Change in GIP plans

Change in GIP plans

  12:35 PM    Jlu17

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I've done what I consider to be a complete 180 on my GIP topic. I'm still teaching Mr. Tyau's 9th grade World Cultures: Pacific Rim class, but I decided to go down the route of how China's one child policy affected its culture.

Over the course of the last few months, Mr. Tyau and I struggled to figure out how to connect such a large idea—environmental regulations—to his students in a meaningful way. His class is more focused on cultures in the Pacific Rim, so I tried to figure out connections between government regulations and the public response.

However, when I read One Child by Mei Fong, I realized one thing: the one child policy is an issue with tangible effects that every student can understand. Not so many kids can connect to the idea that some families suffer from indoor air quality issues from burning biofuels in their home, but most people know someone who suffers from high expectations from their parents and can imagine an exacerbated version of this. For example: when I studied in Beijing, I lived with a host sister who was the same age as me. Because I was born in Beijing, it was easy for me to see what could have been my life in my host sister's life—endless homework, stressful tests, and hours of tutoring every week. Thus, Mr. Tyau and I have decided to focus more on how the one child policy, the CCP's attempt to securely control the Chinese population, affected Chinese culture, specifically from the lens of a "little emperor," or the only child.

My host sister!

Here are my plans: After giving background information on the origins of the one child policy (Cultural Revolution), I will divide the students into several groups and give them excerpts from One Child and news articles that are relevant to the themes that I want them to focus on—how the younger generations deal with the elderly, how rural populations differ from urban, and how the general population deals with a gender disparity. After the groups have read and discussed these readings, they will write on the board areas and overall examples where they think this policy affected Chinese culture, and then they will draw parallels or contrasts between these themes and themes in other Asian cultures that they have been learning about throughout the year. For example, they might compare the implications of aging populations in Japan and in China or the ideas of filial piety in Hawaii and China.

I'm excited to see what comparisons the students come up with!