My First School Visit

These are my friend Tiffany & Jainjing, two grade 6 students at an all girls school in Penang. I talked with the two girls for an hour this morning. The purpose of my visit was to collect data for a math assignment, but we talked about lots of stuff. The two girls were both very smart and math was their favourite subject. They are the oldest students in there school, and they will go to the secondary school next door for grade seven. They go to school from 7:30 until 1:05, along with the grades four and five. Grades one through three attend school in the afternoon from 1:30 until 5:00. They are taught by mostly female teachers, but they said there were five male teachers at the school (5 men & close to 50 women teachers). They don't mind wearing their school uniforms because they said they are used to them, and then they don't have to worry about what they are going to wear in the morning, there are just the two different uniforms.

As I mentioned the girls were very smart, they were doing work equivalent to grade eight work at home. They said they are taught in a very structured format. Their lecturer will gives them notes and examples, then they use manipulative's to solve practice questions, and they have an assignment from a text book to wrap up the class. Classes are only 30 minutes long though, somedays they'll have two math classes in one day. They have no homeroom and travel from class to class similar to high school, they don't have the same classes with the same students.

I had a great time visiting the school, I met the head of the school, the principal, and saw the field, the cafeteria, and inside some classrooms.