First day back
Here’s a picture of the new main administration building at Beijing Normal University, which I think is a really beautiful example of modern architecture. I haven’t been inside yet, so I’ll let you know what the inside of the package is like.
Today I ran my standard loop around the outside of campus and took some pictures. I’ll report on the renovations to that park later. Then I did some organizing at home, retrieved my bicycle from the storage area, and then went into school and met with Shu Hua and Zhang Houcan. I retrieved some of the things I’ve cached here, and dropped them back off in the room. Then I biked over to the Institute of Psychology and met with Fang Ge.
I watched a couple of the reading classes she’s been videotaping for us and was really stunned and surprised by what I saw. The classes differed quite a bit from the math classes, but like them had very slick and thought-out presentations. I’m really glad that we’re extending this project to reading—I think it will end up causing us to rethink our ideas about why teaching works the way it does in the two countries.
Unfortunately, network connections to the outside world weren’t working at the Institute, which meant that I couldn’t accomplish two goals I had for the visit—showing Fang Ge the Q-sort we’re working on and talking to people there about setting up a mirror site for APS and other organizations/journals that might want to make materials freely available in China. Shu Hua and Zhang Houcan both felt that there’s a center at the Institute that would make the best site for this mirror, so we’ll see if they agree.
Fang Ge pressed a huge pile of fruit on me before I left, so the quality of my likely diet here has increased qualitatively. Then I biked home and came back to Psychology at BNU, from where I’m hopefully posting something on this site.
I’m about to crash, so I’ll head home for some sleep.
October 29th, 2003 at 3:30 pm
Kevin,
Glad to hear you’ve arrived safely.
I can’t wait to hear more about the reading classes. I think it has the potential to really open up our understanding of cultural ideas about teaching and learning.
Are the reading teachers specialized in elemnetary school (like they are w/ mathematics classrooms)?
October 29th, 2003 at 9:17 pm
Yes, they’re specialized in the same way. The classes I saw were in a school that’s supposed to be one of the best in Beijing, so classes are very large (~50 students). The teachers had put together really stunning Powerpoint-based presentations and did a number of interesting things, all fairly different from what the Math teachers had their students do.