The RCEF Blog 博客

Guan Ai’s annual New Year’s (Yuan Dan 元旦） Celebration took place yesterday on a chilly but clear day. After breakfast, motorbikes started piling up outside the school gate as students’ guardians arrived. Some of the them had just returned from working in cities and hadn’t seen their kids in weeks or months. Each class set [...]

Teachers at Guan Ai School strongly believe that parents and home education play extremely important roles in the education of their children. However, in the countryside many parents are not conscious of this. On our visits to students’ home, we almost always hear problems about communication between parents, their children and their views on education. [...]

Christmas isn’t usually celebrated in rural China. However, the Guan Ai students and teachers remembered the Western holiday was coming up and went all out to make it special for the RCEF staff here. Last night (Christmas Eve), I walked on to campus surprised to see a lighted up tree! It had the students’ cardboard [...]

Classes at Guozhuang have actually finished now and I’m now back in the safe confines of Guan Ai School in Shanxi. I do miss the students at Guozhuang though, as they really were a great bunch. Throughout the course and, I dare say, wherever and whenever I teach I try to teach students how to [...]

Ms. Wang is the first grade Chinese teacher. She likes to tell stories to students. Here is a blog post she wrote: Young faces, rising voices, enthusiastic hand movements. All of these show their happy and enriched childhoods, increased interest in reading, and improved speaking and presentation skills. A childhood without reading is a dry [...]

Sigh! it’s that time of the year again. Final exams are just three weeks away and Guan Ai teachers have pulled out their secret weapon…… practice tests. Starting from about two weeks ago, various practice test vendors started visiting the school. They would come on their motorcycles, on which were bundled heaps and heaps of [...]

Every day, many things happen at Guan Ai Primary School. The usual day contains many different kinds of matters big and small. Once one task has been completed there is always another to do and, often, the more important goals and plans get pushed back. Only after a long day’s work do we finally have [...]

I’m coming to the end of my time teaching here in Guozhuang village and have taught the students many different things, including net browsing, word processing and email. But more than these specific skills I would like to think that I have also taught them how to learn for themselves, which is surely the skill [...]

Recently, I read a paper by Huhua Ouyang called One-Way Ticket: A Story of an Innovative Teacher in Mainland China (Anthropology & Education Quarterly, Dec. 2000). It chronicles the journey of “Cheng”, a highly decorated English teacher from a rural area. She received free training at an urban university aimed at raising her English skills [...]

Computer classes have been going on for a few days here at Guozhuang and things are going quite smoothly. We have ten students of varying ability, though none of which are very experienced. The plan is that this first class will go on to teach other villagers how to use computers, thereby increasing uptake (purchases) [...]