On the 3rd and 4th day of this Xi’an trip, our students were to attend a Secondary school to experience the typical school life here. Before the students got into their respective classes for lessons, all of us were first invited to the welcoming ceremony.

Our students (along with other Singapore students from various schools) were paired up with their new Chinese buddies by identifying their names on the labels put on the tables. The principals of this school (薄迪中学) gave an opening speech, followed by two students (one from their school, and one from St Nics) who gave a brief introduction.

Next was the exchanging of gifts between the local and Singaporean students. From the picture above, you can see that the students were ready to engage in a conversation with their new friends. Not long after, it’s lesson time, and our students went off to their buddies’ classrooms to attend lessons.

I had the chance to walk about and snap some pictures of the school. Pretty big. They have what is equivalent to Singapore’s Primary, Secondary and JC level all in a single school.

In the afternoon, I was given the opportunity to conduct an English lesson to 2 Sec 2 classes. Yes, English..not Math! :S Anyway, powerpoint slides were prepared in advance, and what I needed to do was to introduce interesting facts and lifestyles of Singapore. I must say that the students here are very well-behaved. They are attentive and responsive, making the learning environment very conducive.

This are the children in the classroom listening to another teacher teaching English. Nope, the boy at the bottom-left is not sleeping. 

A teacher who joined this trip with us giving the lesson. 

See how attentive the students are? (They weren’t even bothered by me snapping my camera away!) When they were asked to write a short paragraph about "Myself" later on, some of the students had a little difficulty in expressing their thoughts in English, probably because they’re still at quite an elementary level of English. But nevertheless, they wrote with great enthusiasm and tried to include as much information as they could. 

Before the lesson ended, Audrey (the teacher who was teaching) asked for volunteers to read out what they had written, and immediately, two students volunteered themselves. With confidence, they recited their paragraphs while the rest of the classmates kept quiet and listened. At the end of each presentation, the classmates clapped together to show their encouragement and support to the two volunteers.

Although we spent only a little time in the school, it was quite an enriching and eye-opening experience. It is interesting to note the difference between schools in Singapore and those in other countries.