My blog from Houston, Texas. Updated most weeks, usually on Sundays.
It is always good to welcome visitors to the school, because it lets us see our own school through the fresh lenses of different perspectives.
On Tuesday this week we welcomed a delegation of 25 distinguished educators from the Haidian district of Beijing. They were visiting Houston to learn from the practices and experiences of American schools, especially in the areas of organisational structures and methods used to develop creativity.
The delegation arrived a little earlier than the designated 1 pm, but that worked well as I welcomed the visitors to the board room and provided them with a detailed, illustrated briefing on the school – its history, mission, size, structure, characteristics and statistics.
The delegation then attended part of the Middle School spelling bee that was underway at the time. Most of the visitors had extremely limited English, so I fear it may not have been the most illuminating experience of their visit to Houston, but our guests did smile and nod politely. The delegation was then split into small groups to attend lessons, but not just 5 or 10 minute snapshots – they were keen to attend entire lessons to assess every aspect of the teaching methodology being employed.
As I was teaching my Grade 11 Theory of Knowledge class at the time, I was delighted to welcome several of the interested visitors to observe my class. We were following up some earlier lessons about the natural sciences, and specifically looking at the question of whether recent developments in science can still be really categorised as “science”. In this lesson, we focussed on two cutting edge examples of scientific research – string theory (in its various forms including SuperString theory and M-theory) and Jeff Tollaksen’s research which suggests time flows backwards as well as forwards and thus future events influence the past and present. Science is traditionally identified by its methodology – observation, hypothesis, predictions, replication and falsifiability – but these cutting edge areas of research can’t really be measured or observed in the conventional experimental manner. Thus, the question we explored was whether science is still science, or have parts of it drifted into pseudoscience, or philosophy, or fancy mathematics, or perhaps something else?
My visitors had limited English and so it is more than possible that they missed many of the finer points of our animated class discussion. Fortunately, my lesson included a well-illustrated extract from Brian Greene’s TED Talk on string theory, but even so, I fear my visitors may not have really understood the subtleties of why string theory requires the universe to comprise 11 dimensions. Nonetheless, I did appreciate the feedback I received at the end of the lesson from one of the visitors, who came up to me and said in halting English “I teach physics thank you”. Our conversation advanced only a little further as I engaged in one of my rare conversations using my “street Chinese”; my level of Chinese language sadly stopped short of required sentences such as “SuperString Theory requires a universe with eleven dimensions so the mathematical equations can work”.
The group reassembled in the board room at the end of the lesson for a question and answer session, accompanied by some welcome hot Chinese food and drinks. I was joined for this session by most of our Heads of Departments, the Deputy Head of the Upper School, our specialist Theory of Knowledge teacher, and the Chinese Language Coordinator.
Predictably, I was very proud of my faculty who assisted with the visit, and delighted with our students who acted as translators and guides for the visitors. Our guests kept saying over and over again how impressed they were with our students (their politeness, their enthusiasm, their demeanour, and in the case of our Chinese language students, their skills of speaking putonghua). I believe it says a great deal about our students and their formation that they were so willing to throw themselves so willingly and enthusiastically into such a potentially intimidating situation.
As they were leaving Awty at the end of their visit on Tuesday afternoon, one of the visitors commented that what makes Awty students unique is the “sunshine” in their smiles and on their faces – a very impressive compliment from an educator who has seen students in hundreds of different schools around the world.
Visitors' perspectives
Sunday, 20 January 2013