seeking feedback on destinations

[clay dube]

We welcome your suggestions on how to make the tour more effective. I'm particularly eager to find a way to make industrial/commercial visits interesting and useful for teachers. It's critical that our students receive more and better training on the workings of the marketplace and on how goods that they desire actually come into being.

We went to the Lenovo plant in Beijing and the Toyota plant in Nagoya. What other businesses might be visited? How can we better prepare folks for these visits? How can we help them transfer the experience to their classrooms?

Just as we have embraced reading and writing across the curriculum, shouldn't financial/economic literacy be a goal as well?

Here's a factoid, worth launching a class discussion with:

American auto makers once dominated the marketplace and were drove American economic development. Now they teeter on the brink of bankruptcy.

Here's the market value of automakers today. Remember that GM has only just been passed by Toyota to be the top automaker in the world. It's still number two, but look at the comparative valuations:

GM $3.5B
Ford $4.6B
Toyota $107B
Honda $39.3B

[Anonymous]

In terms of elementary school level, i've been thinking about how in our curriculum be go over the Silk Road, The slave trade (triangle), and native american trade. if I was to incorporate themes from East Asia I would have to ask how traditionally China and Japan traded with their neighbors. We have learned some, from the import of Buddhism and writing systems. But as to modern trade I would have to grab student interest with factories and commercial areas of products they enjoy. Certainly Toyota city is something they marvel at and can understand. Lenovo is a bit out there for my group. But other products at their level of interest would help then see the connections of import/export.

[clay dube]

Dennis,

Thanks for sharing your ideas on the utility of various destinations for various purposes. We might have pushed more folks to visit the Muslim Quarter and the Mosque in Xi'an, for example, to hammer home ideas about exchanges. If we went to the South, perhaps we could have seen cell phone manufacturing, a Nike plant, or something like that.

On the subject of exchanges, I think many will find an article in today's (12/7) LA Times interesting. It notes that some companies are now organizing tours for Chinese to check out the US housing market. It's at: http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-fi-chinahomes7-2008dec07,0,4690052,full.story

[clay dube]

Hi Folks,

Do you remember Pingyao? Many of you thought it was our best destination in China. Here's the first of several photos from Pingyao. They are part of a Xinhua (New China News Agency, the state media company) photo gallery for Chinese new year.

http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2009-01/18/content_10678855_3.htm

Click on the numbers to see additional photos.

[clay dube]

Hi Folks,

The NY Times and its subsidiary, the International Herald Tribune, published an interesting article about continuing discrimination in Japan against the burakumin.

http://www.iht.com/articles/2009/01/16/news/japan.php

NONAKA Hiromu is a buraku, but also the second ranking official in Japanese government. The Japanese PM ASO Taro is said to have remarked, "Are we really going to let those people take over the leadership of Japan?"

The article discusses the 48 buraku neighborhoods of Osaka (where we visited the museum in 2006 and 2008).

[Anonymous]

I think the article is interesting.

It just brings home the concept that China's economy is growing and enabling their citizens to come here to buy property. It also dismisses the stereotype of a backwards China, that many of our students still perceive currently.

[Author]

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