A pick-me-up

At the end of the school year, teachers try to solicit feedback from their students.... and some of it is positive. And we have such well brought-up students here that most of them make a point of thanking their teachers - but it often seems a little token, perhaps insincere.

At the weekend, however, one of my students surprised me with a very heartfelt and thoughtfully written e-mail in which he thanked me for being so open to any kind of question or topic of discussion, and said that he'd found his English class this year much more "fun and interesting" than ever before. He capped his reminiscences of our year together with the nicest compliment I've ever received: "I think you are the most adventurous teacher I've ever met." I'd be happy with that on my tombstone.

Of course, my 'teaching style' has not been so well received by everyone. What one student finds 'interesting' may baffle or bore others; what some greet as 'fun', others resent as 'frivolous', 'unfocused', or 'lacking in rigour'.

You can't win. You can only keep on trying.

Thought for the week

"To be an idealist, one must thrive on disappointment."

Interviewing Cindy Pon

I was even more crazily busy than usual last week, hosting the visit of my school's first writer-in-residence, the American Chinese YA author Cindy Pon (who I'd first got to know several years ago - an e-penpal relationship that started in the comments of a mutual friend's publishing blog).

Last Monday, I interviewed her in the school library about her life and work. 

Thanks to my student Hayson Chu for filming this

Wot - no 'Thought for the Week'?

Alas, no - I've been too busy.

But since the end-of-year reports and so on are looming, it seems appropriate to reflect on these wise words from John Holt for another week.

25 years on

The violent suppression of the Tiananmen Square demonstrations in Beijing in June 1989 was a key moment in my life. I had just started my first teaching job, and it was at a school that happened to have quite a large contingent of Chinese students (mostly from Hong Kong) - so, we were especially interested in the events we saw unfolding in China on the news through April and May that year, felt a particularly intimate connection to them. And thus the wave of bloodshed that was unleashed on the night of June 3rd/4th was a devastating shock to our little community; not only to the Chinese students, but to all of us who had been drawn into sharing their emotional investment in the situation. As the patron of the school's Amnesty International group, I spent much of my next three years there co-ordinating letter-writing campaigns in support of various victims of the crackdown - one of whom, I recall, was a local government employee who had had the temerity to lower the flag at his office building to half-mast on the first anniversary.

Picture from the New York Times

I had hoped our students here might do something to mark yesterday's 25th anniversary - but I wasn't going to prompt them into doing so. And, in the mad rush that is the end of a school year, they were, alas, too preoccupied with other things.

I am glad to see that the occasion was marked in Hong Kong - as it is every year - by a massive turnout for the candlelight vigil in Victoria Park. And I liked Tania Branigan's article about the anniversary in The Guardian today.

Thought for the week

"We destroy the love of learning in children, which is so strong when they are small, by encouraging and compelling them to work for petty rewards – in short, for the ignoble satisfaction of feeling that they are better than someone else."