Taking down the Taiwanese flag

So as yall know, the Taiwan/China issue is pretty sensitive here. Today i had to do my best to explain it to a bunch of kindergarteners...

a few weeks ago, a group of kids took it upon themselves to research and create flags from all the home countries of the class. they made sure to include everyone's home country and looked them all up so they could make the flags accurately... keep in mind we're talking about 5 and 6 year olds here.... i was VERY impressed. we hung the flags up and until today were displaying 9 flags: america, norway, finland, mexico, japan, singapore, korea, taiwan, and china.

we had a meeting in my classroom this morning and one of the other teachers said she was suprised no one had said anything about hanging up flags and she thought it was against school policy because of political issues. i thought this was silly but as i don't want to offend anyone, i decided to check it out with the head of dept. she said that hanging up flags is always an issue because the taiwanese students want to hang theirs but it can be offensive to the local staff. it's been up for a while and no one has said anything, but i thought we may as well take it down anyway- just in case. the taiwanese girls weren't happy but were fine about it, the rest of the class was a little confused but i did my best explain it and they mostly just accepted it as "the rules".

none of this is terribly exciting, but later in the afternoon, i was just so impressed with one little girl that i wanted to share the story: lauren, a little american girl, came up to me and said she really didn't understand why we had to take down the flag, that they had worked hard on it and it wasn't fair to jessica and venus (from taiwan). i told her that we couldn't hang it because taiwan is a part of china just like suzhou is. she said "yes, yes, I know all that, but conneticut is part of america and nobody gets upset about conneticut flags." (i thought this was pretty wow!) we talked a bit more and i told her that it might hurt people's feelings to see the taiwan flag up and she said "but no one is even from china here, except ayi and miss wu, but they don't mind. *shrug* i guess i understand why we can't hang it up, but i just think its a bad rule is all"
---I don't know if this story reads as impressive as it was- she just really blew my mind with how opinionated she was about it and how well she seemed to understand it all. if you spend much time with this age group, you know that strong opinions are extremely rare.
(example of a typical kindergarten conversation:
sara: I really like cupcakes
hilma: really, i don't like them very much, but i guess they're ok
sara: yeah, i only like them ok, not very much though )

well.... i was proud of her, that's all :)

Blogging

Hey guys, I've decided to start writing a blog :) Something really cool happened at work today and i wanted to tell someone, but my email doesn't work here and i thought this would be more fun anyway. I hate that I don't get to share all the little stories in my life with people- they're the kinda things you tell in the car or over dinner- not in a once a week (or less) phone call. I can't say how diligent I'm going to be about this, but I'm going to try to keep it up- that way, if you're interested, you can pop online and see what's going on with me :)
also, if any of yall have blogs you keep and haven't told me about, let me know- I hate missing all yall's small/daily stuff too!

XOXO-kate (international superwoman)
p.s. jane- be prepared to see a lot of poor punctuation and lowercase letters.... ;)