September 28 is the birthday of the great Chinese sage Confucius, and this is the week when people in China celebrate Chinese culture and teachers. This week also marks the 10th anniversary of the establishment of the Confucius Institutes throughout the world.

Director of Dalton’s Confucius Classroom, Mona Zhao gave the opening statements on Dalton’s CC. Established in May 2012, the Dalton CC works closely with the World Language department and the Asian Culture Club. The Dalton CC helps the school to strengthen its current Chinese Language offerings, enhances educational exchanges with China, sponsors Chinese cultural activities, and promotes mutual understanding and friendship between the Dalton community and the people of China.

Ms. Zhao closed her statement by saying, “the Dalton Mandarin program (would not) be a success without our great teachers and hardworking students.” She invited Mr. Adam Lanphier, coordinator of the Mandarin program to present award certificates to Mandarin students who had submitted short films NYU's 2nd annual Rock That Movie Chinese Video Competition. In Spring of 2014, two groups of upper-level Mandarin Students made short films on the theme of 'updated folk stories' for submission to NYU's 2nd annual Rock That Movie Chinese Video Competition. One group - Margaret Heftler, Jonah Gaynor, Richard Chen, Tyler Love, and Shahn Savino - received an Honorable Mention for their video, "Old Man Sai Loses His Horse." Another group - Andrew Milich, Mattori Birnbaum, Nick Ng, Jamie Konigsberg, and Hannah State - won the 1st place prize in Level III Fluency and Comprehensibility for their video, "The Prince and the Erhu Player."  Mr. Lanphier commended and introduced the award winners, and they stood up to receive cheers from their fellow students.

Dr. Ramirez then introduced the speaker, Jessica Beineke, Founder of CrazyFreshChinese.com. Jessica, a bubbly American girl who speaks perfect Chinese, has over 100,000 subscribers on her Weibo channel and her YouTube channel has over two million views. She has legions of fans throughout China. In her remarks, she exuded joy and passion in her study and teaching of language and is devoted to the sharing of cultures among people all around the world.

Immediately following Dr. Ramirez’s introduction, a happy and smiley Jessica appeared in a video on the big screen, going about teaching Mandarin phrases to her audience. The phrases included “duck face”, “flip-flop”, “I am freezing to death”, “I want to order a medium size soy latte”.  The video also included a short interview of will.i.am., elaborating how he chose his Chinese name.  The videos piqued the students’ curiosity, and when Jessica walked onto stage after the videos ended, the audience gave her a warm welcome. Jessica then told her story of how she came to learn, and love Chinese language and culture.  

In closing, Jessica invited the students to visit her website and challenged them to learn a Chinese phrase and send the video to prove it.   10 minutes after the presentation, Jessica told me some students had already tweeted her.  We received many compliments about this special assembly, and how the students were inspired by her story.

Story submitted by Ms. Mona Zhao, Director of The Confucius Classroom