Principal Mobsby Joins Online Learning Classes – Shenzhen College of International Education

Last week, I had the opportunity to join an AS Chemistry class. This morning I began with G1.1 Mathematics with Xia Laoshi, Miss Summer. We are using Teams today and the lesson began with the register and assisting the one or two students with connection issues. There were 26 of us in the lesson, so just one of our class was absent today.

Then we went onto the lesson, with the topic of trigonometry, beginning with a review of the homework from last time. We got the answer when the teacher asked one of the class and then Miss Summer explained to us the important details of how to get to the answer, sharing her screen and writing the working out so that we could all see it. She was using OneNote to write on with her computer because we can all access it and check back on what we did later.

She carefully explained what was important for us to remember when doing the calculation to avoid simple errors and why some solutions are not included in the required interval.

After explaining the homework, we went onto the main part of the lesson with the teacher telling us today’s objectives on how to solve cosine equations in an interval. The teacher gave a brief introduction and then let us try for ourselves first. While we worked, we could hear the birds singing outside. Then one of our classmates was asked to go through how she got the answer, with the teacher guiding her to help her get to the full solution. I think my classmates are smart. Thank you G1.1 Mathematics and Miss Summer for the lesson.

This morning I am joining G2 Biology with Yang Laoshi, Mr Back. We are using zoom today, but I am a few minutes late so have missed the register, but Mr Back can see the list of us on the group.

We are already into the lesson, looking at the digestive system with Mr Back asking us questions and showing the parts of the digestive system, starting with a simple question – “can a person drink or eat upside down?”. Our teacher allows us to also ask questions to help us understand the details. Now Mr Back is getting us to relate the idea of antagonistic muscles to other parts of the body, making the idea more relevant for us.

What I like about these online lessons is that the teacher asks us questions and with the microphones we can all hear clearly and hear the answers from our classmates – sometimes in the classroom when we are maybe at the back of the room we can’t always hear what people answer. Of course, we still have to use English when we are answering, and the teacher nicely reminds us if we slip – its good practice for us.

Listening to my classmates answering the questions as the teacher asks us in turn, each answer helps us building up the diagram of the digestive system using what we already know to add to a bigger picture.

For the longer and more difficult questions, Mr Back gives us more time so we can think and work through the ideas by ourselves before he calls us all back to the lesson to explain our answers. I think we have had more chances to ask and answer questions today and we can also use the chat function to type an extra question to the teacher if we don’t understand something.

When we go back through the whole diagram of all that we have been studying today, it is amazing how we have built up the ideas of such a complex system, piece by piece. The digestive system is very complex but all the little parts we have studied are simple and logical. Thank you G2.X1 Biology and Mr Back.

This morning I have joined G1.8 English with Mr Kaisar. We are studying The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime. We begin with some reading and explaining from the text to show the tone being used. This is the author’s attitude towards the subject matter being discussed, and because some of us are uncertain as to the definition, the teacher emphasises for us how important it is for us to understand this as it is different to other contexts.

We take it in turns for one of us to choose a passage in the text, read it and explain the author’s tone. We all follow along on the reading as we each have our own copies of the books and can find the same page. Then we discuss the details in the passage and what evidence there is that lets us know the tone. Thank you G1.8 English and Mr Kaisar.