Important piece of information - PAS is a for-profit school. Big red flag for me.
Anyway, the classes. Honestly, I don't understand why they have classes that are so long. NYU classes (usually) aren't even that long, and these kids are still in high school. I really don't think they have the attention span to pay attention for more than half the class.. and it shows, too. Precalc was rather long and drawn out. The class was noticeably split down the middle by gender - the girls were on the right side of the room, the boys on the left. About half the students had laptops. The boys on the left were either playing D3 or watching their neighbor play D3. The girls on the right were working on some essay or chilling on facebook. The teacher lectured for most of the class, I could not tell whether the students actually understood the material or not. Well, I could. They were going over determinants of an n by n matrix, actually, and at the end, when he gave them a problem from the book to solve, I heard a girl say (in Chinese), "How do you get the determinant?"
Next was Physics. The teacher was passing back a test in which about 80% of the class had failed. Apparently, he had a hunch that they were cheating by getting answers off the internet (not sure how that would work), and the students had been doing well overall prior to this test, so he designed a difficult test cheat-proof (again, not sure how). The highest grade was 100. The second highest grade was 60. The lowest grade was somewhere around 20. Not sure how I feel about this one. Without knowing how the students could have cheated, and how the teacher could have made the test cheat-proof, I can't really say much about it. The teacher, though, didn't seem to know his subject; the student who aced the test consistently corrected the teacher throughout the class. Really fundamental errors too, like getting an equation wrong, or mixing up terms.
Spanish was a very helpful class in the sense that I got to learn a lot more about the kids at the school and of the school itself. The teacher was a very open and friendly woman, and was more than willing to answer any questions I had. It is near the end of the school year so today's class was a cooking class, where they made some bacon/garlic/mushroom combo. I forget the Spanish name. But she admitted that the school is very different from typical public schools in the U.S. in that it has a very heavy focus on SATs and standardized test-taking. Students here are mostly independent, "just give them a textbook and a chapter and they'll learn it." Which also means the students are mostly well-behaved. She also admitted that there were some teachers who didn't really care about the kids that much.
Java. Not much to say here. Students just worked on their project.
I'm still not sure how I feel about the school. I don't know whether the students are well-behaved and independent because of the school, or because of the culture that surrounds them (they are mostly Taiwan-born and Taiwan-raised). The atmosphere was very nice and friendly though; since each grade only contains about 30 students, the teacher-student relationships were very close. I don't know if I would want to teach here, although it would seem like a relatively easy job (relative to teaching in, say, NYC), but the goals and methods of the school may not be compatible with my own. But as far as the current quality of education goes, I would not pay the $15,000 USD tuition price to send my kid to this school. Also, core classes only happen 2.5 times a week (half-length classes on Thursdays)... considering how little was covered in today's one class, it makes me wonder how much they actually learn? Well, regardless - we'll see.
Yay pictures:
Jiou cai he zi (pinyin may be off) - $0.80
Cong you bing jia dan (scallion pancake with egg) - $0.80
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