Memories--One of my high school classmates

Just a few days ago, I got an email from a college classmate in Shanghai, showing me a photo and asking me if I know one person in the photo. I recgonised the person who was my elementary and high school classmate 30-40 years ago in Shanghai. Now he is in charge of the Shanghai branch of Siemens (an german company). My college classmate works for my elementary classmate in a German company. What a change! However I am not suprised. He is always a very brilliant student in class. Back to the time of elementary school, it was still in Mao's era. We could hardly imagine 30 or 40 years in the future. I am sure that both of us would never dream about what we are doing today. Nobody ever thought about the current situation of China. China then and China now are just beyong imagination. Luckily, both of us live quite happily in different parts of the world. I am thinking of our other classmates. I wish them all well. I am anxiously waiting to know anything about them.

"Digital Divide"---Does it divide us from our students?

More and more new technologies are available in market. Compare to 40-50 years ago, when telephone and television were the only few luxuary items we had, students and teachers were almost on the same side of line. Later, we had walkman, mobile phones, game players, we were still not that apart. Now portable DVD players, iPod, MP3 players, email, blogs, podcasting.... , the majority of educators are not that "equipped" compare to our students in classroom. Students tend to know more and more about these newbies while some of us are still afraid of, or not willing to use email. Just a few days ago, I found out that some of my students are already blogging online for quite a while. I often consider myself as technology savy. Now I just realized that I don't know much about blogging. Are we divided more from our students? How can we bridge the gap? A dream? No child left behind---Maybe we really need to shout out: NO TEACHER LEFT BEHIND!

Equality in Education

I am attending an AP course training at Philly for a week. It is a quite intensive one. I am glad that my principal send me here. She would like to offer more AP courses in school to help our students succeed in college. At the same time, I found out that most of the teachers in training are from suburban schools. At least in my class, I am the only one from a public high school of metropolitan area. Some of those schools offer more than 10 AP courses. Obviously, city school students do not get the same quality of education. Whose fault? It is not hard to find out that as inner city teachers , we don't get same amount of resources as many suburban school teachers. Another problem is that many highly qualified teachers would like to teach in suburban schools. I don't know how far Bloomburg and Klein can go. I just hope that we, teachers in New York City, get the respect and support we deserve for the benefit of our students.

讨论：美国生活与中文学习

移民美国后, 对中学生来说,首要任务是适应美国生活, 学好英文. 那么中文还要不要学, 中文的提高有没有必要. 让我们一起来讨论这些问题.