The RCEF Blog 博客

If Guan Ai’s 4th Grade class is considered the smartest group of students at the school, then Teacher Sun, their language and science instructor, deserves immense credit for providing her students with a rich, engaging curriculum.

Earlier this week I visited a language classroom of another teacher at another school. The lesson consisted of students first reading through text that described the beauty of grasslands in northern China, then the teacher lectured for thirty minutes about the beauty of grasslands in northern China. At the end of the lesson, the teacher asked students whether beautiful descriptions of grasslands in northern China were the same as they imagined.

Students nodded their heads.

Realizing the glaring bias of the state-mandated Chinese textbooks, Teacher Sun and I decided to take students outside the school campus to write about nature. With pen and paper, students walked into a local field to describe plants, fruits, trees, leaves, and everything in between. We prepared a graphic organizer in order to guide their focus, but we also provided open-ended questions for their imaginations.

Arranged in groups, students used their collective creativity to describe what they saw, felt, and smelled. Students also used their collective creativity to grab fruit off trees and sample.

Most important, Teacher Sun described how students were challenged to describe their surroundings. Instead of deep red autumn leaves found in books, students puzzled over how describe red-yellow-green leaves with black splotches; instead of plump, juicy fruits, students plucked from a tree something that tasted between sour and bitter.

No, nature in reality isn’t as perfect as how their textbooks describe it, but the students found sweet satisfaction learning beyond books.