When Lauren’s email popped up in my in box thanking me for the blog I signed up to write for the March 15, 2019 posting I thought, “Of course I did.” I remember thinking when I signed up, “I really want that free drink after the workshop and if this gets my team extra points so that we win the drink cards, it will be worth it.” We won. I thought it was worth it, though honestly, in my excitement I didn’t really think ahead to what life might be like when March 15th rolled around. In the back of my mind I knew I had signed up for a “lull time” so I wasn’t too worried. As it happens, I will be boarding a plane at 7AM on March 15th bound for Shanghai. It will be my third trip to China this year. When I go on these trips I am the American dignitary and expert. I arrive and am greeted by a Chinese national whose job it is to spend her day taking me to every school I need to visit, every banquet held in my honor and every meeting of important Chinese government and educational officials who have sought my input on how to improve their schools. They all hope that when I leave we will have signed a contract saying that my school will partner with their school and bring their students an American education at a fraction of what it would cost Chinese families to send their child to America, both in monetary measures as well as emotional measure. 
It is a grueling though fascinating schedule that includes making speeches, meeting parents, sitting in on classes and going to long three or four hour evening meals with six or seven courses of food. It tends to be surreal as often when I get up to make presentations the sound crew in the auditorium puts on the theme song from “Gunsmoke” or “Star Wars” to punctuate my approach. Of course these visits include tours of the schools. At this point I have visited Shanghai, Beijing, Fuzhou, Shaoxing, Hefei, Chengdu, Xian and Weinan. At each school a team of teachers, administrators, and government officials walk me through every building in the campus. One of the most common denominators on these tours is how proud these individuals are of their schools and of the opportunities education affords their students. I am amazed each time. In Xian, as you walk into the foyer of the school there is a life size three dimensional sculpture of a soldier coming out of the wall. His face is stricken with fear and determination. The sculpture includes his surroundings which depict buildings falling all around him. “This is sculpture our art student did. This man in the sculpture. He was a graduate of our school. He joined the armed forces. He went to the city with the big earthquake. Maybe you heard about it in America? Many children died in a school. He went to save them. He saved many lives before he died, when a structure collapsed on him.” From there we go into a museum of the school, that holds the history of academic awards, a history of past teachers and past administrators. Though the two longer walls in the rectangular room are filled with academic awards, the shorter wall, opposite of 
the door has a few awards for sports teams: badminton, ping pong and soccer. “We know it is important to be well rounded. So we have added sports clubs.” In another school the art students used their art work to create a student cafe. They created tables, chairs, art work, pillows, and centerpieces. Then they convinced the school’s administration to open up a coffee shop/cafe next to the area they created so they could have coffee, tea, and snacks when they studied in this incredibly beautiful space they had made. Most of the classes I sit in are lecture based. There are 40 to 60 students in an unheated concrete room at desks lined up in a row. The teacher stands at the front and has a computer and a white board. He or she talks and talks and talks about a subject of which they are the expert, the students write copious notes and before the end of the term they will take a final on all the information and their ability to spit it back. 
So the irony of the students finding these outlets for their creativity and moving administration to open and create cafes for them is not lost on me. It’s as if the students know they learn more when they are doing, when they have autonomy and voice in their learning and when they care about the subject. The administrators and the government and the schools bring me over as the “American expert” to teach them essentially what they would learn if they reflected just a little bit more on those pieces of their schools that they include in their tours, on those items that they display with such pride. Then I think of American education: what is it we should be reflecting more on for our students? What are our students telling us that we’re not listening to? As I travel the world in this role of “expert” what am I missing in my own back yard?
Sandra Mings Lamar, a 2016 Rowland Fellow, is the Director of International Programs at Lyndon Institute. She started her teaching career as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Shoshong, Botswana where she met her husband, James Lamar (2017 Vermont Teacher of the Year.) 
She received her MA in Educational Administration as a Peace Corps Fellow at San Francisco State University. She co-founded New Technology High School in Napa, CA and was a founding teacher in the Rwanda Education Bureau’s Rwandan Teacher Education Program. She and James live with their three children and their dog in Barnet, Vermont.
It is a grueling though fascinating schedule that includes making speeches, meeting parents, sitting in on classes and going to long three or four hour evening meals with six or seven courses of food. It tends to be surreal as often when I get up to make presentations the sound crew in the auditorium puts on the theme song from “Gunsmoke” or “Star Wars” to punctuate my approach. Of course these visits include tours of the schools. At this point I have visited Shanghai, Beijing, Fuzhou, Shaoxing, Hefei, Chengdu, Xian and Weinan. At each school a team of teachers, administrators, and government officials walk me through every building in the campus. One of the most common denominators on these tours is how proud these individuals are of their schools and of the opportunities education affords their students. I am amazed each time. In Xian, as you walk into the foyer of the school there is a life size three dimensional sculpture of a soldier coming out of the wall. His face is stricken with fear and determination. The sculpture includes his surroundings which depict buildings falling all around him. “This is sculpture our art student did. This man in the sculpture. He was a graduate of our school. He joined the armed forces. He went to the city with the big earthquake. Maybe you heard about it in America? Many children died in a school. He went to save them. He saved many lives before he died, when a structure collapsed on him.” From there we go into a museum of the school, that holds the history of academic awards, a history of past teachers and past administrators. Though the two longer walls in the rectangular room are filled with academic awards, the shorter wall, opposite of the door has a few awards for sports teams: badminton, ping pong and soccer. “We know it is important to be well rounded. So we have added sports clubs.” In another school the art students used their art work to create a student cafe. They created tables, chairs, art work, pillows, and centerpieces. Then they convinced the school’s administration to open up a coffee shop/cafe next to the area they created so they could have coffee, tea, and snacks when they studied in this incredibly beautiful space they had made. Most of the classes I sit in are lecture based. There are 40 to 60 students in an unheated concrete room at desks lined up in a row. The teacher stands at the front and has a computer and a white board. He or she talks and talks and talks about a subject of which they are the expert, the students write copious notes and before the end of the term they will take a final on all the information and their ability to spit it back. So the irony of the students finding these outlets for their creativity and moving administration to open and create cafes for them is not lost on me. It’s as if the students know they learn more when they are doing, when they have autonomy and voice in their learning and when they care about the subject. The administrators and the government and the schools bring me over as the “American expert” to teach them essentially what they would learn if they reflected just a little bit more on those pieces of their schools that they include in their tours, on those items that they display with such pride. Then I think of American education: what is it we should be reflecting more on for our students? What are our students telling us that we’re not listening to? As I travel the world in this role of “expert” what am I missing in my own back yard?
Sandra Mings Lamar, a 2016 Rowland Fellow, is the Director of International Programs at Lyndon Institute. She started her teaching career as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Shoshong, Botswana where she met her husband, James Lamar (2017 Vermont Teacher of the Year.) She received her MA in Educational Administration as a Peace Corps Fellow at San Francisco State University. She co-founded New Technology High School in Napa, CA and was a founding teacher in the Rwanda Education Bureau’s Rwandan Teacher Education Program. She and James live with their three children and their dog in Barnet, Vermont.