News
09/18/2026
7,340 Miles, One Classroom: How Our Eighth-Graders Made Friends Across the World
by Chenyi Zhou, Poly Prep World Languages Faculty Member
When one of my students realized that her pen pal in Shanghai—more than 7,000 miles away—was obsessed with the exact same Chinese TV drama she was, the distance between them seemed to shrink on the spot. That moment, repeated in dozens of small variations over the year, is what our pen pal program is really about.
During the 2025-26 year, my Grade 8 Mandarin students wrote, talked, filmed, and collaborated with students at Guanghua Academy, an international high school in Shanghai. Across a 12-hour time difference, they’ve traded stories about their schools, their holidays, their favorite movie stars, their everyday lives—and teamed up on three big class projects—building friendships that reach across the Pacific.
Why We Do It
I’ve always believed you can’t really learn a language without also learning the culture and the people behind it. A textbook can define a word; it can’t hand you a friend who uses it. So instead of asking students to memorize facts about China, I wanted to give them real people to associate with the language—someone who could explain a piece of slang or a cultural reference better than any lesson I could write.
To build the program, I partnered with Professor Qianqian Ma from SUNY Buffalo and with a counselor, Qi Shi, at Guanghua Academy, who together helped us design projects that put students at the center. Our shared online space—a platform called Padlet—started as a simple way to swap messages and grew into a genuine community, where students left comments on each other’s work and kept conversations going for months, switching between Chinese and English however they needed to make themselves understood.
Same Drama, Same Distance
Their first project asked a big question in a personal way: “China / USA Through My Eyes.” Students made posters capturing how they saw the culture they were studying—China through American eyes, and America through Chinese eyes—then discovered how much the other group knew.
That was the whole idea. Instead of collecting facts from me, students got to form their own picture of Chinese culture based on their own experiences and impressions, and then hold it up to the people who lived it every day.
What surprised them most were the similarities. They loved the same shows, admired the same celebrities, and worried about the same things. “I enjoyed this project because I appreciate interacting with people from different backgrounds and places,” Ella S. ’30 reflected. “It helps me understand and learn about them.” Again and again, students told me their assumptions about “how different” the other group would be simply didn’t hold up.
Who Am I?
The second project turned the camera around. In a “Who Am I?” video, students introduced themselves in Mandarin and then used English to dig into the parts of their identity that were harder to put into a new language: what they cared about, where they came from, and who they were becoming. By allowing space for both languages, the students’ self-expression was more nuanced and authentic. In a way, each student’s identity became its own lens for language, cultural reflection, and storytelling.
It was one of the most rewarding things for me to watch. Students spoke about themselves with real pride and confidence, and the project became less about grammar and more about storytelling. “Through this project,” wrote Nkechi U. ’30, “I learned that I am pretty sociable and can relate to people with different lifestyles and traditions.”
Making It Work Across 12 Time Zones
For the final project, students formed small international teams and were given the freedom to decide what to create. They chose from a variety of topics and decided how they would present them. For this cross-cultural exchange, Zoey L. ’30 and Serena A.’30 compared “a day in the life” school vlogs from China and the United States. Asher T. ’30 and Nkechi U. ’30 discussed the stereotypes in the Chinese and U.S. films, The Gua Sha Treatment (刮痧) and Kung Fu Panda.
They met over Zoom, sent voice messages on WeChat, and figured out how to run a group project with teammates who were asleep while they were at school. That challenge turned out to be part of the lesson. “You have to talk with others a lot and at the right time,” Ronin B. ’30 told me afterward, “because the time difference affected our messages a lot.” Along the way, they practiced patience, flexibility, and leadership, and solved very real problems when technology or scheduling got in the way.
What They’ll Carry With Them
By the end of the year, students hadn’t just improved their Mandarin; they’d built friendships, challenged their own stereotypes, and learned to meet differences with curiosity instead of hesitation. Many told me the experience gave them a new reason to keep studying the language because they’d felt, firsthand, what it can open up.
That’s exactly what I hope stays with them. Years from now, when one of them comes across an unfamiliar Chinese phrase, I hope their first thought won’t be a definition from a worksheet. I hope it’ll be, “Oh, my pen pal explained this to me.” That’s when culture stops being something you study and becomes something you’ve lived.
