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Life & Times Transcript
11/09/07 Val Zavala>> Tonight on Life and Times -- What's the key to preparing our children for the twenty-first century? The answer may lie in these teachers from China. Eric Olander>> You'll never be unemployed if you speak fluent Chinese. You'll get into better colleges probably. You separate yourself from the pack and that's really very important for every young person to understand. Val Zavala>> And then, he's America's premier documentary filmmaker. Ken Burns talks about his career, his techniques and his love of the photograph. It's all straight ahead on tonight's Life and Times. Announcer>> Life and Times is made possible through the generous support of the L.K. Whittier Foundation dedicated to improving the quality of life by supporting innovative endeavors in the fields of medicine, health, science and education. And by a generous grant from Jim and Anne Rothenberg. Val Zavala>> Think about this. One in five Chinese is studying English. They know that their future is brighter in this global economy if they can speak English and the same is true for Americans who can speak Chinese, but very few can. Well, now some southern California schools are stepping up to the plate and hoping to get students interested in Mandarin. Where do they start? Sam Louie has our story. Sam Louie>> It's a country bustling with more than one billion people. Its strength is evident in its dominance of manufacturing, manpower and the marketplace. Eric Olander>> As China becomes a global power, it in many ways competes with the United States. So understanding how this big giant, the eight hundred pound panda, is kind of moving in the world will really help us navigate in the future. Sam Louie>> Part of that understanding is to learn the language. [Film Clip] Sam Louie>> School districts across southern California are recognizing this. In the Palos Verdes Unified School District, more than fifteen hundred students are learning Mandarin. [Film Clip] Sam Louie>> And within the Los Angeles Unified School District, the second largest in the country, the district has just hired four guest teachers directly from China to teach Mandarin to select elementary school students. Liza Scruggs>> What you're seeing is very historic because, for the first time, we're offering Mandarin language and culture at the elementary level. Sam Louie>> Liza Scruggs is the Assistant Superintendent of Instruction for LAUSD. She went to China last year and recognized the dire need to start bringing American students up to speed with Chinese language and culture. Liza Scruggs>> We went to various provinces across China and, everywhere we went, the students were speaking English. They were performing, they were doing geometry in English, they were rehearsing for plays, they were doing ping pong, but everything was in English. Sam Louie>> And with so many Chinese learning English, she decided that it was time to get as many American students to learn Chinese. Liza Scruggs>> Twenty-five percent of the world's population speaks Chinese or are in China and they're learning our language. So it's key not only for our economy, our politics, our social aspects, but in terms of deepening our understanding of language and culture for ourselves and the other people of the world. [Film Clip] Sam Louie>> Jing Hu was one of four Mandarin teachers selected for LAUSD. As a professional teacher back home to both Chinese and foreign students, Jing has seen interest in learning Chinese grow exponentially. Jing Hu>> I asked my students, "Why you want to learn Chinese?" They told me they want to learn Chinese because, if they can grasp the Chinese, they can find a good job for a higher salary. I know maybe a lot of cultures want to have the trade with China, so they think it's necessary for them to learn Chinese. Sam Louie>> This is Jing's first experience living and working outside of China. She will teach Mandarin for at least two years with her salary paid for by the Chinese government. Lynn Haines Dodd>> It's a very important initiative for the College Board. Definitely having the mindset of bringing not only language, but culture to students not only here in the Los Angeles Unified School District, but throughout the states. Sam Louie>> Lynn Haines Dodd is with the College Board. The College Board is in charge of the SAT and other tests which govern college admissions. Lynn Haines Dodd>> We feel that having students become multi-lingual is the way to go in terms of being able to understand the global economy, being able to communicate, the economic impact that it has not only on them growing up, but on the societies in which they are residing. Sam Louie>> Already the discrepancy is huge between the number of Chinese learning English when compared to Americans learning Chinese. Liza Scruggs>> Two hundred million Chinese children are learning English. Fewer than fifty thousand American children are learning Mandarin. We can look at our own data in our school district and, from our seven schools last year, three hundred five students completed either first, second, third year or the Chinese AP program. Sam Louie>> No one knows this better than Eric Olander, the Vice President of News and Production at KSCI 18. Eric Olander>> Channel 18 is their link to the old world, but as well as the new world. We're the bridge that connects people to understanding how things are done in America. Sam Louie>> Like the television station, Eric also acts as a bridge between east and west. [Film Clip] Sam Louie>> As an American fluent in Mandarin Chinese, he can go back and forth between both cultures with incredible ease. Eric credits his success in broadcast journalism to learning Mandarin while in high school. Eric Olander>> After high school, I moved to Taiwan to continue studying Chinese and I got an internship at an American radio station there, an English language radio station, and kind of stumbled into the news department as an intern and just fell in love with it. Sam Louie>> Eric eventually worked for CNN, the BBC, and the Associated Press while in China. Eric Olander>> You'll never be unemployed if you speak fluent Chinese. You'll get into better colleges probably. You separate yourself from the pack and that's really very important for every young person to understand. Sam Louie>> There are two major Chinese languages, Mandarin and Cantonese. In the United States, Mandarin is now growing in dominance. That's because immigration reform in the 1960s brought a new wave of Chinese to America. Ronald Lew>> The flood of immigration from those people from the mainland China made Mandarin the language certainly of choice here. Sam Louie>> Ronald Lew is a United States District Court Judge whose parents immigrated to the United States during the 1920s. Ronald Lew>> I suppose it's a real great situation that Mandarin now is the language for China because you have universalized the language itself so that you can have one Chinese language spoken. It's a common language throughout China. Sam Louie>> Although English is expected to remain the language of choice for commerce and trade, with one-sixth of the world's population in China, Mandarin Chinese could follow as a close second. Do you think Mandarin will ever be the number two language? Jing Hu>> I think so, I think so. Number two. Sam Louie>> I'm Sam Louie for Life and Times. Val Zavala>> So what do you think of the effort to get more American students speaking Mandarin? You can post your opinion on our blog. Just go to kcet.org/lifeandtimes/blog. Announcer>> Kcet.org is the place to look for the very latest on Life and Times. You'll find previews of upcoming stories, plus transcripts and audio of past episodes and links to some of our most interesting features. Just go to kcet.org, scroll down the page and click on "Life and Times". Val Zavala>> This Monday is Veterans Day and, this weekend, KCET presents a marathon broadcast of Ken Burns' documentary series, "The War". Earlier, I had a chance to sit down with Ken Burns to ask him how his career began and what challenges he faced when tackling a subject as huge as World War II. You didn't go to film school. You're in a very film school kind of town, as you can imagine, and there are many people who would die to do what you've achieved and have gone to school to learn it and yet you didn't ever. Did you plan on being a filmmaker when you were young? Ken Burns>> I've wanted to be a filmmaker from -- Val Zavala>> -- really? What was the first sign that you thought you could? Ken Burns>> Well, I remember that my dad had a fairly strict curfew, but he'd let me stay up late at night and watch an old movie or he'd take me to the Cinema Guild in Ann Arbor, Michigan and I'd see a foreign film. It's the first time I ever saw my dad cry. You realize then that there's something pretty special here. So from fairly early on, I wanted to be a filmmaker. Actually, I wanted to be a dramatic -- Val Zavala>> -- you wanted to make people cry, huh? (laughter) Ken Burns>> A dramatic filmmaker like a John Ford or Alfred Hitchcock. I went to Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts, an undergraduate. All of the teachers there, the film and photography teachers, were mostly social documentary still photographers. They reminded me quite correctly that there's much more drama in what is and what was and, in anything, the human imagination -- this town -- can think of. So I suddenly had all of my molecules rearranged and decided to devote myself to documentary and suddenly realized that I had this latent and completely untrained interest in American history. Talk about no film training, but we practiced making movies in the field. I came out of college and just started my own film company and it's thirty-one years later and we're still working and I still feel like I have the best job in the country. It educates all of my parts. It gives me a chance for me to understand almost all the aspects of our complicated and, incredibly to me, inspiring history. Val Zavala>> Now clearly you've made your mark on filmmaking and one of the signs of that is this quote from a web log. It's advice to editors that says, "You can't escape the Ken Burns Effect. There's simply no way to disable the Ken Burns Effect," it says. "Apple -- meaning Apple Computers who makes this system -- must think it's so cool that they want to ram it down your throats." (laughter). Ken Burns>> Well, Steve Jobs called me up and asked me if they could put in this thing that they'd been working on for years which they had as a working title of the Ken Burns Effect in iPhoto. People use it all over and apparently it's very, very successful. It's funny. What we're saying was that a still photograph is the DNA of our visual communication. Most people want something to move and that's very important that it does. But I think things also move emotionally, that it's much better to be moved than to necessarily move. So we've always felt, even though we use particularly in this film, "The War", lots of newsreels, we still think the still photograph is the anchor and we believe to get inside of it. So like that old feature filmmaker that I wanted to be, I treat a still photograph as if it's a wide shot with a medium, a close-up, an extreme close-up, a pan, a tilt, a zoom, all of that stuff. I started moving it within. Most other documentaries before we came along sort of held their photographs at arm's length like a slideshow, happy when it was, phew, over with. But I went inside. I wanted to live inside. I wanted to not only look at it, but I wanted to hear it. Where those troops are tramping. Where the cannons are firing. Where the glass is tinkling in the bar of the jazz club. Where the bat cracks. Where you hear the roar of the crowd. I wanted to hear the photographs. I think that this Ken Burns Effect is really just one manifestation of understanding that it is possible in our hurly-burly kind of MTV quick-cutting generation to find meaning within something. As much as we want it quick and we want it fast and we want it changing, all real meaning in this world, the things that you and I value most in our lives, the relationships and the work we've done, have benefited from our attention. Sometimes that means just sitting there and looking at something for maybe just a second more. Val Zavala>> What's the most challenging part of the production process for you? Ken Burns>> I think the challenge for me is the challenge that everyone faces and it extends to all aspects of life, which is to try to remain authentic, to be true to one's self and to one's talents, to say what you have to say. For us, it's going out and trying to approach a subject that we've chosen without kind of a preconception or learning how to throw off those preconceptions, to allow a story to tell itself. That's a very complicated and difficult thing to do. We so often impose our story on things. We're so certain of our judgments, particularly in our media culture now, that sometimes you just want to get out of the way of a good story and figure out ways that it tells itself. Then I think a huge and complicated aspect of what we do is sort of spreading the word about it. We live in an era with five hundred channels and you have to be part evangelist to sort of praise the gospel of what you've just done and try to get people to pay attention. So there are challenges at every moment of a production. But I think in the end, it's all being true to one's self and being authentic and we recognize that in somebody else. We spot a phony a mile away. We see the junk on television. It may just attract us for a little bit like flies to honey, but in the end, we're sustained by stuff that has some larger, nutritional value and we hope that we've been able to do that. Val Zavala>> Well, Ken Burns, thank you very much for your work. Ken Burns>> Oh, it's my pleasure. Val Zavala>> And thank you for spreading the gospel. Ken Burns>> Thank you. Val Zavala>> The rebroadcast of Ken Burns' "The War" begins Saturday at 11:30 and Sunday at noon here on KCET. Announcer>> To send a comment or a question to our program, you can reach us by mail at this address: Life and Times 4401 Sunset Blvd. Los Angeles, California 90027 You can also call our viewer comment line (323) 953-5555) or contact us the fast way by e-mail at kcet.org. Val Zavala>> American students rank eighth among thirty-five industrial countries when it comes to science literacy and the case is even worse among minorities. That's where Hal Walker comes in. Walker was part of America's mission to the moon and, as Toni Guinyard tells us, he and his wife are now on a mission of their own. Hildreth "Hal" Walker, Jr.>> "And the emergency we're going to have today is our life support systems have a malfunction." Toni Guinyard>> They are would-be astronauts in training, inner city youngsters getting exposed to space exploration in an unlikely location, an old bank building in Inglewood transformed into the International Science Discovery and Learning Center. Hildreth "Hal" Walker, Jr.>> "So you should notify Mission Control that we're having an emergency and we're going to shut down some of the equipment." Toni Guinyard>> At the center of it all is Hildreth "Hal" Walker. Bettye Davis Walker>> Well, he has always wanted to have a center in the inner city for young children to experience science at an early age. Toni Guinyard>> Hal Walker may not have a recognizable name or a familiar face, but his work as a laser systems specialist left a mark on early space exploration. Hildreth "Hal" Walker, Jr.>> I was involved in 1969 with Apollo 11. I was responsible and led the team that conducted the first interplanetary experiments which were operating a laser that ranged to the moon. Toni Guinyard>> It was the summer of 1969. The space race was on. The world watched as the Apollo 11 crew walked on the moon. Part of the mission: the lunar laser ranging experiment. Hildreth "Hal" Walker, Jr.>> Neal Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin placed the laser reflector there that my team successfully used to detect it and make the first measurements of the true distance between the earth and the moon by using a laser. Toni Guinyard>> Inspired by that moment, Walker and his wife, retired educator, Dr. Bettye Davis Walker, established the African-American Male Achievers Network, International Science Discovery and Learning Center. Bernard Harris, the first African-American to walk in space, is its spokesman. Hildreth "Hal" Walker, Jr.>> And he comes here and visits, so they get a chance first-hand to meet someone who's flown in the space shuttle, who's actually conducted experiments in space and, while he's here, he gives them a personal walk, I'll call it, of what a mission is like. Toni Guinyard>> The relationship gives students reason to dream and provides them with an example of what they could achieve. The program is aimed at taking the fear out of learning about science. Bettye Davis Walker>> When I was a junior high school principal, that was the first thing that I could see: the youngsters not wanting to get in those math and those science classes. But after we started having our hands-on science program after school and before school and in the summer, then all of that fear just kind of disappeared. Rahim Miller>> "The object is for you guys to brainstorm and put together a cubicle structure using the marshmallows as glue." Bettye Davis Walker>> Science is a part of everything we do and, using hands-on science as a motivational tool, your critical thinking skills are there, your analytical thinking skills are there. Rahim Miller>> "I want you guys to not only build a cube, but reinforce it." Hildreth "Hal" Walker, Jr.>> We give them a basic understanding of the mathematical involvement of space. For example, the speeds that are needed to break away from the earth is talked about. So they find that practical use of mathematics that they're familiar with explains some of the things that they're seeing happening in space. [Film Clip] Toni Guinyard>> As the children work, Hal Walker watches perhaps thinking back to the moment his interest in space science was ignited. He was not unlike these youngsters. It happened when he was in the seventh grade. Hildreth "Hal" Walker, Jr.>> Well, the folks from, I think, Rocketdyne brought over a model of a rocket to our school. We were all kids sitting there in the auditorium and they turned it on in the auditorium on the stage and that sound of that power, of that type of a small little thing making that sound, just caught my attention and I just said I want to learn more about that. Bettye Davis Walker>> My father worked at the Pentagon and I was at the Pentagon running through the Pentagon halls, so science, space exploration, all of that has just been a part of me. When Hal and I met, it was like this is it. We can talk this all day and all night and do it all day and all night and it's just been a real blessing. Rahim Miller>> "Oh, a sticky situation." Toni Guinyard>> Rahim Miller is one of their success stories. [Film Clip] Rahim Miller>> I got teased when I was younger because I had glasses. Toni Guinyard>> No one is teasing him now. Miller began participating in the program when he was eight years old. He returned to be a mentor, teaching here at the center while pursuing a degree at Loyola Marymount University. Rahim Miller>> I'm majoring in electrical engineering and, from there, I want to receive my Masters and possibly work in the field for a few years and develop experience and then apply for the NASA training school to become an astronaut. Bettye Davis Walker>> That is what it's all about, that you can set your sights as high as you want and you can reach them and you can feel that you can reach them. The key thing is that the kids can change their minds, but the point is that the goal is there. Toni Guinyard>> The Walkers believe this learning experience should be as realistic as possible, so in 2004 the couple commissioned the construction of this space lab. It has all the bells and whistles you might expect and many of the students say this is the heart of the science program. Hildreth "Hal" Walker, Jr.>> The purpose of it is to give children here at the center an experience of actually being in a space station simulator and also operating in conjunction with Mission Control. Bettye Davis Walker>> In order for us to be the best, we have feel the best. So it's a little exercise machine in there. Hildreth "Hal" Walker, Jr.>> "Now the reason we're doing that is because we're in weightlessness and it's necessary now for us to keep our body toned up properly to overcome the weightlessness." Toni Guinyard>> They may appear to be playing astronaut, but there is a lesson woven into every step of every mission from life sciences to biomed. The students must learn to communicate with each other, taking turns working as astronauts or in Mission Control. Bettye Davis Walker>> In this day and age of so many parents raising their children on the television that's got things blinking and blopping at you all the time, I think this is a perfect segue to where you really can come and get some information. Hildreth "Hal" Walker, Jr.>> Each time the students use the space station, they're actually on a mission and there are specific tasks that they're going to actually conduct. Rahim Miller>> "The message points to a slide in the AMI, the articulator microscopy interface." >> "I know it's a human something. This is seven. One fifty seven." >> "Okay, I decoded it and it's the human stomach." Rahim Miller>> "The human stomach. That's it. High alert." Toni Guinyard>> And so begins another day in the Walker's world of space exploration, a world born from one couple's dream of passing their love of space science to the next generation by encouraging them to reach for the stars. Hildreth "Hal" Walker, Jr.>> You have to see what we did in those Apollo days that was just the opening of a door that just leads us into a vastness that is yet to be conquered, but we're on the way. Rahim Miller>> "This mission is now concluded." Toni Guinyard>> I'm Toni Guinyard for Life and Times. Val Zavala>> Do sharks get a bad rap? Well, consider this. Four humans were killed by sharks last year, but millions of sharks were killed by humans. But one lucky shark has ended up at the Aquarium of the Pacific in Long Beach. It's a Bull Shark, but don't be fooled by the name. This bull is a female. Eric Castillo>> My name is Eric. I work here at the Aquarium of the Pacific as an aquarist. We have a lot of different species of sharks and rays here at the Aquarium of the Pacific. One of our feature creature is obviously our Bull Shark right now. Our Bull Shark is about a three and a half year old individual. She weighs roughly about sixty pounds and is right about four feet in length. She's going to go ahead and mature up to be about eight and a half feet, three hundred pounds, very, very large shark and reported to be twelve feet, five hundred pounds. Bull Sharks are reported to be in all tropical Pacific oceans, warm waters. In northern America waters, you can find them anywhere from about New York all the way down south to Florida, very, very common in southeastern Florida, all around the Gulf. Also very uncommon for them to be here in southern California, but there is a potential for them to be around here. These animals are often going to be coming very near shore. Quite often, one of the adaptations she has is to transverse from saltwater to freshwater, so you can find these animals in very shallow waters where freshwater rivers meet the ocean in an estuary habitat. The reason why we have her here is to kind of educate the public about really the shark food trade that is out there. Here at the Aquarium of the Pacific, we're really trying to educate the public that these are beautiful creatures and, unfortunately, because of the undue reputations sharks have, we're currently killing worldwide about a hundred to a hundred fifty million sharks. There's a couple of things that the public can do in their everyday life to help sharks out in their natural habitat. First and foremost, we really want people to stay away from shark fin soup as well as shark cartilage products and shark liver oil. We hope, by educating the public to stay away from these types of products, it'll in turn help the sharks out in their natural environment. Val Zavala>> And that's our program. I'm Val Zavala. For everyone at Life and Times, thanks for watching. We'll see you next time. Announcer>> Life and Times was made possible through the generous support of the L.K. Whittier Foundation dedicated to improving the quality of life by supporting innovative endeavors in the fields of medicine, health, science and education. And by a generous grant from Jim and Anne Rothenberg. Sponsored in part by:  | |
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