A few things:

• As part of my new lesson plan to teach American culture and history, this week I started teaching the [tag]Declaration of Independence[/tag] to my high school kids. Apparently I couldn’t have timed things worse–after some prompting, my students informed me that this weekend one of the papers ran an entire ad-free issue entitled something like “American Atrocities” that gave a rundown of all the bad things America is doing in the world. This left my students pretty unreceptive to discussing the lofty ideals of the Declaration, but the newspaper did help spark some spirited debate (“It [The Declaration] is a lie.” “America is very bad. But you are very nice.”) and gave me a nice chance to teach them the word hypocrisy.
  On the other hand, my classes all really liked that any American can run for President. They also all agreed that Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness are fundamental rights. Some also listed freedom of expression (specifically criticism of the government), universal health care, and education as other fundamental rights. There was disagreement over whether availability of work is a fundamental right, but only because some of the students felt very strongly that people should be allowed to stay at home and do nothing if they so wish. If I had to work as hard as they do, I’d probably feel the same way.
  My friend Charles rightly pointed out that if I want to talk about American culture I probably should have started with something fun and easy like baseball rather than jumping into the Declaration. Good point, Charles.
• On a tangentially related note, [tag]LiveJounal[/tag] is now being blocked by the firewall, so for the time being I can’t keep up with your various lj blogs.
• Shanghai trip stories will start to be posted Wednesday, so you won’t have to hold your breath much longer.

[tags]China, teaching[/tags]