Lessons in Chinese Exchange teachers give Bangor pupils a taste of their country

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Eighth-graders at the William S. Cohen Middle School in Bangor received some unusual instructions recently when teacher Gao Chengchun asked them to count to 10 on their fingers using only one hand.

“That’s the Chinese finger counting system,” said Gao, an exchange teacher from China who’s giving Bangor pupils a taste of the language, culture and history of her country as part of an “Exploratory Chinese” class.

Bangor is the first community in Maine to be involved in a three-year partnership with Primary Source, a Boston-based nonprofit organization that runs the New England China Network to help schools introduce China studies into the curriculum.

The goal is to have every Bangor student leave high school having been exposed to Chinese culture in at least three different grades.

While Gao teaches seventh and eighth grade at the Cohen school and third grade at Fruit Street School, another exchange teacher, Wang Xiuzhen, leads classes for seventh- and eighth-grade pupils at the James F. Doughty School.

After beginning their class with the traditional bow to their teacher, pupils in Gao’s class began their first lesson in how to count in Chinese. They already had learned in previous classes the words for America and other countries.

Things grew lively as pupils stood up and faced their partners, laughing at themselves and each other as they repeated aloud the strange-sounding words.

Roaming around the classroom, Gao offered praise and suggestions.

“Good job! Excellent pronunciation,” she said to one set of pupils.

“Pay attention to tone. You need to roll your tongue,” she said to another.

Initially, the hardest thing for pupils is to get the tone right, a vital part of the language since different inflections convey different meanings, said Gao during an interview after class.

Depending upon how you say it, the

word “ma” could mean mother, hemp, horse or scold, said Gao, 32. She looks nearly as young as her pupils, wearing corduroys and sneakers and with her black, shoulder-length hair pulled back.

“It’s something totally new. She does a good job explaining it,” said Meagan Emery, 13, who joined the interview along with 14-year-old Damian Sutherland.

“The hardest part is writing. You have to write it perfectly or it could mean something totally different,” said Sutherland.

Gao is focusing on the spoken language and uses a phonetic system called Pinyin to describe the pronunciation of the standard spoken Chinese language.

But she also is giving pupils a smattering of how Chinese characters are written, and she said she’s been surprised at how eager her pupils are to practice writing the delicate symbols.

Most characters are a combination of a pictograph – a picture of the word – and an ideograph – a symbol for the idea, according to Ryan Bradeen, who coordinates the China studies program.

“Chinese characters are like little puzzles,” said Bradeen, a former Bangor High School Asian history teacher who’s been to China several times and speaks “survival Chinese.”

The character for mother, for example, takes its meaning from the character for female on its left side and its sound from the character for horse – pronounced “ma” – on its right side, he said.

Bradeen said Chinese grammar is simpler than English grammar because it has no articles such as “a” or “the.” Also, many words have no plurals; the context within the sentence defines whether a word is plural or singular.

A high school English instructor who left her husband back home with their 41/2-year-old daughter, Gao said the exchange program gives “Chinese teachers a chance to see real Americans, and American children a chance to see real Chinese.”

Standing outside after school Monday watching as students boarded their buses, Gao said there are no such things in China. While high school students ride their bicycles to school, younger pupils typically live within walking distance of their schools, she said.

Her goal is to teach pupils about life in China. “People here read books about the Cultural Revolution and history, but they’re not familiar” with life nowadays, said Gao, who shows them pictures of Suzhou, the large city she comes from.

Differences abound between American and Chinese students, she said.

American kids are more “active,” she said. “They’re not afraid to make mistakes or laugh at each other or themselves.”

In contrast, Chinese students aren’t “as talkative,” she said. “They feel more responsible for their work.”

In China, parents pay more attention to their students’ work and keep in touch more with their teachers, according to Gao.