Grade 7 students recently discussed cultural differences and taboos in Social Studies classes.

In recent years, culture has gradually become an important business card for communication. As a product of the continuous development of human society, the culture of a place contains the historical details of a country or region and exudes its unique charm. 

Just as we put visiting museums on our "To-do" list every time we go to a new city; the culture is the first step for understanding.

This semester, middle school students welcomed Mr. Rathke, the new Social Studies teacher for Grade 6 and 7. 

In order to help Mr. Rathke better adjust to life in Shenzhen, the children brainstormed and offered him many excellent suggestions. Some advice was quite general, such as “you can’t eat on public transportation like subways and buses” and “when you go up the escalator, stand on the right and give the left to the more urgent people.” Other suggestions were very specific like “you can pay with your mobile phone instead of swiping your card in almost all places” and “make sure to not use chopsticks to point at people.” Many of the things we couldn't think of, they thought of.

In fact, this question sounds familiar to us. I believe that in addition to "Li Lei and Han Meimei," there are also Li Ming, Jenny, and a little dinosaur named Danny, in the memory of many Chinese people. We all had the experience of writing to imaginary American pen pals and sitting down with dinosaur to talk about cultural differences. 

Before we can explore the world, understanding cultural differences can be challenging. However, doing activities like this in class helps build the necessary curiosity to better interpret the world. As the Iceberg Theory says, “what we see is only one-eighth of the entire iceberg. The rest is just under water.”

We all know that when interacting with others, we shouldn’t hastily define things or people we don’t understand. The same applies to culture. The children in the seventh grade also understand this principle, and in the classroom, they learned to use culture to communicate diversity and inclusion; just like the city we live in.

In fact, cultural differences are only one of the topics of Social Studies. In the Social Studies classroom, rather than teaching facts, it is better to cultivate awareness. 

We leave the initiative to the children, to go on their own journey of discovery, exploring their connections with the world and finding their own identity. 

I am very glad that we are all growing and progressing; we also realize that the most important thing is to understand and respect each other.

"Difference" is a very interesting word, because of its existence, we are intrigued every day.