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Dear Ralph,
So pleasing to hear from you. Taipei School sounds a lot like my experience at the Anglo=American School in Moscow from '85-'87. The school had children from 30plus countries. While Amjericans were the largest group nationally, they were not in the majority, and so we all learned a lot in a practical way about the wonderful variety in the world. At that time the school had about 350 children k-9; subsequently as Moscow opened up more it expanded with one campus for k-6 in an old Soviet style schoo
l building and another 7-9or more on the US embassy compound. In many ways I wonder about what life is like there now. Being in Moscow was enormously stimulating: not always fun but always provoking of thought and deed.
Most of the children's families were posted to MOscow for definite amounts of time - 2 or 3 years - so constant changes in the student body were the norm, although most of them occurred at the beginning of the school year. As in my current school parents arrived with an agenda of getting children into school as soon as possible so that they could attend to their own responsibilities. Sometimes children came to the school before they had gotten over jetlag (this was the case of children from the spo
nsoring embassy communities - American, British, Canadian, Australian, New Zealand). Other children were admitted after passing an English competency exam, so there was some delay. Then the counseling concerns included whether they were being left unattended or with a caregiver who did not speak their language. Isolation, anxiety, another new culture, mourning for friends and family left elsewhere, how to manage when a parent was abusing alcohol, making it in a high-achieving atmosphere with language li
mitations and possibly some sort of learning disability, quite a raft of issues - the sort which we face anywhere in the world - the human tasks of learning to live in a complex world and learning how to live with a developing mind, body, and soul.
The school where I am based now is a k-6 school on the campus of a university. It is both the neighborhood school for an area which includes student housing and the laboratoryschool for the School of Education at UMass. We have a wonderfully diverse group of c hildren. Do you remember that song, WE Are the World? Well, we are. It is hard to think about working in a school ora community where people are ethnically or racially or ideologically all the same. Granted, the going is rocky at times,
but I think it is enormously important for children to see one another as regular people, no matter what their background.
Must sign off for now. Let's stay in touch. What do you do to help kids get acclimated asap when they arrive in yourschool? How do you interpret the curriculum and procedures to people who do not know American ways? Inquiring minds want to know (heh, heh).....
And what is it like to be in Taiwan?
Regards to an Iowa boy from a Connecticut/Massachusetts girl
