Thought for the week

"Intelligence is not making no mistakes, but quickly seeing how to make them good." 

Meeting the people

A key part of the special mission of my current school - a year-abroad residential programme in the Chinese mainland for one of Hong Kong's leading private schools - is to try to get out and about as much as possible to engage with local Chinese culture and give our students maximum opportunity to develop their abilities in Mandarin Chinese.

Although my own Mandarin has never progressed much beyond restaurant-and-taxi competence (and I am, privately, something of a curmudgeon about the value of learning the language anyway), I have done my best to support these initiatives in every way possible. I've had my Film students shooting short documentaries entirely in Mandarin (and sub-titling them into English, to help me out in following them!) and visiting an old people's home to record the reminiscences of some of the city's senior citizens. And I've sent my English students out to shopping malls and such to try to conduct vox pop interviews with local people about what the 'Chinese Dream' means for them.

So, I like to take some of the credit for our most recent 'Inter-Disciplinary Experience' event we conducted at the end of last week, in which we sent our whole school out to various locations around the city to try to talk to and photograph passersby, and then asked them to use this material to create an art display in our theatre capturing the diversity of the society we are living in the midst of. However, I must acknowledge that this project is much grander in scope and ambition than anything we have attempted before, and has been largely developed by our energetic team of 'Coach Mentors' - recent university graduates who join us for a year to live alongside the student dormitories and act as 'big brother/big sister' figures to our boisterous 14-15-year-old charges. The main point of inspiration for this project was the cult photo blog, Humans of New York, created by Brandon Stanton. (I am hopeful we might be able to get Brandon to come and visit our school one day - or at least take a look online at some of the work our students have created in emulation of his site. [We hope to get all of this up on our own 'Humans of Hangzhou' site at some point, but it may take a while.])

Here's a short film I made of the activity (this can also be viewed over on the official school 'TV Channel', which I curate).

A weekend away

One of the approximately gazillion things I have found myself taking on responsibility for at this school is overseeing the Model United Nations group. I knew fairly little about this until I became involved with the CIS Hangzhou project two years ago, and it is not a particular passion of mine; but I do appreciate the enthusiasm it excites in many of our students. And, luckily, I don't really have to do very much to help the group along, as we have a very effective student leadership team taking the reins this year. They only need me for the mundane logistics of booking travel and accommodation, when they want to attend a conference....

CISSMUN VI, the sixth annual Model United Nations conference to be hosted by Concordia International School of Shanghai, was our first opportunity this year, held over this past weekend. The whole of our very vigorous and enthusiastic MUN Club took part. Emily Duncan, Flora Xiao, Lauren Mok, and Jacky Tam represented Thailand on four of the six General Assembly committees, while Natalie Chak, Katherine Ye, Tippy Pei, and Adam Guo represented Yemen on the same committees; Enrique Chuidian was a Yemeni 'expert' on the special Advisory Panel; and Sabrina Chan and Dominic Law were invited to join the press team on the conference's own magazine, the Vigil.

Our parent school, CIS Hong Kong, also sent a delegation of nine members, seven of whom had been with us in CIS Hangzhou last year: Kenny Jeong, John Yap, Axel Leven, Victor Yin, Hannah Hui, Gloria Schiavo, and Jemima Barr. This was the first time members of the current and previous Hangzhou cohorts had had occasion to meet on official business - a moment of such historic import that two of my younger colleagues, Ms Lam and Ms Lee, travelled nearly 100 miles on public transport to join us all for dinner on Saturday evening (they appear in some of the group photos in the restaurant about two thirds of the way through the slideshow below)!!!

I must say, the students and staff at Concordia deserve unstinting applause for a superbly organised event - much the best of its kind that I have ever been to. I very much hope that both CIS Hangzhou and CIS Hong Kong will make this a fixture in their MUN calendars from now on.

Once again, I attempted to record the trip in photographs, and assembled them into a slideshow.

The music is - of course! - Everybody Wants To Rule The World by Tears For Fears. [Sorry - I couldn't help myself!]

Thought for the week

"A great many people think they are thinking when they are actually rearranging their prejudices."

A masterclass in cinema

It is an uphill struggle to get my Film students to post regularly and appropriately to the blogs they are required to keep as a 'Process Journal' reflecting on their work and their growing knowledge of cinema. But occasionally one or two of them will produce a really impressive effort on the blog (which encourages me to hope that one day, maybe, everyone could attain to something nearer that).

I have one lad at the moment, Dan, a very quiet and thoughtful student, who makes me swoon with delight whenever I look at his blog. 

For one thing, he has some sense of visual design - he actually takes some trouble to make it look good. (I emphasise to all my students that film is a visual medium, and that, if they want to demonstrate their grasp of that on their blog, it would help if they could also display some visual flair of their own in its presentation - or at least a basic awareness of what looks good and what doesn't.)

Even more inspiring to me, though, is that he's obviously got a genuine passion for the medium, and for its history. He's about the only person who's working through the whole of the DVD section of classic films I set up in our Library - including the old black-and-white ones like Jules et Jim, A Bout De Souffle, Rififi, Bicycle Thieves, and La Strada.

And he turns up some great resources online. Just recently, he found this marvellous analysis of the great Japanese director Akira Kurosawa (which I was moved to show to the rest of the class, although it's not directly relevant to what we're doing at the moment - thanks, Dan).

This reminds me of an incident about a dozen years ago, when I was teaching at the Beijing Normal University. There were some very good pirate DVD shops in the university districts of the city back then, and I found one quite nearby on the North 3rd Ringroad that had a particularly good selection of non-English-language films. On one visit there, I was astounded to discover an entire shelf devoted to Kurosawa - some dozens of titles, most of which I'd never heard of. I couldn't afford to buy them all at one go, but I was looking forward to being able to build up a comprehensive collection of the master's work over the next few months. For the moment, I contented myself with picking up a handful of his best-known films - Yojimbo, Rashomon, Throne of Blood, Kagemusha. When I returned a few days later, the Kurosawa shelf was almost completely EMPTY; they'd sold out the entire catalogue in under a week. I asked how soon they were going to re-stock. "Oh, we probably won't get any more of him. He's not very popular," they claimed, mystifyingly. Hence, I am guiltily aware that I am still not nearly as familiar with Kurosawa's work as I ought to be. I still have a lot of catching up to do.

Thought for the week

"A teacher is one who makes himself progressively unnecessary."

An experiment

I confess myself to be a severe sceptic about the supposed glories of our modern Digital Era, and I shudder whenever I hear the currently near-ubiquitous, near-obligatory platitudes about the necessity of "digitizing the classroom" and "integrating technology" into everything we do as teachers.

I have found that when children are allowed to use computers in the classroom, they may well get into a productive 'flow' and work very efficiently (although often not), BUT this is the kind of work that could be better addressed in their own time, as 'homework'. If their computers are open, or even switched on, even switched off and closed on the desk in front of them, they are an overwhelming distraction. Hell, even still zipped up in their bags on the floor, they are a distraction. 

Kids using computers do not interact with anything or anyone around them except their screen. It is very difficult to have any useful discussion activity, whether pairs, small groups, or whole class, if computers are on the desks.

In my classes I like to have a broad range of activities - vigorous and student-centred activities. We will have group chats and brainstorming and role plays and oral presentations and improvisations and whatever-else-I-can-think-of. Very little of it silent, almost none of it solitary; and none of it simply staring at a computer screen, thank you very much... or only an absolute minimum of time.

I like to bring a broad range of stimuli into my classes: and I use a lot of video clips and music played from my laptop; but I also like to use poster art and physical objects; and, yes, good old-fashioned books. And I often encourage my students to contribute interesting discussion prompts of this kind as well. They or I will use a computer at some point in almost every class.

But not every class. And not all the time.

I saw an IT 'advocate' at a conference once show a picture (from a computer, of course) of an old school writing tablet, chalk on slate - in an attempt to deride how primitive teaching resources were a hundred years ago, and celebrate how much 'luckier' we are today. I was almost immediately struck by the many egregious advantages of the slate: never breaks down, easily shared among multiple users, much faster 'reboot' time, inexpensive, expendable, not dependent on electricity/battery or Internet connection, VERY long lifespan and almost infinitely reusable, negligible carbon footprint, etc., etc. Good grief, the very metaphorical image of the 'blank slate' conjures up ultimate creative freedom, a completely free rein for the imagination. 

Whereas, the computer (especially the goddamn Mac!) represents for me - and for the kids, too; for most of us, surely - frustration and vexation: endless freezes and crashes, inordinately slow boot-ups, neverending software updates..... and sudden, disastrous losses of data.

What I've only just realised, however, is that the computer also represents - particularly for today's youngsters who've grown up with it, and scarcely known any other way of life - ephemerality and unimportance.

My Film students all keep a 'Process Journal' blog as one of their key course requirements. It is a constant battle to chivvy them into adding regular posts to it. And it is absolutely 100% impossible to get them to read (much less comment on) any of their classmates' posts - I have tried and tried and tried, to no avail. What's more, I am quite confident that they just about never re-read anything they've posted, and hence can scarcely remember what they've posted.... and thus are probably indeed genuinely surprised and baffled when I point out their blogging delinquency to them every few weeks. (Ah, and nobody, nobody ever reads the comments I leave for them!)

I notice again and again in my English classes also that students invariably love any kind of activity that involves creating some lasting physical artifact: rudimentary props and costumes for a drama performance, storyboards for a micro-movie, 'mind-map' diagrammatic notes on a big sheet of craft paper. That stuff they'll hang on to. That stuff they'll go back and look at again, in a few weeks' or a few months' time. I've had the cork-board at the back of my classroom decorated for months with drawings my students made illustrating a favourite from the small selection of Lu Xun short stories I looked at with them early in the year. They're still occasionally looking at and commenting on these now.

A photo slideshow or a PowerPoint deck (perhaps the single most common form of assessment task set in our school) or a piece of writing online.... slips from their consciousness almost as soon as it's complete: click 'Save', click 'Send'..... and forget about it.

And so.... at the end of our last session, just before Christmas, I decided to embark on an experiment with my two English classes. One of them I've been badgering into starting a 'Book Review Blog'; and the other I'm trying to get to do similar work in an old-fashioned notebook. I'm having to set lots of required tasks at the outset, to get the ball rolling. But my hope (ah, fond hope) is that some of them may occasionally start adding items of their own volition.

The blog format should have all kinds of advantages - in making it a more collaborative experience (though I know that, much as I might encourage them, almost none of them will ever look at anybody else's posts), in giving it a consistent look-and-feel, in making it easy to use quotations or add photographs, posters, book jacket illustrations, etc.... and in making it easier for me to monitor. And I know there is likely to be even more resistance to writing longhand than writing on a computer.

But I'd be willing to bet a substantial sum of money that this summer, when they've all left this school, quite a few of those with the notebooks will look through them again. I don't think any of those in the blogging class will revisit their work.

And that's a BIG - and, as yet, almost completely unaddressed - problem in modern teaching. There's a lemming-like rush to embrace more and more new technology, to do everything on a computer, to do everything online.... because it's easy, because it's trendy, because the kids seem to like it. Not because it actually provides a valuable or enduring learning experience.

Thought for the week

"Where evil holds sway, there are greater opportunities to do good."

Such, at least, has always been my justification for staying in China so long... In the last few years, I must confess, this idealism has been wearing thin. The 'bad guys' are still winning here, and I see no sign of that changing in our lifetimes.