Introducing China to Rosemount-Apple Valley-Eagan schools

The Chinese guest teacher at Scott Highlands Middle School gave her students a quick mystery to solve one day last week.

Standing at the front of class, 28-year-old Xu Jia held out a handful of what looked like shuttlecocks with brightly colored feathers. What were they for?

"To dust things!" one student yelled. "To tickle your feet?" guessed another.

Xu grinned and shook her head. The mystery objects, she explained, are bounced off the feet of players in a game called jiànzi.

But if jiànzi was strange to her students, Xu is having some new experiences of her own as one of two Chinese guest teachers in the Rosemount-Apple Valley-Eagan School District.

"It took me a while to adjust to the food here," she confessed. For one thing, what's up with the raw broccoli? In China, "we tend to cook our vegetables." As for the idea of eating a raw mushroom, "That's my Mount Everest," she said, laughing.

But cultural exchange is the name of the game for Xu and Xing Bei, her counterpart at Rosemount Middle School. Both women are here until next summer, teaching language and culture as the district builds its Mandarin Chinese program.

In addition to vocabulary and grammar, students will get a taste of China that's likely to include lessons in cooking and calligraphy, Xu said. But her work isn't just in the classroom. "I would like to pro ject a modern and healthy image of China," and the views of many American adults need to be updated, she said.

"I've met a lot of different people, and some of them surprised me by asking questions like, 'Do you still have a lot of bicycles in China?' or 'Do you have libraries?'" she said.

Xu and Xing, whose visits are funded mostly through two different guest teacher programs, are providing important support as the district's Mandarin program grows, said Shane Schmeichel, the district's magnet school specialist.

The district has offered Mandarin Chinese since 2007, when Diamond Path Elementary in Apple Valley became a magnet school focusing on international studies. This fall, about 300 students at Diamond Path and 150 at Scott Highlands and Rosemount middle schools are studying Mandarin, Schmeichel said. The district also offers Spanish, French, German and Japanese.

The Mandarin program is still relatively small, with only two full-time teachers in addition to the guest teachers. But it got a boost in August when the district learned that it will receive a federal grant of $1.3 million over five years to expand Mandarin classes to secondary schools.

Next fall, the district will offer the language to high school students, probably at Rosemount High and possibly also at Eastview or Eagan, Schmeichel said.

The district's Mandarin program is developing at a time when interest in the language is building in the Twin Cities. A growing number of schools offer the language, and the metro area boasts several immersion schools and programs. In response to rising demand for Chinese teachers, the University of Minnesota has started a program in which speakers of Mandarin and other less-commonly taught languages can take evening and summer courses to earn teaching licenses while they work in schools under temporary licenses.

Discovering Minnesota

Xing, 29, teaches at a high school in Huangshan, a small, mountainous city in the Anhui Province of eastern China. When she learned she would be visiting a school in Rosemount, she Googled both the city and Minnesota. The state, she quickly learned, was a cold place known as "The Land of 10,000 Lakes."

"She knew more about Minnesota by the time she got here than I think most Minnesotans know," Schmeichel said.

Still, some things have surprised Xing: The open landscape, for example, in which buildings are scattered and people nearly always drive rather than walk.

The guest teachers, who are living with host families, arrived in August and spent a few weeks exploring before school started, checking out everything from the State Fair to an American-style barbecue.

Both Xu and Xing are English teachers in China -- and switching to Mandarin as a teaching specialty isn't as simple as you might think. Because English wasn't her first language, "I know what is the difficult part for my [Chinese] students," Xing said.

Teaching Mandarin, it's a bit harder for her to guess what will trip up American students. Universally, though, one of the toughest things for English speakers is mastering the four pitched tones of Mandarin.

In class, both teachers are also getting an up-close look at American schools. Xu's students at Scott Highlands are "wonderful," she said, but they do tend to slouch more than Chinese students. American students are allowed to express their individuality more, she said, in ways as simple as wearing jewelry and makeup.

"Here, it's very student-centered," added Xu, who teaches at a boarding school focusing on English in Hangzhou, a city about 100 miles from Shanghai. Chinese teachers lead lessons more assertively, she said, while American teachers "are on the side, to guide."

Teacher-parent relationships are also different. "Teachers in China are more respected," she said. Xu said she's been told that American parents are apt to question a teacher who says their child is doing poorly in class, saying, "That's your problem" or "You should be engaging students."

In China, "if a teacher tells the parents about something like that, they will probably blame the student, because everything the teacher says is correct," she said, laughing.

Still, her own feeling is that teachers generally know what they're talking about. "When they're telling parents their child isn't doing very well, they probably won't be lying."

Sarah Lemagie • 952-882-9016