Despite the fact that my Chinese is pretty bad, the biology teacher here encouraged me to teach a few lessons after I she heard my major was biology. I honestly thought she was joking when she asked me if I wanted to teach a few classes. I basically prepared for the lessons by repeatedly reading their biology book and writing down all of the words I didn’t know into a notebook. All of my students were really interested in my notebook, and would always crowd around to look at it during breaks whenever they saw me studying it. They were surprised by how many words I didn’t know and that I took the effort to write down so many. One of my students even gave me a book full of children’s stories titled Chinese for Kids with a big cartoon rabbit on the cover after he saw me studying Chinese. After the first biology lesson I taught, the biology teacher made a big show of telling the students about how hard I worked to learn enough Chinese to teach them and showed them my notebook. She told them that they should also work hard to learn English. Several days later I noticed one of my students (Cindy) started making a notebook like mine of all the new English words that she learned outside her textbook.
Another thing that struck me during the process of preparing for my biology lessons was how advanced their material was. The 2 chapters I’ve taught were about the eye and the nervous system. I hadn’t learned about all the parts of the eye and nervous system until college. I’m sure most college students have never learned what the choroid is or the difference between the cerebrum and cerebellum. The first biology lesson I observed here was about the excretory system, and as a third year Duke biology major I have never learned about kidney structure or function in a formal class in high school or college. Admittedly I’ve never taken a higher level anatomy class before at Duke, but the biology teacher said the seventh graders are just getting a brief introduction to biology before taking “real” biology classes in high school. In other words, everything they were learning was simple and basic in comparison to what they would be expected to learn in high school, let alone college. The only reason why I’ve learned about the material they are covering is because I have been studying for the MCAT, aka the test college students take to get into medical school. It’s especially impressive when one considers how most of the students here will not even advance on to high school.
Another thing that struck me during the process of preparing for my biology lessons was how advanced their material was. The 2 chapters I’ve taught were about the eye and the nervous system. I hadn’t learned about all the parts of the eye and nervous system until college. I’m sure most college students have never learned what the choroid is or the difference between the cerebrum and cerebellum. The first biology lesson I observed here was about the excretory system, and as a third year Duke biology major I have never learned about kidney structure or function in a formal class in high school or college. Admittedly I’ve never taken a higher level anatomy class before at Duke, but the biology teacher said the seventh graders are just getting a brief introduction to biology before taking “real” biology classes in high school. In other words, everything they were learning was simple and basic in comparison to what they would be expected to learn in high school, let alone college. The only reason why I’ve learned about the material they are covering is because I have been studying for the MCAT, aka the test college students take to get into medical school. It’s especially impressive when one considers how most of the students here will not even advance on to high school.