Life-wide Learning Day

Life-wide Learning Day (全方位學習日) is a strange name to the outside world except the schools of Hong Kong. It is a new product in School Reform created by the Education and Manpower Bureau (in short EMB) in recent years.

In the past, this day was reckoned as a picnic day, welcomed by students at all ages because they could spend a day at the seaside, down our valleys and over the hills. They could absorb sunshine and breath fresh air in the countryside, eat sandwiches or fry chicken wings at the fires they set. They could talk to and play with their classmates freely without hearing their teachers saying “Shut up”.

Now, the happy moments have gone because EMB says that picnic day is not meant for fun and that students should learn something from this day of school function. What our students in Hong Kong have to do is to write reports in the form of essays, poems or songs if they have the talent, drawing pictures or photo-taking, studying nature, rocks and plantations. Tourist guides and Biology teachers are busy talking about history, living environment and names of plants they come across. Class teachers have to keep an eye on every student to see if they will lose sight in the countryside or at the seaside.

I had the experience of taking my class to Tung Chung (東涌) on such a day. As soon as we reached Tung Chung, we were guided to see the remains of an old castle(東涌炮台) at Tung Chung. It was surrounded by walls with a few cannons pointing at sea. It was supposed to be a lookout for watching any pirate ships coming in. The castle was a fortified one in a small scale, interesting but primitive. It had the size of two to three basketball courts. The tourist guide said that it had been turned into a school before!

During lunch time, I accompanied some of my students, all boys, to a MacDonald at Yat Tung Estate (逸東邨).“15 minutes for lunch” our tourist guide shouted to us. I thought it was a crazy thing to finish eating in such a short time, especially for those boys who decided to eat in a MacDonald. The waiting time for ordering burgers was far more than that of eating in this fast-food restaurant. I went with these boys because I was afraid that they would get lost and might run about, doing something dangerous which I did not expect to see. Even more, I did not want them to be impolite to other customers or dirty the MacDonald. My another duty was to find the location of a Male toilet so that they could go and made sure that all of them left the shopping centre.

Soon after we had taken our lunch, the tourist guide took us out to the wetland near Tung Chung. We avoided from stepping on the wet mud on our way. I did not like the act of a few of my students throwing pebbles seaward to see them jump over the water surface because sooner or later the land would be reclaimed in this way and there would be no more wetland at Tung Chung.

Next we spent most of our time at Tai Ho Wan (大濠灣). Our tourist guide was an expert, explaining to us different kinds of plants as we walked along the narrow footpath round the bay off the North Lantau Expressway(北大嶼山快速公路). We stayed for about an hour there and took the same bus to North Point where I dismissed my students.

I guessed my students must have one or two compositions to write in their English or Chinese Composition lessons. I myself would not ask my students to do any calculations in relation to Mathematics as assignment on this special day. We, teachers, just let our students experience what EMB supposes them to do on a Life-wide Learning day.