She has the name of “The Principal who is having the minimum salary” and a poor amount of monthly salary of $4500. She, Lui Lai Hong, 45-year-old, has over 20 years of experience of teaching children. Although she have already retired, a sudden news has changed her rest of his life.
The only staff in Yuan Gang kindergarten quitted her job last year. The school has only five students left at that time. Only if the school can hire a new principal in a short time, can keep the school from a destiny of closing. If not, the students would have to leave the school or even forced to suspend their study. In order to maintain the daily operation of the school, the supervisor of the school announced a recruitment advertisement of hiring a principal, with the last remaining monthly salary budget of $4500. After the news had been widely reported by different media, Lui Lai Hong volunteered to apply for the recruitment.
On the first working day, Lui knew that the school was lack of different equipment and facilities, for instance, the bell and telephone line. In addition to classroom teaching, the principal of the school have several roles, such as picking up the student to school and sending them back home after school, sweeping, cleaning toilets and distributing flyers.
Lui believes that teacher has the most important role to play in teaching a student successfully. In the case of insufficient equipment and facilities, she needs to take full advantage of the environment surrounding. As there are a few kapok trees near the school, Lui brought students out to pick up the Kapok flowers. Seeing the ants came out from the flowers when the children were washing the flowers, Lui could teach students about the size of an ant. Lui then taught them how to dry out the Kapok flowers. After that, Lui taught students about recording the color changing of the flower. A few weeks later, Lui worked with the students together to buy some Chinese medicines and put Kapok flowers together into a pot to boil herbal tea. This could inculcate the traditional Chinese culture into young minds. Consequently, children would be more proactive to ask different questions – “How to write ‘Kapok’ in Chinese?”, “How to say ‘Kapok’ in English?”, and this indicated that the student learnt how to link different knowledge together.
The way that Lui is teaching allows students to learn with interest and it is indeed “student-centered”. Finally, not only saving the kindergarten from closing, Lui has also recruited more student for the school. With the number of kids of the school on the rise from 5 to 64 in five years and Lui’s unique teaching method, she has won reputation in the society.
Written by: Chan Tsz Ki/Chow Wai Yin/Leung Wing Yu
The other article link: http://wikipeacewomen.org/wpworg/en/?page_id=6907