Hello everyone! At the beginning of the new school year, a diversity of outstanding students appeared in BCOS, especially Amanda Batista, the student star in September from Grade 12. Despite the fierce competition of university applications throughout the whole year, Amanda is still capable of keeping great academic performance, getting along with Grade 10 students and passionately teaching them new words, so that those students can gain an effective transition into high school.
Every noon, most students passing the reading room hear Amanda, whose is voice full of patience and energy, helping Grade 10 students with new words by clarifying the slight difference between synonyms. Without any teacher organizing this teaching and learning activity, Amanda has taken initiative, volunteering to teach words to new students, showing her spontaneous kindness.
The reason she began teaching Grade 10’s vocab, according to Amanda herself, was “to teach the Grade 10’s from her speak up team”, as she wanted to “help them to improve their English skills”. When they gathered in the reading room, there were other Grade 10 students there, and they came to see what was going on. Due to Amanda’s inner kindness, she decided to invite the other Grade 10 students to learn new vocabularies.
On top of infinite passion, Amanda equally shows strong teaching capability and adaptability. At first she planned to teach the Grade 10 students words they can use in their English essays for the great importance of essays in high school. At some point, while talking, she decided to start with words that we use in daily life instead, since she was totally surprised by the Grade 10’s unawareness of common words. What Amanda teaches is in a great variety of aspects, including the meaning, how to use the word, synonyms of the word, and how the word could be “transformed”(the verb/noun/adjective/adverb version of a word), which is quite beneficial for Grade 10s to form a thorough comprehension of the new words.
Teaching benefits both teachers and students. We do hope that the mutual relationship between different Grades can gain larger popularity and encourage the academic exchanges between students.