Tuesday, April 13,2010
The beginning of this writing is for Mrs. Gries and her wonderful associates in the Helfrich Park Paradise Café. As in any city, there are of areas within the city that have market places (like USA farmer’s markets) that sell different types of food. Usually there will be fruits, vegetables and meats. In addition to the local cuisine of the city or village there may be markets that sell other types of goods (like an open air Wal-Mart that varies in size depending on the size of the village or city). The market near our hotel in downtown Beijing is two city blocks from our hotel, is extremely large in size and has quite a bit to offer, thus my reference of the Paradise Café at the beginning of this paragraph.
Like the wonderful goodies that Chef Gries creates with Angie, Beth, Cheryl, Liz and Becky, I stumbled upon some delicacies that we do not serve at Helrich Park normally, if ever. Do you remember earlier I wrote that quite a bit of food prepared at our meals was like fondue (fried or boiled in a small pot at our table)? I would describe this market to be like Franklin Street during the Fall Festival times week except much larger in size. Like the Fall Festival, much of the food is deep-fried. Some of the items that our wonderful students may be familiar with include deep-fried bananas, beef, pork, lamb, cucumbers, green vegetables, etc. But I also saw some other goodies such as: big beetles, sea horse, starfish, scorpion, snake, squid, crab, and other types of bugs (how would the PUMA students like to have some of those fried items for lunch and then burn off the extra calories in Physical Education class led by Mrs. Redd and Mr. Weber?). With all of that, and I may have missed some foods, I was a bit surprised there was no deep fried Twinkies! Anyway, the variety of food that was offered was tremendous and for a weeknight, and the area was packed with city people and tourists.
Our work for the day began at the National Ministry of Education. We went to the second floor of a massive building and assembled in a room with a 30 foot conference table that had seating for 28 people. There are 40 administrators in our group so those that did not have seating at the table sat around the room in a second row. The Education Ministry Secretary for the country of China welcomed us and spoke about 90 minutes on the history of education in China, the educational reforms currently underway, obstacles regarding those reforms, educational funding, teacher professional development, and future goals of education in China. Currently there are around 300 million school aged students in China. They have compulsory education through ninth grade, which is fairly new, within the last decades. They have what they call a 3-6-3-3 educational system. Three years of pre-school, six years of elementary education, three years of middle school and three years of high school. If student wants to attend college, he must pass a very rigorous exam. It is their philosophy that students be well rounded and exposed to high academic rigor, moral education, sports, and arts. There was much more he spoke about but I am not a good enough typer to get everything down that he said although I have about six pages of notes.
Next the country’s Educational Research Specialist spoke about the educational reforms being put in place for migrant workers. In the past eleven years, Beijing’s transitional or migrant population has gone from 160,000 students to 500,000 students. This is excluding the students that live in Beijing! As you can guess, this is a huge task to get things organized and provide education to all of the school-aged students that are moving to the cities with their families in search of employment. As we have discussed many times at school and I am sure you have heard at home, education and skills will provide you with opportunities in life. In China, 70% of the population lives in rural areas (China has a population of 1.3 billion people) and in the last fifty years China has made a very concentrated effort to expand educational opportunities for people throughout the country. It is the philosophy of the government that education will give the people in the rural areas more opportunities to have a better lifestyle. That is the main goal of the Ministry of Education and it is not unlike our national Department of Education in the USA as it sets education policy for all of China. The youth of any society is the future, and like our country, China wants to prepare its youth to make sound decisions as adults in whichever field of work they choose.
This brings you up to date on today’s (Tuesday) activities. Enjoy your day, students, at school and work hard. I see the weather is nice in Evansville via The Weather Channel so work hard in class, play at recess and then get back to work to end the day on a positve note.
