Learning notes 3

Wonderful lectures today even though the gold price is still dropping!

Isobel made a good example of arrange group discussion. Each group member should have a role. This role settlement pushes students to focus more on group work and to engage in the discussion.

Isobel also arranged a "no-talking" game in the 450 class. In the game, all the DP students needed to stand in alphabet order of our first name/last name. Moreover, we needed to play the game according to our birth dates, and even the distance from birth places to Vancouver general hospital.

The purpose of the game is inspiring: (a) in order to play the game, students need to communicate through body languages (remember, talking is not allowed), which in some extent creates a "fair" environment that is regardless of language, skin color, or any other factors. Also, (b) it challenges students' ability of analyzing problems. In this case, students need to break down the problem through creating comparable categories. For example, in the birth place case, students need to compare the birth places by country, then province, then city, and then communicate through a silent method. Many of us use distance (in km) to demonstrate birth places (but it is imaginable that at the beginning the class is totally a chaos as people communicate differently). Some even communicated by airplane flight hours. But all in all, this is inspiring.

This game is all about showing what an inquiry-learning class is. I will summarize the inquiry-learning materials in this blog on Saturday and Sunday.

In the afternoon 490 class, we were informed that all the IB candidate teachers must participate in some CAS activities (basicly volunteering) for two hours per week. Neil later gave me a wonderful suggestion that to be a basketball (or soccer) coach in Richmond. Maybe I will join him.

We also did a claim/counter claim exercise in 490 class. The topic is "You can't be a well-rounded, knowledgable person unless you take math (this is my teaching subject)". One thing to be noticed is that all the subjects have sufficient reasons to be known, but students may choose some subjects that s/he may be interested in for further development. Rejection of any subject(s) makes a student grow up imbalancely.