Wycombe Abbey International School Changzhou: Update fom Dr Dawber Monday 20/06

Today was fairly quiet around school, not least because all the children in kindergarten have been sent home for two days due to a case of hand, foot and mouth disease, which is quite contagious. The headmaster has been having a testing few days with that and with a small group of rather challenging parents of primary school children. Life is never dull here!

I taught a lesson introducing pressure in fluids to a year 9 (U4) class this morning. That was great fun, the students were really responsive and we did lots of fun experiments and demos, some of which involved a certain amount of water being sprayed around the lab! I was impressed with the student's knowledge - one interesting thing is they don't have the same problem confusing weight and mass that many English children have, because they have not grown up using the word 'weight' in every day speach when they really mean 'mass'. They all know that weight is a force and is measured in Newtons, whereas mass is not a force and is measured in kilogrammes, something many home students struggle with. They love doing experiments and demos - because the school is so new, they don't have all that much apparatus yet, so practicals are much rarer here than at home.

One big frustration still is the little meths burners they have to use because the government doesnt allow gas in school, so no Bunsen burners. I prepared for this by heating the water for my collapsing can experiment almost to boiling in the kettle before ading it to my coke can and heating with the burner, but it still took about 15 minutes to boil, so my can didn't collapse at the end. Disaappointing! Many experiments, especially Chemistry, must be pretty challenging to do without Bunsens.

In the afternoon I spent some time trying out experiments for my three big 'experiment mornings' (next week and the end of this week I am doing one session of just under 2 hours each with the whole year group for each of year 7, year 8 and year 9 respetively, doing fun and funky experiments). Rather interestingly, the sprngs they have here don't obey Hooke's Law (how is that even possible?!) so you don't get a stright line graph for Force against Extension. My experment to find the mass of a alien is going to be interesting!

After dinner, I had a drink with the Phil Dearden (deputy head academic), his wife (who is librarian) and the headmaster in the headmaster's rooms. The head is a jigsaw buff so we spent some time on his 10,000 piece construction of Times Square whilst we were chatting! He had also invited to his room for a brief chat three students who are leaving the school at the end of the year to go to a school in England. It was lovely to hear him encouraging them not to be someone they are not in an effort to impress, but to do their best, try everything new, and really make the most of their time in England. He also tried to prepare them for how things in England will be different, not least in terms of the sense of humour!

All in all another fascinating day!

Below are some more general pictures from around the school grounds