(Post on behalf of Duan)

In the past year, the meaning of my work has become the most common topic of my thoughts. So far I have established about 15 schools for young children, and am currently working with more than 260 children (the numbers is still growing), I have to remind myself to be careful about what our schools are providing to them. Are we doing really good things for them? Do they need what we are giving? Do we really know what we are doing for the children? Do they want to be the way we want them to be? Who gives us the right to cultivate the children as we want? Do we really have the rights? I have so much doubt about my work, because I really hope my students could be a good person and have a good life in the future and I want to contribute the positive power for our education system.

However, what is a good life? Nowadays in China lots of people are in a terrible circulation of their desire and anxiety. The desire makes them feel more anxious, thus they think if they had more they would then worry less. This negative circulation also influences our education philosophy.

For example, when the parents are thinking about sending their child to our school, usually they have worries about what and how we teach. Normally most of them have strong preconceptions about early childhood education. Such as learning as preparation for primary school, learning to be skilled, learning for being a beloved one in the community, learning for being smart enough to protect her/himself, etc. Behind all parents’ opinions there are their unresolved desires and anxiety. They want to be a rich business person, a professional expert, a superstar, a governor, a doctor, a lawyer, even the housewife of a magnate, all in all they want to have an easier life, but now they do not, and they are bearing the powerful pressure with great effort! I also partly understand why they yearn for all this. The main cause is not the greed or the vanity of human beings; it is the unfair social system. As an ordinary person, everything is hard in China, such as finding good schools, hospitals, safe food, even clean air, while the rich and powerful people have the convenience of all the fine resources. On the other hand, the media is encouraging the consumerism because our government wants the GDP to keeps growing quickly. So the parents are also suffering with these problems. Their income is not high enough, their apartment is not like they want, their skin and body shape is not perfect ( more and more mothers ask our teachers to not giving too much food to their daughters because they worry the young girls would be not slim enough in the future. Other parents force their children to eat more, and there are many parents who do not really care what their children eat in the school, instead their concern is what kind of skills they learn in school). Therefore the parents have an unhappy life in this society. I think psychologically most of the parents from a grassroots family have subconscious guilt for their children because of all the reasons above. Now they pass their unrealized desires to the young generation. Because they think it is too hard to provide the fine conditions and friendly environment for the children they are then so afraid their children will lag behind in the competition with others for the limited resources. Under the pressure and feeling guilty, they have very incompatible requirements for our schools. They want their children to learn as much as we can teach without facing any difficulty in our schools. They ask our teachers to take care of their children as best as we can; they worry we let them eat too much or too little; the parents are not satisfied with the air conditioner, it is always too warm or too cold; they ask us to not let them get any little hurts in the school; ask us to teach more words and math. They have forgotten the famous proverb that every Chinese person knows, “becoming the greatest needs suffered of all the bitterest difficulties.”

This is one my biggest my career challenges. Not like the manufacturing production or service industry, where they focus on the satisfaction of their customers, we need to persuade the parents to concur with our education philosophy while also trying to improve our education quality. More and more we noticed that educating the parents’ thoughts and behavior even is more urgent than for the children.

That’s why I often ask the parents same questions I ask myself everyday: what kind of person do we want the child to be? Are we sure s/he would be satisfied in the future with being that kind of person? How can we design their future without asking their thoughts? Are anyone of us really perfect enough to have the right to ask our children to be perfect?

In our school, our plan is to supporting the students being a good person. What does a good person mean? We, all of our staff, have discussed and concurred the values of our team as this: Firstly, to be a good person. That means to be honest, kind, thinking of others more; first of all we need to be a better person for our children.

It is not easy to be a good person though, for adults or children. To be a honest person, we take a higher risk to be cheated by a less honest person; to be kind, we are more easily been hurt our softter heart by a harder one; thinking of others more means thinking of ourselves less at the same time. These are not parents want to happen to their children. It is maybe reasonable, to protect their children parents would like their children to be less selfless. But in our schools, we try to educate the children to be a good person. It is so different compared with most of the schools in China. We do not have the ready-made textbooks for the children, there is no the writing homework for the students, no primary school teaching style classes, no exams. Meanwhile we have a thousand well-chosen picture books from the world; our art teachers are also excellent artists; we introduce the best classical Chinese articles to the children. The students also experience real occupational experiences as a postman, doctor, chef, police in the real working offices in our schools; on the other hand, we never hand feed the children and instead train them to eat by themselves; we remind them to talk and sing gently to avoid disturbing others and also feel the beauty of singing. In the other schools, teachers ask the students to talk and sing very loud. We ask our students to eat slowly and learn to appreciate the food where as other school teachers ask them eat quickly as a competition. When some students are crying we never just ask them to stop as in other schools, we usually agree they cry for a while until they have expressed all the negative emotion and then remind them there are more effective ways to solve the problem because crying can not solve any thing. When someone broke toys or wasted food, instead of preaching or rebuking them, we ask them try to fix by themselves as our only rule is “ take care of and be responsible to yourself, others and the environment”. We even expend lots of effort to make a small field with the children to plant some vegetables when other schools ask them work hard on the textbooks.

We are doing this because we believe if each of us could be a better person then all of us would have an easier life in the future. Not so many parents really agree with our education philosophy, including the educational department of the government. People often are more concern about what they could have now. So besides the daily communication with the parents, we also host free workshops for learning parenting. The good news is they have more sense about it gradually, even slowly. That is really nice hope for my work so far.

As I am writing this, I am facing another big challenge. Since Chinese economic situation is going down since last year, the company I am working for has a serious financial problem like many other companies in China. All the staff have not been paid for three months already, and for me even almost one year. Many staff already left or are leaving, but our education program team is still working for our dreams so far. I don’t know how long we can maintain since so many of us need the salary for the regular life.

I have written too much above maybe. Whenever think of early childhood education I always have too much to share just like I did during APLP. That is my passion, my dream. I believe I am working for a better world for our children.

A Whole New World!

Being in the Middle East is still like a dream - A region I have never planned for living. After 2 months in Abu Dhabi, UAE, I would say, except the extreme heat, I am very well.

After graduation in last August, I had a one-week train trip across the US from Chicago to San Francisco. It was surprisingly a fantastic journey though at first I was quite disappointed as it was planned with a friend but got cancelled by her at last minute. I still decided to go, just to make my mind clearer about post-graduate life - I had no job offer yet, I did not know where to live (got kicked off from student apartment), and I had no idea to stay or leave the US...

                                (Graduation Commencement)

Life is just like a journey, You might miss some views here, but as long as you keep going, there will be other views that excites you. Coming back from the train trip, I immediately got a job offer from the NYC Department of Education, which I had tried time after time before I graduated and almost gave it up. I then moved from Manhattan to Brooklyn where my office locates and worked for 7 months until this March.

I had always expected to work in the UN so when I got an internship opportunity in the UN Bangkok, I quickly decided to leave the government job as well as the US and to embrace UN!

                                (Tuk-tuk in Thailand, saying Aloha!!)

March, I left the US where I lived for 2 years and got back home to China.
April, I had a very short-term period but wonderful internship experience (of course with train trips here and there) in Bangkok, Thailand.
May, I got my current job offer at International Renewable Energy Agency and moved to Abu Dhabi, UAE.

                                (View outside of my office)

In the past half a year, I had spent 3 New Years: January 1st, Lunar's new year, and Songkran which is Thai new year. With all of the new years' good wishes, I am expecting more journeys in my next half a year which will start with Masai Mara, Kenya in late July! My first time to Africa.

I continue to miss G12 APLP Ohana and wish a big reunion in the near future! Until then, please be well and be happy.