Good Luck, Even Before Chinese New Year

For several days in January, poet Naomi Shihab Nye was invited to spend time with students at several ISS schools in China. While visiting NCPA in Nansha, Naomi interacted with students and was able to observe their mastery of the English language. NCPA and Shekou are both proud pilot ("catalyst") schools for the ISS World Language Initiative (WLI) English as an Additional Language program. We are delighted to include her thoughts in this blog post:

Being a visiting poet at NCPA, Nansha, China, for 3 days in January, 2015 was a gift beyond measure. I had worked in China before, at two international schools, and on this year’s trip was also working at three international schools in Hong Kong, Shekou, and Guangzhao, but being with the Chinese students at NCPA was a particular delight. My deepest gratitude goes out to librarian-extraordinaire Dianne Salminen and her husband John, and Superintendent Dick Moore and his wife Janet, as well as all other fantastic faculty and staff.

Not only is the gorgeous campus a peaceful oasis of quietude and green, but the warm support and positive encouragement offered by faculty and staff creates a gentle and flourishing atmosphere, a garden of possibility – students in every session and grade, both high school and middle school, were attentive, interested and welcoming.

A combination of previous poetry studies and global issues studies had established an atmosphere of inquiry and curiosity that felt just right, too. The students were willing to ask lots of questions relating to world issues (something I often write poems about) and try their hands at writing poems in English. (I now wish I had asked them more about their thoughts on Chinese poetry – I just kept telling them mine. This seems wrong, in retrospect, and I apologize.) Their gift with metaphor and imagery was natural and fluent. Once they felt the open-endlessness-possibility of contemporary creative writing tactics, vs. “writing in form” styles – I think their energies and confidence increased.

My favorite poem, by Crystal Zheng, a tenth-grader is copied below:

The Pencil

When my mom was a student,
there was a pencil she loved.
When I became a student,
she gave the pencil to me.
She says she can see golden sunshine
spilling everywhere,
every time she holds the pencil.
But I think the pencil is daydreaming,
dreaming itself into being
a wise little bird,
pondering all the time,
dipping into the pond to kiss water.
I wish I had magic,
so that I could see my mom,
holding the pencil and smiling like
a little girl.

The thing is – Crystal DOES have magic, and so does every other student, as long as voices are believed in. I loved the layering of this poem, the way it moves both backwards and forwards in time, the elegance of its simple descriptions.

If we can practice simple tactics such as keeping regular personal writing notebooks, collecting details and observations from our days, feeling comfortable writing questions and describing our interior responses to things, I think we can increase our fluency with languages no matter how many or few we speak. This is what I tried to encourage in these brave, beautiful students exercising English skills with confidence and clarity. I was impressed by their vocabularies, I must say. They seemed much better than the vocabularies of many native English speakers I meet all the time in American high schools. But confidence is a big part of the language experience and I think, when we exercise our poetry-writing muscles, feeling free to combine things in new ways, stretch and risk, good things happen and confidence grows. I tried to encourage the students to do this sort of creative writing ALL the time – maybe ten minutes every day – to help their other writing as well.

Rereading the poem copies students at NCPA gave me – I feel a shiver of discovery and delight. No, Alexandra, you did not forget to bring your brains to school. You brought them quite successfully – and your delightful voice too.

Naomi Shihab Nye
San Antonio, Texas, USA