Last Friday, I accompanied TECC Smith president Gao Chi and Fundraising VP Zhai to visit the local Chinese Immersion Charter School. We'd met the principal of the school and a fair few of the families whose kids attended the school at our Chinese Cultural Exhibition a few weeks before; a sort of interactive arts and crafts/performance/educational event. The event was a huge hit, and the school and TECC Smith wanted to get to know each other and see if we could work out a beneficial relationship in the future.

As a white kid learning Chinese as a foreign language in America, just like other kids learn French or Spanish, this opportunity was really special to me. I started learning Chinese when I was eleven in sixth grade. The middle school offered French, German, Spanish, or Chinese. Most people took Spanish or French; almost no one wanted to take Chinese. While there were upwards of five Spanish classes, all full to the brim, I was in a single Chinese class of 13. However, I did live in a school district in which about 60% of students didn't speak English at home- a large portion of these spoke Chinese. This was both a blessing and a curse: on the positive side, I had endless conversation partners, all with native accents, to practice with. On the negative side, a vast majority of them thought I was weird for so enthusiastically trying to speak with them in Chinese, and as I got older and more self conscious, there were more critical ears out there to catch my mistakes. Still, I didn't find Chinese class before college all that challenging, until my senior year, when I suddenly realized that all students with no Chinese background had phased out of the program or into lower levels of Chinese. Half the kids in the class were ABCs, the other half were actually Chinese ESL students, and then there was me. Needless to say that was a challenging year.

Anyway, away from my reflections on the past and back to the charter school! The school carried grades k-3 & 6, adding a grade every year. The classes for the lower grades were all in Chinese, except for English language arts. The younger grades learned no pinyin or phonetic system; but the sixth graders, older, more established in English, and more self-conscious, learned pinyin to help learn the sounds and to use computer systems. All teachers for classes other than English Language Arts were native Chinese speakers and never spoke English to the children.  However, they would respond to English, and children were not scolded for speaking English. However, over the course of the children's educations, the teachers would slowly start to "forget" more and more English, to help the children's understanding of Chinese grow. I was intrigued and more than a little jealous of these kids opportunity.  Whenever I speak Chinese with native speakers, I'm inevitably complemented on my accent; but I often speak slowly, fumbling if I'm not really prepared to speak, and generally feel awkward. Maybe my fluency would be better if I'd had this environment to grow in.

Contrary to what one might think, very few of the children were Chinese. Any Asian-looking child had generally been adopted by American families. Maybe it's a good thing: they have no reason to be self-conscious, all being on the same level. Their situation is both so similar and yet so different from my own. An organization at Mount Holyoke (another women's college about 30 minutes away from us) had already been working with the school to record readings of children's books in Chinese. Like me, these children don't have parents who can help them with their homework. Mount Holyoke's Love Across Coasts and Smith College's TECC can, hopefully, help fill that gap by providing them with extra help, whether simply through speaking to them in Chinese or educating them about China's culture, both past and present.