[Taylor Bub]

Hi everyone,

My name is Taylor Bub and I am a 4th year teacher in LAUSD.  I teach Biology, Physiology and Psychology. I find it important to explore different cultures from around the world and ensure that every student feels welcome, valued and represented within the classroom.  At our school we have an architecture and digital design magnet and I often work closely with those who are in the magnet.  I am looking forward to gathering ideas that can be used in cross curricular activities.

[Taylor Bub]

I very much enjoyed participating in this class.  As another classmate stated above, so much of our curriculum in all courses is eurocentric.  We spend so much time focused on white colonisation and history, that we tend to see other cultures that have so much rich history pushed aside.  I want to make sure that my students, no matter what class they are in are learning about and are exposed to other cultures, specifically those of East Asia.  As a teacher in LAUSD, I look at my students and see so much diversity, but many people believe that diversity is limited to white, black and Latinx students, but we have sucha. large population of Asian students as well.  Plus, there are many parts of Asian culture that have recently made their way into American pop culture (things like anime, manga, kpop, sushi, boba, etc.).  I think it is so important for our students to learn about and understand the different aspects of Asian culture.  This class was eye opening for me in that I was able to learn so much more than I previously knew.  I am grateful for the opportunity to meet the people in this course and to have access to the many different lesson ideas on how we can incorporate what we have learned into out own classrooms.  

I was so glad to see more focus on women and their experiences throughout history in East Asia.  I think a lot of courses gloss over this or don't even mention it at all.  It is important for us as teachers to show our students, no matter what race or gender they are, that they are represented in history and in the world today.  I loved learning about Ho Nansorhon and her accomplishments, as well as how her family provided her with so much support and I want to find ways to incorporate her into what I am teaching.

Finally, I was so grateful when scrolling through the forum to see someone's post about foot binding.  I find this concept so fascinating and it gave me so many ideas on how I could incorporate this into my curriculum as a physiology teacher.  I will be using what I have learned from this course to meet with history teachers on m y campus to see how we can work together to create cross curricular projects for students to help solidify their learning and understanding of East Asian culture. 

Thank you so much for such a fun and wonderful course, I learned so many things and I am looking forward to using them in my classroom in the future.

Taylor

[Taylor Bub]

Melina I love your idea to focus on key women throughout these historical moments.  I think it is so important for our students to see strong women who were real people and not just characters on a tv show.  So many students only learn about male figures in history and in classes about culture.  As a science teacher, I have students explore female scientists as well as scientists who were people of color as a project.  There are so many women, Asian, Black, Latinx, and other people of color who are not recognized in favor of white males throughout history.  I always think of Rosalind Franklin, who discovered DNA, but her spotlight was taken by Francis Crick and James Watson.  I wonder how many other women or people of color this has happened to throughout history that we do not even know about.

[Taylor Bub]

I thought this was interesting too. I remember being in seventh grade and my history teacher taught us what foot binding was and explained it as if it was something to be laughed at.  But if you look at how the process was completed and the results, you can see that it is actually excruciatingly painful.   I teach anatomy and physiology right now and I have a unit where we discuss bones and hwo they develop.  I think in the future I will add in activities where students can view x-rays or other images of the bones of bound feet.  This way students can see the results of foot binding and understand how terrible of a practice it was for those who had to endure it.  I have included a link below that shows a typical foot x ray vs an x ray of a person who had their foot bound.  This would be good to use to have students make connections across the curriculum.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1930043316302710

[Taylor Bub]

I really like the quote you pulled out. "Though I think you are an unworthy enemy..."  To give an idea on how to incorporate this into a lesson, you might provide students with quotes like the one you mentioned and have them discuss the views on war from a Japanese perspective.  Then students could be given an similar or differing quote about war from a similar time period but a different civilisation, (I'm thinking the middle ages possibly?). Then students can dissect this quote and compare the different perspectives on war across the different cultures.

[Taylor Bub]

I think it speaks to the intelligence of the leaders of the Qing dynasty that they were able to maintain control of China for such a long time.   Clayton spoke about the accommodations the Qing dynasty made for other cultures within their rule.  Some things that stuck out to me were things like being more accepting of Tibetin Buddhist monks, and maintaining the same tax system that was already in place.  These things helped businesses not be interrupted by the change in rulership.   I did find it interesting that, while they seemed so accommodating, they also encouraged (if not required) men to shave their heads and wear their hair in braids, and I wonder if this created any kind of negative reaction from the Chinese people.

[Taylor Bub]

I love your idea of having students learn about Sijo poetry and utilizing rap or songs to help them connect to it.  I think many students struggle in making connections to poetry and by connecting these ancient forms of poetry to something so modern can be so enlightening for them. I think that Sijo is also a great comparison to haiku, and if time allowed, it would be interesting to provide students with a particular song or rap and have them rewrite it into the form of a Sijo or Haiku poem, or even to have them write a Sijo and Haiku poem about the same topic to compare the two styles with one another.

[Taylor Bub]

I love that you are trying to learn Japanese.  I personally have always had a fascination with learning new languages.  I think however, many people choose to learn more Euro-centric languages (thinking French, Spanish, Italian, and German) because they are seen as 'impressive' to be able to be fluent in.  However, I have always found it much more impressive that people, expecially those who have immigrated from China, Vietnam, Thailand and other Aisan countries have been able to learn English so well considering how different the languages are from one another.  I have watched other people make rude comments or just act in rude ways towards people who are speaking Korean or Vietnamese and switching between that and English.  I wonder if this rude attitude comes from some form of jealousy that other people are able to communicate in more than one language, or if it really is just from believing that people who speak languages other than English from birth are lesser.  Personally I would love to learn Japanese or Korean, but I have found that the grammatical rules compared to English seem so complex (even though I know that the English language has some more complex grammatical rules).

[Taylor Bub]

I would be so interested in reading the article you found about the canal China is building in Nicaragua.  I think that it would be an interesting comparison for students to explore the similarities between China reaching out and utilizing other countries for cheap labor, and how the United States currently uses countries like China and India for the same.  One question that could be asked is, how can we, as a country or even as a world society, promote the idea that the labor of people, no matter where they are from, should be compensated fairly and similarly, regardless of what country that person was born in.  It could be interesting to allow students to research labor laws and treatment of 'employees' in 3rd world countries, and hold an in class discussion.

I also fully agree with your statement that China has a long way to go in terms of 'going green'. They are still one of the number 1 importers of good in the United States, and many of the items that are exported from China are low quality, plastic products, designed to last only a few months or years before a replacement would be needed; which only adds to our world's growing problem of pollution.

[Taylor Bub]

I agree with both you and Tara.  I also found it so surprising to see such little emphasis on education within the United States when compared to other countries.  I really love your idea of using these charts in homeroom to discuss the value and importance that we place. on education here in the United states.  To add on to your idea of having students explore the divide between the values placed on education, students could also explore the other aspects shown in the pie chart and compare them to those same values in the US.  For example, students could explore not only the differences in educational value, but also in familial values, as this is a strong theme throughout many different East Asian cultures.  Students might be interested in researching their own familial values (in terms of respect for elders, etc) and comparing them to other cultures.

[Taylor Bub]

Reflecting on our meeting this morning, I found it so interesting that the growth of Christianity was embedded in the social change specifically for women in China.  I thought about how in class, we can have students compare the affects of Christianity on cultures, specifically how they affect the culture in a positive and then a negative way.  We often often think (and rightly so) about European explorers conquering other cultures and forcing changes onto those cultures to change them.  But I have not seen many evaluations of how these exporers bringing in Christianity might have affected the culture in a positive way, other than in typical documents showing how these explorers "helped 'lesser' cultures become more 'civilised'".  

[Taylor Bub]

I found the reading fascinating as well. I think that it would be important to inlcude the "quiet gender revolution" in our courses.  We live in a world that is so male dominated, and I think that many of us look at these power distributions and focus mainly on European cultures and American cultures.  However, it is important to see that these problems exist worldwide.  I have expressed this thought before but I still wonder (and probably will never know) why women in almost every culture are viewed as lesser than men.

[Taylor Bub]

I agree that it is important to identify "cultural heroes" within many different cultures.  We tend to focus in school on European cultures and the heroes of European cultures, but I think it would be super important for our students to be introduced to separate cultures and their heroes.  This lends more validity to ideas found on other cultures.  I love your idea of having students create artwork based on the folklore because this allows for students to explore other cultures that they might not otherwise experience

[Taylor Bub]

I really love your idea of exploring the rivers in China and designing a levee system.  This would be such a cool way to create a cross curricular plan for students to help solidify their learning.  I teach science and we discuss engineering a lot and ways that we as humans can affect the environment.  Creating a project where students research these rivers and where people have settled along them, while also deciding where and how to create a levee to prevent flooding.   They could then look into how the levee's they propose might affect local ecosystems as well.

[Taylor Bub]

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

Taylor Bub - John F Kennedy High School

Employee ID: 01140767

Thank you for such an interesting course!!

[Author]

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