A Science Experiment that Changed My Thinking
孙 会苗 | Posted on December 9th, 2008 in Integrative Rural Education Program, Personal Impact, Quality Education, RCEF, Science, Subjects, Teaching. 
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I brought lots of glass bottles to the science experiment class because I thought that plastics bottles would be easier for the students to knock over. Ron Sung watched the class and offered some suggestions for improvement. He asked me, “How do feel the class went?” I said, “Not too bad, though perhaps a little long.” Then he asked, “Why do you think it is that it was too long?” I replied, “I think the experiment needs that much time.” The advice he gave me was this: “In fact, it doesn’t have to take so long, and you can use plastic bottles. You didn’t lay down any ground rules at the start of the class which meant that it became a bit unruly.” His advice made me realise that several things I thought before were wrong. I think when students are doing experiments they’re bound to get excited and it’s no cause for concern. Even if a few students knock over bottles during the experiment I wouldn’t say anything. Ron said, “If you want to keep order during the experiment, in addition to laying down rules at the beginning you also have to punish the students who break them.” I learnt from what he said that I was wrong before to think that experiments were fun and that it didn’t matter too much if they got a bit out of hand. Science is a serious subject and it requires a serious approach. I think that Ron Sung has a strict as well as fun approach to science.
For the next experiment, I used plastic bottles and set some rules, and the results were much better. This time, one group broke the rules three times in a row and eventually I stopped their experiment. There were also some students who wrote their reports using overly simple language and did not fill them out carefully enough.
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