Highlights of Teaching - Science:Chasing the life

How do you think today’s high school students? Innocent kids, ill-behaved lads, or guys and girls who fall in love with each other and busy with dating every day? The answer is: No! Contrary to the stereotypes for publics, high school students are not simply teenagers. On the contrary, their brains are already similar to that of adults. Young children may not engage in toys or PC games, instead, some sophisticated scientific research and activities are already applied by our students. For this purpose, a qualified high school serves as a divine palace for determining the future of teenagers. A good example is Southwest Weiyu Middle School in Shanghai. At this promising place, you, as a fresh student, can not only acquire current high school knowledge but also get in touch with the frontier in biology. In April 2023, a special biology class has been kicked off in grade 10.

Before the class, based on the teacher's requirements, we divided ourselves into groups and selected our interested topics about genetic diseases, such as Marfan's syndrome and phenylketonuria. Our content included the cause, symptoms, diagnosis and possible treatments of inheritable diseases. The students cooperated with each other to find the answers first and then gave academic speeches to their classmates.Although our academic speeches are far from perfect, it can be seen that we are all striving to align with the standards of future researchers.

After each speech finished, Dr. Du Xuejing, a PhD in psychology from Leiden University in the Netherlands and a Master in biology from the University of Utrecht, commented on our performance with many useful suggestions. He uphold the idea of " Praesidium Libertatis (fortress of freedom, palace of academia)" and encouraged us to divergent in thoughts and brave in expressions. His professional skills and kind voice impressed us to become more hardworking in future.

Although biology serves as a challenging subject for high school students due to the enormous amount of definitions and terms, Dr. Du always converts dull definitions into vivid examples, which is the reason that we admire him as a student. At the beginning of the semester, many students in our class feel negative about learning biology. However, with the gradual deepening of learning, we have emerged with a strong interest in cells, genes and ecology. Our grades have greatly improved. Moreover, our practical skills improved drastically because of the setting of experiments.

More “miracles” happened in Dr. Du's psychology class. As far as we know, the brain was considered the most complex structure in nature. We once thought we could never build a model of the human brain. However, Dr. Du instructed us to build a brain model with clay and glue. He clearly showed us the structure of the cerebral cortex, cerebellum and brain stem and we memorized the concepts by rehearsal. After long-lasting endeavours, when the exquisite and delicate brain model was presented to us, everyone couldn't believe they have just completed such a miracle.

At last, what I want to point out in this article is that we are not simple “mind boxes” conducting classical and operant conditioning only. Instead, with the help of experts in SWWY, we can reach our zone of proximal development, and become scientists in future. We have written a poem in Chinese to express our admiration for our biology class.