Reflections on OELP- Day 3&4

On the third day of the trip, we went to Nanjing Bo Le School for the second day of the school immersion programme. We had the chance to sit through a lesson in class with our buddies. The lesson I sat through was Geography, and the teacher got students to introduce their own countries briefly, such as travel attractions, food, geography on the word map etc. There are many observations I made:

-Students are able to voice out answers, or their own opinion

-Both students and teachers are very encouraging 

-Able to see that no students are distracted 

-Teacher very spontaneous, he rarely stops 

So how are they different from us?

There was not once that the students did not volunteer, apart from being called on by the teacher. This shows that they have great passion for learning. Sometimes, when a student gets a question wrong, I observed that the teacher will not frown or directly tell the students that he/she is wrong, but instead let the student try again, and then explain the answer. Thus, I found that it was very encouraging for students. 

However in RV, there are many times that the teacher have to wait for a few moments before someone eventually volunteers. I would actually prefer to study in Nanjing Bo Le School as of it's learning environment and the attitude of the teachers and students.

Next, we went to Nanjing museum and I felt that it was very interesting to see the artifacts of China, especially the ones during the Qing dynasty, as we studied the history of it during history classes. Another exciting point is that we got to see real dinosaur bones too!

On day 4, we went to the Nanjing massacre memorial hall. There was dim lighting in the museum for the atmosphere is solemn and respectful. Before the trip, my seniors who went before kept telling me how scary it was, and that people were crying after the visit so I thought that it was going to be very gory, but it was not as bad as I expected it to be as pictures were in black and white. To me, it was not that scary or too extreme but it was definitely very sad. I felt that the museum is more biased towards the Chinese people, who were the victims, so I felt that the museum would not be the same if it was to be built in Japan. When it is built in Japan, it would affect people's attitude towards the Japanese, and make them seem less cruel.