NCSSM instructor brings Chinese language to students across North Carolina

Mandarin master
Durham classroom broadcasts to students across state

BY DAVID ELSTEIN, Correspondent
The Durham News / The Chapel Hill News

The N.C. School of Science and Mathematics in Durham is more than a residential high school for talented juniors and seniors from across the state. It also offers challenging courses electronically to students at their home schools where these classes are not normally available.

One of those is Mandarin Chinese.

Caryn Rossi Louie of Carrboro teaches two classes in person to students at Science and Math, as well as a class of 11 electronically in towns such as Kannapolis, Washington and Clinton. It is her second year at the school.

"It's a fairly challenging course," she said. "Some kids recognize Chinese's importance to the future." Others get interested in the culture through things such as art or martial arts.

An estimated 1 billion people in the world speak Mandarin Chinese.

"I am Chinese, so I wanted to know more about the cultural history and language," said Casey Yang, a ninth grader from Clinton, about 30 miles east of Fayetteville. "Videoconferencing also gives me an outlet to a different subject that is not offered at my school."

Yang's mother was born in Taiwan and both her parents grew up speaking Chinese. Her parents speak Chinese to each other when they don't want Yang or her siblings to know what they're talking about.

After getting a bachelor's degree in linguistics at the University of Colorado at Boulder, Louie did post-graduate studies in Taiwan. She worked in China as a tour guide for Americans and got her master's degree at New York's Hunter College to teach English to speakers of other languages.

For 15 years, Louie, 49, worked in English as a Second Language. She also worked with a New York resettlement agency, spending a lot of time with Jewish immigrants from the former Soviet Union.

In 2003, she and her husband adopted a Chinese girl named Qiuhu whom they wanted to be bilingual. That got Louie thinking she should switch from teaching English to teaching Chinese.

In 2005, the family moved to the Triangle. Since she had gone 22 years without speaking Chinese regularly, she took a nine-week intensive class at Middlebury College, and then got a master's in teaching Chinese there.

Louie took the job at Science and Math because she "wanted the opportunity to develop a program from the ground up," she said. "As a flagship school with influence across the state, NCSSM gives me a platform for contributing to the field of Chinese language education in an important way."

Logistically everything is through broadband. Louie stands at a podium with three monitors where she sees her students. A computerized white board serves as a blackboard. A document camera lets her show items from a book. She even has a "green screen" like TV meteorologists use, which she can stand in front of to show photos and other images.

Each participating school has an on-site facilitator who communicates with Louie frequently and passes out and collects assignments.

When she was hired, she didn't know if Chinese could be taught this way. But she loves what she is doing. A big part of the success is having studio manager Rob Caldwell making the technology run smoothly. Caldwell even knows Chinese; he was a missionary in China and is an expert on Chinese film.

To Louie, the class is more than language.

"Culture is a huge part of it," she said. She took the class on a field trip to Grand Asia Market in Cary so they could see, smell and hear the culture.

"It was a very powerful field trip," she said. "Students gained several important understandings of Chinese culture: the history of famine and its impact on the cuisine of China, the emphasis on not wasting, polite ways of expressing surprise, use of food in Chinese medicine, and the connection between food and prosperity."

In Durham Public Schools, Mandarin Chinese is taught at Burton Elementary IB Magnet School and will be added to Shepard Middle IB Magnet School next year. In the Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools, it is taught at Chapel Hill High and Carrboro High as well as at Glenwood Elementary and McDougle Middle.

"Students come to class with the misconception that learning Chinese is hard," Louie said. "This idea often blocks progress. In reality, learning spoken Chinese is quite easy. I conduct the class using simple and natural language that is easily understood by social context, and I build on their skills from there."