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 :)
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
5 comments:
That is so awesome! That little girl's going to grow up to be just like you. :-) Sad, though, that you had to take down the flag.
Maybe you could have made a Texas flag to hang next to the US flag and then hung the Taiwan flag next to the Chinese flag and it would have been ok? Flags are important though--they are not just decorations. They have deep symbolic value. Continue to encourage the strong opinions. We need strong people in this world.
I dunno if that'd be ok. I'm not sure hanging the Taiwanese flag would be analogous to hanging the Texas flag today, but more analogous to hanging the Texas flag--or even the Confederate flag--during the Civil War.
the problem is: either way, you're upsetting someone. if I hang the taiwan flag independently it upsets the Chinese. If I hang it as a sub-china flag, it upsets the taiwanese- best just not to hang it at all! *Sigh*
I like that little girl! Plus she has an awesome name!
Post a Comment