New Year Is Time for New Culture

Serving up noodles, rice and fortune cookies, teachers at Jackson Elementary School on Tuesday helped students raise their cultural awareness at a festival celebrating the Vietnamese and Chinese New Year.

The third annual “intercultural exchange” at the school, which has grown to six classes and 150 students, included a dragon dance, a small parade and lots of food--even if some of the students were not sure what they were eating.

“I liked the food--the spaghetti,” said Frank Ornelas, 7, who had, in fact, been eating Chinese noodles. Students were taught that spaghetti originated in China, and maybe the distinction between it and noodles was lost along the way, teacher Eileen Mahmoud said.

The school festival’s origin is in cultural exchanges begun about six years ago in classes taught by Mahmoud and another teacher.

The school held its first full-scale festival three years ago, with four classes participating.

This year, the festival was expanded to six classes, and Principal Julie McCormick hopes to increase that number in the future.

McCormick said that, based on comments from teachers, the festivals have helped promote tolerance. On the playground, for example, students do not always cluster along ethnic lines, she said.

While all 150 students Tuesday wore hats shaped like cones and made of red paper, students from three classes performed the demonstrations. For the Mexican holiday of Cinco de Mayo, students from the other three classes will perform.

The lunchtime festivities began with a procession of students holding mock lanterns and marching around the lunch tables and through the media center. Some students wore traditional costumes, which included long silk shirts that drop below the knees.

Two students also demonstrated the dragon dance, using a papier-mache dragon head attached to a long cape.

Jackson Elementary, said McCormick, is 85% Latino and 13% Asian. The other 2% comprises blacks, whites and Pacific Islanders.

Mahmoud noted that the school’s diversity has allowed teachers to use the students as sources of information.

“We have such great resources here,” Mahmoud said.