So we were pretty overjoyed about it, and still are. Of course, like in any endeavor, you celebrate and move on, and now we’re puzzling over any number of implications and next steps.

As we’ve been talking about it with other parents, everyone has been hugely supportive and congratulatory, and ask how we’re feeling about it. And as we’ve been answering, what’s become clear to me is this: parenting is a series of decisions that could have profound implications years from now that you have no way of really, truly understanding now. There’s an unfortunate lack of data on what works in education generally, let alone in language immersion programs.

(Although it’s important to say this: we know a LOT more about what works in education than we actually use in practice. Lots and lots of reasons for this: many are industry structural, many are cultural — we have a lot to learn about best practices in teaching still, in a data-and-outcome-oriented way — but it would be a big step to be able to use what we DO know.)

In the case of SPL and Mandarin, we really are excited about it, and SPL is, too. But it’s very hard to tell what it will mean in the long term. It’s been really clear so far that learning Chinese and English at the same time (since he was about 3) has been challenging, and that it’s affected the order of his skill development (in particular in terms of reading and writing, since he’s learning a couple of very different systems simultaneously). There’s some new research that suggests that in general, dual-language learners develop more slowly in terms of reading & writing until about 4th grade, at which point they catch up and develop normally. There’s other literature that suggests that kids who grow up bilingual have better executive function as adults, presumably because their brains become good at making snap decisions on which language to use in any given situation.

But in truth, who the hell knows? The data sets we have on this stuff are vanishingly small. As I wrote about Ohlone, in our experience there just aren’t any other schools that are constructivist and whole child and Mandarin immersion — so the data we have to look at is really just the 4 classes that have come before us. So we’ll see.

I’m not saying we haven’t worked the angles on this. Like so many of our friends, we can be a little, um…detail-obsessed and maybe even have OCD tendencies. And since Kathy’s a teacher, you might imagine that we’ve done a lot of thinking and talking about this with lots of friends and educators. And so we have good feelings about it, based on pretty good reasoning.

In that way, parenting is sort of like trying to operate a startup. You never have nearly the information you need to make decisions; and lots of times when you’re trying to make certain decisions you not only don’t even understand the implications of what you’re deciding, but often don’t even really understand the data that you think you do.

So now we’re off to the races. Will SPL embrace his Chinese over the years? Will he work in China 20 years from now? Will he reject it like so many kids reject piano lessons? How will it affect the way he thinks, the way he looks at the world, the way he makes his own way?

We don’t know — we’ve really got no idea at all. But that’s sort of the mystery and the magic of it. We’ll learn as we go. Nobody’s seen this particular movie before, and that’ll make it challenging, and interesting, and human.

At the Palo Alto Unified School District board meeting this past Tuesday, the board took up the question of whether to change the status of this Mandarin program from essentially a startup to ongoing status. Even though we had literally just finished up with the movers to our new house, we wanted to participate, so I went to speak, and what I said, essentially, is that we moved here for the chance to participate in the program (it’s a lottery, so chances are uncertain) — and that it’s a critically important and unique type of program, but that it shouldn’t be unique. We need more kids getting more chances to build more comprehensive world views, and that starts with language.

Happily, the board approved a change to ongoing status for the program — a huge milestone for the startup program here.

Kathy & I also sent a letter to the school board prior to the meeting — I’ll share it below.

Congrats to Ohlone!

—

December 7, 2010

Palo Alto Unified School District Board
25 Churchill Avenue
Palo Alto, CA 94306

Dear Board Members:

After living for 10 years in Sunnyvale, and more than 20 in the Bay Area, my husband John & I are moving to Palo Alto this week to give our 5 year old SPL the best opportunity for an exceptionally high quality public education in the area. And the specific school and program we’re most interested in is the Mandarin Immersion program at Ohlone Elementary. I’d like to share a bit of background on why we think it’s such a uniquely important program to support – for our own family, for children of Palo Alto, and for education overall.

Neither my husband nor I have any Chinese background at all; I grew up in San Antonio and my husband lived in many states growing up, as his father was in the Air Force. I’m an educator and have taught science at several levels in the Bay Area and internationally. As a teacher over the last 15 years (and currently mentor teacher in East Palo Alto), I’ve built up significant theory and practice and have a strong belief in constructivist practice, as well as a strong focus on social-emotional learning, so you can see why we’re so interested in Ohlone generally.

For my husband, in his job as CEO of Mozilla the last few years, he’s been traveling and working internationally quite extensively, including helping to set up their office in Beijing and working to build their Chinese efforts since 2007. He’s now transitioning from his Mozilla role to a new one as a venture investor at Greylock Partners, and China figures to be a large influence in that role as well.

As you might imagine, once we decided that we wanted a bilingual experience for our now 5 year old son, SPL, Mandarin was an obvious candidate: it’s extremely relevant to today’s world. That was the idea. Figuring out how to give him a high quality dual language experience has been an extremely challenging enterprise. We were fortunate to have friends who walked this road before us, and they were able to point us to an extremely competent early childhood caregiver who was able to start with SPL when he was 3; at 5 he’s quite proficient in both Mandarin and English. So we were lucky as a starting point.

We’ve spent much of the last year trying to figure out the best way to continue Sam’s Mandarin into more formal schooling as he enters kindergarten, and it’s a real challenge. There are, of course, several private options – but only 1 of them on the whole Peninsula had a strong constructivist approach, but the Mandarin is not immersion, and that school is, in any event, very much in the formative stages. And there’s CLIP in Cupertino, as a public school option, but we believe it’s a significantly more traditional Chinese approach to education than we’d like.

Which leaves Ohlone. It’s a public school with an incredibly strong history. It’s got a focus on the whole child, including supporting discovery for each child. And the Mandarin program is immersive. That combination of characteristics, in our experience, makes Ohlone unique. That’s not something we say lightly, but we haven’t found any significant blending of progressive teaching techniques and strong Mandarin instruction in any context, let alone in a public institution. It seems to us a wonderful option for our own son, and one that’s sorely needed in an increasingly multi-cultural Bay Area and nation. And it seems to us that it’s an incredible example of modern, ambitious education that works, and can help others around the country follow.

For all those reasons and more we strongly encourage you to support giving the program a more permanent status at Ohlone and PAUSD. Thanks for your consideration and efforts so far – the program’s been incredibly inspirational to us as we find our own way.

Sincerely,

Kathy Howe & John Lilly

One of my favorite & most thoughtful writers on China writes a great framing piece for the new administration. Great suggestions. One of a few areas that have made me uneasy in the new administration’s work the last couple of weeks. (Although as James Fallows points out, Secretary Clinton already has adjusted and made great strides.)

Winchester has written a number of masterful books — most notably (the oustanding) The Professor and the Madman and Krakatoa, as well as the more recent A Crack in the Edge of the World. Anything he writes, I’ll pick up — he’s just a very careful and thoughtful historian who’s able to contextualize a great number of contemporary world events and help you make sense of the real history.

Anyway, this is a bit of an unusual book — it chronicles the life of Joseph Needham, a Cambridge scientist who became enamored with China and it’s amazing history of scientific innovation (especially from antiquity to the 1500s or so). He was right to be fascinated, of course — the Chinese invented printing, gunpowder, chain link, the segmented arch bridge, and on and on. He learned about all this as a British diplomat during and after WWII. Then later in life, back at Cambridge, put together a colossus of a history called Science and Civilization in China. Weighing in at 7 gigantic volumes, it’s never been out of print since its introduction (of volume 1) in 1956.

The book also details a bunch of Needham’s adventurous (escaping parts of China just before the Japanese occupation forces closed the roads, for example), peculiar (a confirmed nudist, clearly polyamorous, etc), and and controversial (blacklisted as a communist by McCarthy, duped by Mao’s government into condemning the US for alleged (and apparently false) claims of using biological weapons during the Korean war) paths through life.

I didn’t love this book — it was a little too long for so narrow a look — but am glad that I read it. Would recommend his other books first. But I’ll pick up his next book, for sure, no matter what the topic is.

An amazing meeting in Beijing — Jimmy Wales seeing Chinese officials at the State Council Information Office. I met Jimmy in Dalian at the WEF event a year ago — he mentioned then that people in the Chinese government were interested in talking with him about Wikipedia. Rebecca’s got a great writeup on it, as she apparently saw Jimmy at this year’s WEF event there (The event last year is when I met Rebecca, too.) We live in interesting times.

Great photos as usual, from an outstanding blog.

And some interesting stuff over on Rebecca MacKinnon’s blog (and Wired) about Cisco and their involvement in the GFW dating back to at least 2002.

First half of the article focuses on the what & how, which is interesting enough, but the second half is more important as it talks about the whys, and the effects that the techniques are having even though they’re quite easy to circumvent. Huge implications for everyone around the world, not just in China.

Article also features Rebecca MacKinnon, a very very smart observer/participant/writer in the middle of things now.

- a post on techblog86 (a great new blog on tech and startups in china) about the extremely fast rise of the chinese internet population and some details about it — 210 million people and growing quickly

- a fantastic recap by rebecca mackinnon (her blog is also highly recommended — she’s a wonderful voice about the internet reporting from hong kong) about the recent Workshop on Asia and Commons — and the myth that “Asia” means anything, not to mention the idea of “freedom” or “commons”

both are great writeups that are well worth a few minutes.

I’ve got a bunch of reviews backed up, so am going to do a few brief ones before writing about a couple of fantastically amazing books I ended 2007 with. I got this memoir from Gen after our first trip to China last year — it’s an accounting of DeWoskin’s time in Beijing several years back — maybe 1999 or so — when she became a little famous in a Chinese soap opera about foreign attitudes called “Foreign Babes in Beijing.” Very readable account, but probably mostly/only because I spent a bit of time in China this year and am still in the phase of initial reactions — and I’ve heard so much about how Beijing is completely transforming itself every day that it’s neat to read an eyewitness account of a few years before I got to be there. Worth reading if you’re interested in Chinese contemporary culture.

So it really cheered me up today to see Li’s post about the Mozilla Manifesto translated into Chinese.

Our work in China is something that’s gone incredibly well this year — at the start of this year we had a very small market share there (something like 0.5%), and no team really focusing on it (but a community that was ready to be energized). But Li is doing great — we’ve got an office and a small full-time team working hard now, we’re working hard to engage the community, and our market share has at least tripled, to something between 1.5% and 2%. This is really good news, because getting to 5 or 6% market share will mean that a whole lot more sites in China will start testing against and working with Firefox.

I personally have learned a ton about China through this work — have gotten to go meet some interesting and amazing folks (including our own team there) 3 times, and am looking forward to more visits. Notwithstanding ongoing weirdness with redirects there, the Chinese consumer Internet is being shaped right now, and I’m excited we have an opportunity to make a difference.

I’m going to be incredibly interested to watch reaction to the Mozilla Manifesto there.

- China’s Censorship 2.0

- Eating River Crab at the Harmonious Forum (this is an absolutely delightful must-read piece)

she also wrote something about one of the most interesting sessions in Dalian with Tom Friedman and some leaders of Chinese government and industry.

Great, great book. Everyone interested in China should read it. Written by an NPR correspondent who’s reported from Beijing for 6 years, it’s a really good bit of insight into what’s happening in China now and why. The book jacket reads a bit like a travel book: the frame of the story is 2 trips that Rob took on China’s Route 312, and East-West highway that stretches from Shanghai on the East all the way through Urumqi and into Kazakhstan in the West.

But it’s a lot more than that; it’s a look into the mass migration that’s happening in China from rural areas into cities, and from the relatively underdeveloped West to the coastal East of Beijing, Shanghai & Shenzen. He likens it to the travels of the Okies written about by Steinbeck.

He also gives quite a lot of historical context as he travels through places like Xian (the original capital, I think?), and visits Tibet. There are bits about what the government is doing to bring the West into the rest of China (culturally), and why that’s happening. And it’s a fun book to read, too.

Anyway, great book, highly recommended. I recognized a bunch of the places and the phenomena that he talks about from my recent trips, and from my point of view, he does a really admirable job of making some very complicated things accessible to everyone.

Today was an extraordinary day for me here at the WEF meeting in Dalian. I had a 1-1 half hour conversation with Tom Friedman (we talked about a bunch of stuff, including the fact that we’re all transparent humans now in the public eye, and that we need to learn again how to read — incidentally, watch for his next column, as it will be a bit about Dalian), spent an hour talking with Jimmy Wales (founder of Wikipedia), talked with my friends Isaac Mao and Kaiser Kuo, preeminent bloggers in China, kidded around with the founders of probably a dozen incredibly awesome startups, met Rebecca McKinnon (formerly CNN Correspondent for northeast Asia including North Korea), and spent time with my new friend Chris, whose design firm is involved in this and this and especially this, not to mention probably two dozen other extraordinary people I met for the first time. Oh, right, and I had drinks at the reception with a friggin astronaut who’s now trying to save the earth’s water.

So all in, a good day. An amazing range of experiences and an amazing range of people to spend time with. As I mentioned, I feel very lucky.

But here’s the really amazing thing: as blown away as I am by all these folks, every single one of them knows Mozilla and Firefox and is rooting for us. Not everyone uses Firefox, although most do (1 Maxthon user, 1 Safari user, the rest use Firefox). But every single person I talked with thinks that what the Mozilla community has accomplished is incredible, and wants to see us do better and better.

So the funny bit for me is that sometimes you have to go 5,000 miles (literally & figuratively) to really be reminded how amazing the people around you are, and how lucky you are to get to work with them every single day. [This also applies to my family, of course -- I can't wait to get home to see Kathy & Sam.]

Everyone involved in any way with Mozilla should be proud of the impact we’re having on the world — an awful lot of awfully amazing people are noticing & cheering & helping.

The first said it in the context of global climate change: “Democracy is going to have a hard time surviving climate change [in 10 years or so].”

The second was Tom Friedman, in response to Martin Wolf, a Financial Times writer — Martin said this: “News is expensive; information wants to be free.” And he’s concerned that to have a functioning, healthy democracy, you need legitimate news (construe that how you will, but he and Tom mean that it has reasonable editorial standards and process).”

But it’s the climate change one that knocked my hat into the creek, as Diego says from time to time. The implication is that effects from climate change have the potential to put tremendous stress on our political systems; market dynamics may not be able to address the problems, and direct democracy may actually make the problem worse, not better. (If you have any doubt, think about Prop 13 in California, (relatively) cheap gasoline in the States, even now, or the person who cut down the last tree on Easter Island.)
Sobering & brain-breaking. Lots to think about.

I’m here at the World Economic Forum meeting in Dalian — the first of these annual meetings of 2,000 or so global leaders in China. Dalian is a very very nice city — the nicest Chinese city that I’ve been to (I’ve only been to three — Dalian, Beijing & Shanghai). I’ll post more about it, and some of the activities here, soon.

But this morning has been amazing — the queen of Jordan spoke, then there was a smaller session on China’s use of soft power (referring to a brilliant concept by a Harvard professor named Joseph Nye) — Tom Friedman of the New York Times was on the panel, along with the CEO of China’s largest bank (maybe the world’s largest by market cap — I’m not sure), and a pretty high ranking Communist Party official. It was a candid, sometimes aggressive panel, and was terrific. Then I sat in a very small session with the guy who coined the term “nanotechnology” and a couple of other guys who are succeeding with it today. And I just had lunch with some Chinese friends who are working very hard to develop an open culture here. I’m blown away by their mission, their dedication, and what they do every day.

As for Mozilla, about half the people here who I talk with know about Mozilla and/or Firefox — and the people that recognize us absolutely love us. It’s great. I do feel like a tech nerd, though, next to all these economists, politicians, and world leaders. It’s cool, actually.

More later — at the moment I’m about to go into a session where all of us on the panel will be nerds. Tariq Krim of Netvibes, Dave Sifry, formerly of Technorati, John Gage of Sun, and some others — it’ll be like being at home…

Lots to think about — makes me both realize that the contribution of Mozilla in the world is large (and growing) and can be larger — and that the way we’re doing it — in a broad, people-focused, open, non-organizational way — is what many many leaders around the world aspire to.

And as usual, I feel very lucky to be here on behalf of Mozilla. More soon.

anyway, i’ve just put up some pictures of my first day in Beijing on .mac (easier to get to than flickr from here). hopefully i’ll get to take more in Dalian, where i’m headed this evening. [warning: the .mac gallery isn't working for me with firefox 3 trunk builds, but it's hard to tell whether that's because of a browser problem or our slightly wacky network situation here in BJ.]

The hotel I’m in is brand new — it’s the Wenjin Hotel right near Tshinghua Science Park — the Mozilla office is about 2 blocks away, so it’s super-convenient. The hotel is great — super-shiny, super-stylish, and the staff is very friendly and ready to help. It’s sort of like my whole China experience so far — ultra-modern, brand new stuff, stylish, tons of people around to help — but also a little empty — sort of like people are waiting for everyone to move in. It’s a strange dichotomy — it’s not like there’s a shortage of people — there are folks everywhere — but the ubiquity of new construction just seems empty sometimes.

Having said all that, I’ve spent a fair bit of time in Europe, Japan and China over the past couple of years, and nowhere feels the same entrepreneurial intensity as Beijing. I’ve not been to India yet, but for me, at the moment, Beijing feels more like Silicon Valley than any other place I’ve been.

More later — I’ll post some pictures to Flickr in a bit, once I get into the office — I got glimpses of the amazing new buildings going up for the Olympics — the National Stadium and the National Aquatics Center — amazing, amazing buildings.

Fighting with ecto3′s notion of time zones — things aren’t quite showing up correctly on my blog right now, but working through it on a somewhat sketchy internet line.

Hoping to blog a bunch during my week in China — have a couple of things to write about books I’ve read lately, of course, but also planing to post some pictures & thoughts on my 3rd trip to Beijing. FWIW, it’s getting harder & harder to travel away from Kathy & Sam. But back in a week.