Dear Larissa,
Hope you are enjoying the holidays and will have a happy New Year. I am
sending you a copy of what I sent Heidi on debate. This time it is a reading
selection I wrote years ago that I resurrected this evening.
Dear Heidi,
When I was in undergraduate school at Bob Jones University in South
Carolina, I took my psychology course from a professor named Dr. Don-Chean Chu.
At the time he was a recognized expert on China, and was advisor to the
president (Nixon, I think it was back then). Anyway, he took several of us
students to the University of South Carolina where they had a special collection
or archive of primary source materials from China. We took notes for him. I
saved a copy of my notes on just one aspect of the subject we were researching,
education in Communist China. I later made these notes into a reading selection
for my students as part of my reading motivation unit. I thought you, and
perhaps your students, might be interested as this would directly relate to the
unit you mentioned you planned to use in the third quarter on the Chinese
Cultural Revolution.
It could tie in to debate, too, if you had students debate the topic "Is
education better in China than in the United States" or "Are Chinese students
more highly motivated to excel than students in the United States."
I have a longer version of this selection. I am sending you Selection Number
72A, "The Great Leap Forward: Education on the Chinese Mainland." Selection 72
is nearly twice as long, but I found it was too hard for most of my remedial
reading students at the time to handle, so I "wrote it down" to help my remedial
readers. The comprehension questions for the two selections are identical,
except the answer choices have been changed in their order so I have, in effect,
two versions of the same comprehension test or exercise.
If you are interested in the more complete version, let me know. I can easily
send it as an attached document.
I'll get back to you shortly about my writing assignment which inspired my
students to want to get involved in debate.
Happy New Year!
Jerome Smith in Detroit 12/27/2000 11:17 pm
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