Covid came into our world.  

I also think that the film-makers made this film easily understandable and accessible to everyone, by going city by city, and focusing on different people actually involved, with the narrator explaining what is going on between China and each country.  For example, how Jim Chu, who used to live in the US working for Microsoft, who now has 60 patents of his own using bluetooth technology, now develops consumer products very successfully.  They take the camera into his home, to meet his family and you learn how other people live.  The film continues to follow the camera into Djibouti where their port is strategically placed to transport goods towards Europe.   The people are somewhat upset and don't seem to understand why they are treated as 2nd class citizens however. 

Our journey continues into Addis-Ababa where again, the Chinese are the bosses, in many factories, and the Ethiopian workers feel some animosity towards the Chinese and their methods.   I found it interesting that the typical Ethiopian laborer earns $56 per month, when their Chinese supervisors earn $2000 per month, but live on the premises of the factories in dorm-style housing. 

Our last stop takes the viewer into Pakistan, through Islamabad, towards the port city of Gwadar.  This port also gives rare access to China and the nearby oil wells near the Arabian Sea.  Despite angry Pakistani who occasionally show their opposition through terrorism, the Chinese are persistent in their development of the sea port and have begun pushing out local fishermen and their families, while leaving the coastline degrated.  We are again taken into the home of a poor fisherman and his family to see what this new development is doing to all concerned.  I like that this film is showing all sides of this action by China.

I agree with the previous submission that since this film was made in 2019, it would be a wonderful assignment for students to see what has happened in this area since then.  Let's hope that China wants to help benefit all in their new community projects, otherwise, they will encounter greater opposition along the China's New Silk Road.

 

[Deirdre Harris]

This article was very eye-opening about the reduction in school-age children in South Korea.  It makes perfect sense that this could happen with the children, growing up and moving to the nearby cities, as they begin to graduate from school to look for jobs.  They don't return, to the country, and the schools are forced to close down, and either have very few students, as the first school in the article mentioned.  They turned many rooms into "golf-rooms" for Physical Education, and then the second school that was closed down completely, then repurposed to teach people how to make clay pots.  It ties into the diminishing populations in China, where the 1 child rule used to exist, and now China is faced with a similar problem if an aging population, and not many young people.  All of these governmental decisions that were implemented to solve an over-population problem, have now caused a different problem with having an elderly population, which the government has to deal with and try to solve.  These decisions have consequences, and we as learners, teachers, and observers, must learn from watching the decisions made by governments around the world.

[Deirdre Harris]

I remember driving by this National Historic Site and wondering what these buildings were as well.  Until I took a class about what happened here later on in my life.  The atrocities that happened here, are real, and they happened here, in the United States of America.  When we think of rounding up 110,000 Japanese Americans (some American Citizens) we think of WWI and the Nazi's and the concentration camps in Poland, which ended much differently, but the treatment of these people were very similar.  I recently watched the Fred Korematsu story, of how he stood up against being taken to Manzanar, and took his court case all the way to the Surpreme Court, where at the time, he lost that case 6-3, in 1944.  He was forced into the compound, why?  Because the US Government said that they were afraid they might give intelligence to the enemy at the time?  He was an American.  The conditions were awful.  For Fred, he ended up in a horse stall in a breezy room with nothing but hay, and treated like an animal.  But the families at Manzanar had to share a 20X25 foot room to be their entire house.  The bathroom situation was unlike anything they had ever had to deal with, and many families had to find cardboard to give themselves just a tiny bit of privacy.  They put up blankets to create seperate bedrooms, and family areas.  The children did their best to learn in the make-shift schools they provided.  Things were always dirty, because the sand blew in from everywhere, and there was only a tar-paper roof, no real roof for their protection from the elements.   They waited in lines to eat terrible food, that made them sick often because it was spoiled.  Many developed illnesses, and died due to a lack of decent medical care.  

After they were released after 3-4 years of this imprisonment, they were given $25 and a bus ride to the city, and told to go "find a job."  They were treated as 2nd class citizens and endured much harrassment from regular Americans at the time.  I've listened to testimonials of people who were children in these camps, (like Manzanar) speak about their experiences during, and after their release, and they live with the trauma forever.  Years later the government finally gave them redress of $20,000 for each surviving member of these camps (there were many others, mostly in the Southwest part of the country.)  But how can you put a price tag on the experiences these people went through?  They will be in therapy for the rest of their lives, and even then, still ask themselves, "What did I do to deserve this?  I must have done something to end up in here?"  

As teachers, we must use these experiences, to teach our students, (mine as young as 9 and 10-years-old) to understand that all people are guaranteed civil rights under the constitution.  We must not allow people to treat other people differently because they look differently, or any other reason.  We can use these experiences to relate to what is happening today?  Some questions for a 4th grade class to answer might be:

1)  How can we relate what happened to the 110,000 Japanese Americans in 1942,  to what is happening now to both Asian Americans, and Black Americans in our world?

2)  Why have we not learned from our past?

3) What can you (all of us) do to prevent this type of thing from happening again?  Be specific.  

Education is the best (and possibly the only) way to prevent these types of experiences from happening again.  We must keep these issues alive, and use them in our daily lives, and lesson plans as teachers to not repeat the mistakes of the past.  

[Deirdre Harris]

Hello fellow students!  It is my honor to participate in this Origins to 1800 Online Seminar.  I have been teaching for 27 years, in both the private and public sector of elementary education.  I am a proud graduate of USC, where I received my BS in Education working with Dr. Sandra Kaplan. I currently teach a 4th grade Gifted Class in Sunland, California, at Apperson Street Elementary.  I hope to teach my students that we here in America need to learn about the rest of the world, instead of just focusing on ourselves.  We are a global community, and the internet has helped bring us all together.  We need to find global solutions to the world's problems, and what better way to do that than teach our future citizens to "Think Globally."  I am excited to learn about this part of the world.  Thank you.

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