My First Visit to Lishan High School

Tiffany and I reached in Nei-Hu at about 8:20 am. As I took my first look at Lishan High School, it was like a castle in the fairy tale. The surrounding area was not densely populated as I thought and so the air was fresh. I could tell that the school was newly set up by the whole school buildings as well as the feeling that people there revealed. There was a signboard which was read “A School of the Future” giving me a thought, “Wow, it must be provided with great technology.” This is my first impression about Lishan High School. Put it as a footnote that I think it is quite economical, since there were lots of facilities of sensoring lighting system at school.
I was in the group A. The teachers we visited had different teaching styles which were involved in their individual’s characteristics. The first teacher we visited was Ms. Liu. She started the lesson with some simple review questions about an article, “Echo and Narcissus,” which she had covered it before. At that time, I was a bit embarrassing since stories on ancient Greek mythology were a far access for me when I was in their age. Ms. Liu then indicated the intended lesson objective clearly. Here came the first activity: tape listening on “Echo and Narcissus” along with its reading content. The learning activity was followed by an array of questions asked by Ms. Liu. There were some features I jotted down concerning the way she presented questions to her students. To start with, she asked for students who were picked to look her eyes and answer the question in their own words. Furthermore, Ms. Liu asked questions step by step along the plot, including “who, what and when.” The way she presented was quite logical and clear-cut. Interestingly, she kept repeating the question about 6 to 7 times while asking. My understanding is that she intended to help students who were absent-minded remind of her questions. Repeating questions, on the other hand, can speed up students’ train of thought. As for students, to my surprise, they all were able to give answers in fluent English.
The following activity was “word building.” Ms. Liu introduced three vocabularies on the board. Students then familiarized those vocabularies through a tape listening on the story of Tantalus. Later on, teacher again asked questions to help students piece together about what they heard. The learning activity smoothly went on with tape listening again with the handouts. There were some vocabularies on the handout. The learning activity, consequentially, turned to sentence making. Ms. Liu set an example by herself first. Continually, she went over those vocabularies one by one with students. In the meantime, students were asked to make their own sentence with a certain vocabulary. The former learning activities I mentioned were all teacher-centered, I might say, given the patterns of interaction were like teacher asking and the students giving answers in response. The last learning activity was that students were allowed to discuss with their peers and showed their sentences on the board. Since students produced the sentences on their own, the activity was student-oriented, let me put this way. The whole sequences of those activities were fairly coherent and smooth, except from the time management was a bit out of control. By the way, as I took a look at those vocabularies on the material, amazingly to me that some of the words like “condemn” or “recede,” were out of my knowledge as I was in the second year in my senior high. “Nowadays senior high students are really excellent in English,” I was wondering.
Our following class observation led to the class308 conducted by Ms. Yuan. Today’s topic was about handling stress which was directly displayed with some simple questions by Ms Yuan. Questions giving to the students are like, “Have anyone of you ever had pressure or distress in your daily life?” or “How did you handle it?” To start with, Ms. Yuan distributed handouts which require students to write down their own troubles and stress. Ms. Yuan put herself as an example sharing her trouble and how she dealt with it. The activity further moved on to the pair work that students were asked to find a partner that s/he trusts on for help and suggestions. There was a girl, by the way, asking me about how to get an easy access to memorize vocabularies. After the completion of the blanks on the handout, Ms. Yuan picked up some students and asked them to share what advices they were given. I noticed that, however, the whole class was a bit out of control. Since some students haven’t finished the sheet yet, inevitably it was hard for them to draw their attention to what other people said. The next learning activity was to read some dialogue poems about friends, parents or dream on the other handout. Some students were chosen to read out the poem. After the reading section, here came the last activity. Students were required to find a partner or two members to create their own dialogue poem.
It’s interesting to me that teachers with different characteristics actually can initiate different atmospheres among the class. As I was in the class207, it appeared that there was something pushing me to focus my concentration. While I was in the class308, I felt a sense of comfort to be with them.