EXPERIENCING CHINA
Local teen visits China as part of school-sponsored trip
CLIFTON PARK, N.Y. >> A Clifton Park high school student has returned from a school-sponsored trip to China with a better understanding of the Chinese culture and an awareness of the work necessary to improve his language skills.
Aaron McCarthy is 17 and a junior at Tech Valley High School. Last month he joined 18 other students for a 10 day trip to China that included visits to three major cities, Beijing, Tianjin and Xian. A three day visit to Tech Valley High’s sister school in China, Tianjin School 41, was also part of the trip.
McCarthy came home with photos of the Great Wall, Tiananmen Square and the famous terracotta warriors as well as an appreciation of Chinese home cooking and a first person view of how small the world has become in the 21st century.
“I was interested in traveling and seeing the world,” he said last week. “It’s a different culture and I wanted to experience that. I couldn’t pass up the opportunity. I might not get another chance.”
Tech Valley High School has two types of exchange programs. One is purely a sight-seeing trip while the other, like McCarthy’s, has the Chinese students and their families host an American student for several days.
“We go every two years,” said Sophia Hsia, a Chinese language teacher and music teacher at the Albany-based school. “It’s important for students to have an eye opening experience. These trips develop cultural appreciation. You need to be a cultural citizen because the world is getting smaller.”
Hsia said the trips not only allow the American students to learn about the people and culture of China, practice what they’ve learned at school and get to know the country’s people, but also learn something about themselves.
“I was 14 when I came from Taiwan and I didn’t know a word of English,” she said. “It’s good for high school students to see that they can leave the comfort of their families and their culture and overcome any fears of the unknown that they may have. It’s good for them to see that they can use what they’ve learned and communicate.”
That wish was fulfilled with McCarthy. Though he’s taken three years of Chinese he quickly realized his language skills still need more work. Yet despite not fully understanding all that went on around him, he found he was able to communicate and make himself understood.
“I really liked the trip,” he said. “My peanut allergy posed a little problem because they use a lot of peanuts in cooking but overall it was really enjoyable. I was mainly interested in seeing the culture and experiencing the country and we did that.”
After Beijing the Tech Valley High group went to visit the students of their sister school in Tianjin. During the three days they spent there they received a welcoming ceremony from the entire student enrollment, took a tour of the school, toured its museum including exhibits on how it evolved and made a stop at the Cultural City to buy a few gifts for those back home.
There were visits to art and music classes where interaction between students allowed each to practice the other’s language and quick observation visits to science, math, and social studies classes.
“Their academic classes are a little big,” Hsia said. “There are 50 to 60 students in each one.”
Small class size and opportunities to meet Tech Valley High School business partners are two of the reasons McCarthy chose to go to the school rather than Shen High School.
“It offers experiences for individual students that Shen can’t manage given its gigantic population,” McCarthy said. “The entire student body of Tech Valley is just under 200.”
Another reason for choosing the school was its internship programs. I-term is a one week internship with a local company that includes integrated class work before and after the internship. Senior Project is a twoweek internship program that all students must take in their final year.
With an eye on a career as an architect, McCarthy interned in February with C.S. Arch, an architecture design firm in Albany.
Asked about the building boom going on in China the teen said he’d seen quite a number of skyscrapers in Beijing and Tianjin and a lesser number in Xian.
While he described Beijing and Tianjin as similar of large cities found in other parts of the world, McCarthy said Xian was more of a dessert city with air quality that was drier and significantly cleaner. However, tourist draws are crowded wherever one goes and though he found the terracotta warriors there very interesting, the site was crowded with others wanting to see them.
“The trip and staying with my host family was great. It allowed me to experience a culture that can’t be taught in schools,” McCarthy said. “I learned what life is like on an individual level.”