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Even if tickets to events had been available, they wouldn’t have gone. They were too busy.
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Nine Winona Senior High School students and three district staff members spent two weeks in August in the most populous nation in the world. The trip was a pilot program for a possible future exchange relationship with China’s Hunan Province Department of Education, where Winonans will spend time learning the language and culture.
The trek began Aug. 15, when the group departed on a 12-hour flight to Tokyo. From there, they flew to Beijing and then to Changsa, the capital of Hunan, and finally northwest to Zhangjiajie.
Between Aug. 17 and 24, the group got a crash course in all things Chinese at Zhangjiajie. Students took lessons in Chinese from instructors and peers, as they were paired with students at a middle school in the Wulingyuan area outside Zhangjiajie.
The area around the city reminded them of home, but with mountains instead of bluffs. The Wulingyuan Scenic and Historic Interest Area, however, looked nothing like Winona. The park, with its massive stone pillars that spring out of forests below, could only be described by comparing it to one of America’s most famous natural destinations.
“It looked like the Grand Canyon but with green,” 11th-grader Halley Sobeck said.
The big pillars reminded the students how far away they were from Minnesota. They saw villagers wash their clothes in a river and water buffalo across from the school.
High school teacher Kent Miller told the Winona school board the Minnesota entourage was warmly received by their Chinese hosts, particularly in rural areas, where they often were the only Westerners in the region.
“Everywhere we went, they were taking our pictures, standing next to us,” Miller said. “They wanted to talk to us.”
In a country with a different culture, students tried their hand at the art of negotiation. At silk markets and shops, they navigated the shouts and yells from villagers trying to sell their wares. They found their greatest test at the Great Wall of China, the pinnacle of tourist sites.
“At the Great Wall, pretty much everything is negotiable,” 10th-grader Alli Wildenborg said.
The envoy mixed in their language lessons with the staple stops for foreign visitors. Along with the Great Wall, they saw Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City, ate Chinese food and posed for pictures. Trip leader Scott Hannon, district director of academic affairs, sent reports of their adventures over webcam sessions and postings on the Winona Area Public Schools Web site.
After their stay in Zhangjiajie, the group traveled back to Beijing and then to Shanghai. While the big cities were exciting, the students said they will remember the rural areas of China more.
“It’s just like going to New York in Shanghai,” 10th-grader Jessie Sorvaag said. “But it was still really cool.”
Learning language and culture
Students were introduced to both written and oral Chinese while there. They learned the cultural significance of written characters, how they were created and what they mean.
They said they learned much more from their study partners than from their tutors, at least when it came to words they would actually use.
They said they valued this experience more than they would a trip to Europe.
“Their culture is so much different than ours than a European culture,” Sorvaag said.
The students said they see a shift in the world and that schools should put more focus on international and language studies toward places that will affect them in the future. American schools traditionally offer courses in European languages such as Spanish, French and German. They said they’d like to have opportunities to learn Chinese and Middle Eastern languages.
“The younger people (in China) were so driven to learn English,” Sobeck said.
School board member Kelly Herold, who has suggested in the past the district should broaden its language offerings, asked the students if Chinese or Arabic languages classes would be popular at the high school and middle school.
He received a resounding yes.
An annual affair
This trip may be the first of many. At the Sept. 4 school board meeting, Hannon was asked to develop a proposal that would outline procedures to make the trip to China an annual affair, similar to one students take to Misato, Japan.
Hannon said he has been welcomed back by Chinese officials, but the board wanted a clear explanation about how the trips will be funded. They said they didn’t want students who couldn’t afford the trip to miss out on the opportunity.
The trip cost about $40,000 total, with about $10,000 paid by RTP Co. Hannon said in the future, trips likely would be scaled down to help reduce costs. How the funds will be raised is yet to be determined.
“Do we want to get into fundraising, or how we will do that?” Hannon said. “We will have to get through that.”
The board expressed support for an annual trip, and members likely will vote on the proposal in October.
Nolan Rosenkrans may be reached at (507) 453-3519 or at nolan.rosenkrans@lee.net.
