Before teacher Paul MacLeod left the U.S. to visit Japan, his students gave him some advice.
"They were telling me all kinds of crazy things," he said, "like to be careful because in Japan people eat dog and that they have a custom of burping loudly after a meal." He laughed, then added that the students at his rural Vermont school don't get much exposure to other cultures.
"We don't even have any African-American students at my school, much less any Asian or Japanese ones," he said. "So they were a little misinformed."