My Joy in Teaching and Learning I have been engaged in teaching Intensive Reading Course to PhD【1】of Science and Technology

My Joy in Teaching and Learning
    Ladies and gentlemen, comrades and friends, I should like to share with you the joy I have in my teaching and learning.
    First I’ll talk about teaching. In recent two years, I have been engaged in teaching Intensive Reading Course to PhD candidates of Science and Technology in Sichuan University. Some friends shrugged their shoulders, saying, "They are not P.H.D.’s of yours. Why take the trouble to make dowery for others? After all, you are just teaching ABC." But I believe this is a pleasure and honour for me. So I started from scratch, from wide reading and careful selection, to edit a text book and write a guide for Doctorate Intensive Reading. Many of the texts are selected from Nobel Laureates whose speeches give a wide scope of their fields as well as a wonderful summary of their painstaking efforts leading to success. So I brought it to the classroom to begin a new career.
    I find my 50 or more postgraduates young and energetic. They are academically keen and alert. With many years of disciplined trainings, they have built up an analytical and synthetic mind, some still holding a very good memory. What is very typical to them is their sense of social responsibility, and a sense of challenge and chance. They are ambitious to master English to speak in the international science conference for our motherland. They are eager to dedicate their knowledge, skills, youth and wisdom to China’s giant strides in the Twenty-first century. However. their English proficiency isn’t of the same level--Even for the same student, the four skills are developed in an unbalanced way. Most of them are weak in daily English conversation. No one has the experience of addressing a crowd in English.
    In my first lecture, I introduced Francis Bacon’s famous aphorism: "Reading makes a full man; conference a ready man; and writing an exact man." I also added a line, "Listening makes a wise man." These four skills should go together to form English proficiency. It is matched with another word "efficiency" namely, in the shortest possible time, to achieve the best possible results. Students find this idea quite convincing. With a high demanding, with conscientious work, with the inspiring Nobel Laureate’s speeches, with proper teaching and learning methods, they have really made dramatic progress. By the end of a term and a halt, every EHD. candidate could speak in the English conference about their research field, their topics including "On Passive Stabilization", "Sediment Problems and Long-Term Use of the Three Gorges Reservoirs  Rechargeable Lithium Battery" "Time Saving in Refueling Daya Bay Nuclear Power Station  Green Chemistry and Sustainable Development of Leather Industry" Not only speaking, the students were also required to write detailed outline, make graphs and charts, write abstract, give report, answer questions, organize the conference or preside over the workshop meeting. Professors of English who were invited to ask questions in the workshops graded the students according to the same criteria fully discussed. When everything was smoothly done, when the PhDs spoke on their research work fluently and confidently in English, you might ask, "How do you feel at that moment?" I could frankly answer, "Superb" or I’d directly quote from Keats, "It’s not through envy of thy happy lot. But being too happy in thine happiness--."
    Now let me come to my learning. I don’t think I was born terrifically brainy to be a good teacher. But I can assure you I am diligent in learning and good at learning. When studying at West China Union University, I was major in English Literature and minor in Music. Besides requirements such as Composition, Translation, Literature, Piano, Harmony, I also chose Physics as optional for 8 credits. I find them all very useful in my later life. After graduation, I learned Russian from the very beginning and taught college Russian for two years. In my mid-career I turned from an undergraduate English language teacher to be a rotor of post-graduates (M. A.) orientated in Contemporary English and American Literature. When I was forty I studied under the professors of British Council in Shanghai Foreign Language Institute for half a year. At fifty I became a student and visiting scholar in America for a month and got certificate at Sit (Student of International Training ) in Vermont. At sixty I studied and did cooperative research on Shakespeare in Oxford University. Right now, I hold the same enthusiasm in studying Einstein’s relativity, Plank’s quantum theory, Chaos theory and genetics engineering, Clones etc. Of course, my knowledge is rather superficial and it is dangerous to be a rolling stone. I think it is not the knowledge itself, but the satisfaction of knowing that something is known that makes me happy. 1 have got what Francis Bacon called "only by kindling a light in nature" and what Freud called "oceanic feeling" that’s why they are so helpful in my qualifications of being a teacher of English for the RH.D’s.