May 11th or 10th. Its our first day in China, over 7,000 miles and fifteen hours flying time from Atlanta. Add a nearly four hour car drive from Valdosta and a three hour wait
in Atlanta before the plane took off for me. It’s 1 a.m. here, but it’s 1 p.m. yesterday as far as my body is concerned. Whatever it is, I’m out of sync. In any event, it’s late and
early, and we have an early and late call yesterday this morning to climb the Great Wall. As soon as we had stepped off the plane in Beijing and went through customs, I could see
that a lot of the 43 students were on an adrenalin rush that washed away their plane fatigue and muscle aches. They were a walking combination of excitement, anticipation,
confusion, and anxiety as they inhaled the polluted newness. So many have never been outside Georgia, have never flown, much less have been in another country. I had prepared
the Valdosta contingent with monthly “getting to know you” and “all you wanted to know but didn’t know what to ask” community building and “getting ready” get-togethers a
my house. Nevertheless, they weren’t prepared for the reality of it all. So much was strange to them: the language, the currency, the food, the odors, the toilets, the hard beds,
unhygienic conditions, and a host of alien cultural habits. They don’t know the half of it. They will be tested. And, unlike the classroom, the lessons come after the test. They
will have so much to take in, so much to experience, so much to which to adjust, so much upon which to reflect, so much to understand, so much to appreciate, so much to be
awed by, and so much to enjoy. Even more so, if they see rather than merely look, listen rather than merely hear, reflect instead of shop; if they accept challenges to their
preconceptions and presumptions; if they escape the trap of their assumptions and overcome the solid rock obstacles of their perceptions; if they venture out into the uncertainty and
unknown; if they greet this newness with open hands, minds, and hearts; if they accept China and its people on their own terms free of any judgmental likes and dislikes;. China,
like everything else, is not what someone tells them it will be. It is precisely what they make of it and make it. They will just have to look at the same things in different ways or
different things in the same way. After all, what begins in their feelings, travels to their thinking, and ends up in their doing. There’s a lesson here for both life in general and the
classroom in particular, as all this is true for these students in China on both this first and following days, it will be true throughout all aspects of their lives, and it is true for me as
a teacher in the classroom on the first and following days of a new semester.
