Mark and I were staying at my old friend Peter’s condo in Bangkok, Thailand and we were delighted to meet his partner, Wendy, for the first time. Wendy is a Teach for China alumna and so I learned that Teach for China was founded in 2008 by Andrea Pasinetti, an Italian American and Princeton dropout at the time. His story is very inspiring. When researching his senior thesis in rural China, he discovered that many students in remote provinces such as Yunnan and Guangdong cannot finish middle school because of a lack of teachers. As a result, he led Teach for China for ten years whereby university graduates agreed to teach in remote provinces for a two year period. Sound familiar? Since then, Teach for China Fellows number 450 and have reached more than 70,000 students.
While at Peter’s condo, we met Gwen, a friend of Wendy’s and a fellow Teach for China (TFC) alumna. Gwen got a Master’s in food science at Cornell after TFC and is now teaching food science at a vocational college in central China in a city on the Yangtze River. Her students are 18 and 19 year olds who are away from home for the first time and some of whom have called her at the beginning of the school year to find out how to get from building A to building B on campus and to whom she had to teach map reading. She takes great pleasure in how much progress her students have made in the past year and how much more self-reliant they are.
I loved talking to Gwen about the challenges of building rapport in singular ways with each student so that they could expand and grow as students and as human beings. I had a sense that Gwen was a gifted teacher because she was so focused on building rapport with her students.
