The Not-So-Far East

Vince Durnan
by Vince Durnan

Our mid-August start date jars old-school Labor Day launch purists, but it opens doors for international partner school visits. Last week we hosted the first Chinese student delegation to USN, and next week our friends from Japan arrive.
Asian academic calendars often start in the springtime, aligned with the return of growth in the natural world. Summer vacations there tend to occur later and not last quite as long as our own agrarian ten-week hiatus. As a result, there’s an opportunity for USN students to visit active Asian schools in June and for those host schools to come see us in August without missing too much back at home. With sufficient and substantial planning, these short term exchanges can fit quite nicely.

Witness last week—ten students and two faculty members from Changzhou Foreign Language School experienced USN classrooms, homestays, and Nashville hospitality during our little heat and humidity festival. If the school name sounds familiar, perhaps you read about our students visiting Changzhou among other destinations last June. Excitement on that end, typical of the fast pace of all things in urban China, generated plans to come see us in return, and thanks to gracious USN families and committed USN faculty, we had the red carpet, as it were, rolled out and ready.

Our growing number of students studying Chinese enjoyed the singular benefit of speaking with age peers native to the language, and those of us who needed translators were able to ask questions about an education system wholly different from our own, a system I had the chance to explore in a trip eighteen months ago (including a visit to Changzhou, where a brand-new campus is set to open). The Chinese students, middle schoolers all, came to USN on a larger trip to the US that included New York, DC, and Disneyland, not unlike the way our trips might include Bejing or Xi’an for terra cotta warriors.

This weekend brings a visit from our longtime friends at Kwansei Gakuin, once an all-boys middle and high school and now a K-12 coeducational program adjacent to a prominent university in Nishinomiya, near Kobe, Japan. Our partnership, now more than 25 years old, reaches back to the Japanese corporate heyday in Tennessee and around the world. Remember when we marveled at its status as the second largest economy on the planet a generation ago and how we imagined the benefit of learning Japanese? In those heady days we met, through connections with neighbors at the Methodist Board of Higher Education, this wonderful school. For many years we’ve enjoyed exchanges of all kinds, and this trip promises to be extra special.

Along with a dozen students and a couple of teachers, the principal will be visiting—and staying with me. What an honor and a treat. The hospitality and educational insight shared in our prior visits helped establish a foundation for our subsequent efforts to build partnerships elsewhere around the globe. Watching Kwansei Gakuin adjust to demographic and commercial change in Japan has provided great perspective for us, as has watching our friends from Changzhou adapt to the Chinese boom.

Learning directly from those two educational models is no simple thing. Their classrooms typically contain seven rows of seven students, with teachers changing venues every hour or so as students stay put (for efficiency’s sake). The work would strike most American observers as pretty dry and the hours pretty long, often accompanied by supplemental classes after school hours. Not a lot of fixation on travel soccer type stuff, by the way. Exams loom large, ranking is common, and stakes are high.

While we may be in no hurry to emulate these programs, we certainly stand to benefit from understanding our colleagues in a global discussion of best practice. And it goes far beyond their asking us about how to teach creativity and our asking them about achievement in math. My special thanks, and yours too, should extend to the families whose warm welcome of our student guests makes the whole thing possible.

From the international desk,
Vince
 
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USN Mission: 
University School of Nashville models the best educational practices. In an environment that represents the cultural and ethnic composition of Metropolitan Nashville, USN fosters each student’s intellectual, artistic, and athletic potential, valuing and inspiring integrity, creative expression, a love of learning, and the pursuit of excellence.