The Harvard's teaching method was very impressive. In Taiwan, the English course is usually divided into a few types of classes based on functions, such as grammar, conversation, writing, listening, vocabulary...etc, and that's the way we were so comfortable with. Here at Harvard, it integrated four skills together: listening, speaking, reading and writing. In other words, the course was designed to be content-oriented. The biggest difference of English classes between Taiwan and Harvard was we had tons and tons of assignment here. We were required to read a lot of assignment or do research before we went to class. Besides reading, we had to look up the vocabularies on our own, to annotate, and to come up with a few questions. Everybody was so stressed out. I stayed up late and got up early to catch up with my homework but still couldn't finish all of them. At first, I was kind of disappointed, thinking that "Is this the English program I want?" I would really like to work on listening and speaking skills instead of spending most of my time doing research and studying. I would like to learn something more practical like TV news or newspaper or something.
I just finished my stressful graduate study at Brandeis. I desperatedly wanted to have a relaxed summer vacation to enjoy learning English language, not jumped into another even more challenging program. Oh no! I complained a lot. I felt depressed Sometimes. A lot of times, I just didn't want to do my homework until the last minute. When time went on, I gradually found the classes were so valuable, and started to appreciate the hard work and the great efforts the educators and instructors had put into in our classes. We had visiting activities once a week and lectures twice a week. With regard to visiting activities, we went to Treedom Trail, JFK museum, The Science Senter and The Peabody museum..etc, during which we were required to do research and class discussion before and after our visiting.
In terms of lectures, we had Harvard's professors giving speeches twice a week. We had different topics each week. The lectures the speaker gave were related to each week's learning topic, such as human rights, education, politics, environment and gender. Again, we had to do research before the lecture and discussed what we learned, what we were confused about and what questions we might have had after each lecture. All of the learning experiences were combinded together, so we would start to question about what relations between the papers we read and the speeches we listen. Was the speaker right? Was there something debatable? That was a whole NEW experience for me. No matter in formal education or private language studies in Taiwan, I've never, ever had any classes teaching in this way. Critical thinking is the most valuable lesson I learned at Harvard, as there is no absolute truth! We have to keep in mind all the time.
When I still feel painful, struggling with my never-ending assignment, I can't belive that the eight-week program is over. Time flies. I bought a Harvard's yearly planner and a flag to constantly remind me of the Harvard spirit, critical thinking, in my lifetime.
One of our speakers, the right, whose speech was about globalization.
This is the dean of the IEL program, who is so strict and mean, but I still wanted to take a picture with her. ha!
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