Using the innovative measures to teach CHEMISTRY to students who never liked the subject, from the Newspapers, translated…
“Come! Let’s go see Hayao Miyazaki for coffee!”, this became a trend among the high schoolers in Hsinchu. The Hayao Miyazaki look-alike cram school teacher, Wu opened up a café without a sign, and added the icy, cold, AND boring concepts in chemistry to all the corners of his café; the café became the favorite secret meeting place for the students.
At age fifty-four, Wu was a retired associate professor from Teaching College, after his retirement in 2012, he took his twenty-five years’ teaching experiences back home to Hsinchu, in the evenings, he’d taught the high school students in the cram school, and during the daytime and the weekends, he’d operated a “not-for-profit” café in the second floor of his apartment. The space was filled with the aromas of the coffees, filled with knowledge in chemistry, it’d, clearly, become, the students’ favorite secret gathering place.
Wu’s biggest trait was, that he resembled the Japanese animation artist, Hayao Miyazaki, which closes the gap between the students and him,, every time he was asked, “Why do you look like Miyazaki so much?”, he couldn’t help but smile.
Miyazaki used animations to tell the stories, “Chemistry Miyazaki”, Wu also used the drawings to put his twenty-to-thirty years’ experiences in chemistry to show the students. Being interested in the arts, Wu taught himself to use the computerized drawing programs, and turned the knowledges in chemistry into products he could sell, he’d even put the chemical equations onto the mugs as sketches and décor too.
There was a mug with a boat that’s filling up with water on it. Wu told, that the baseboards are soaking in water, that, is the concept of “penetration”, and the chemical equation for that “π=iCRT, was hidden within the reflection of the sunset of the designs”.
The concepts in chemistry had filled up the entire space of the café. The tables has a hexagonal structure of benzine, there were cone-shaped bottles that were turned into the light fixtures, and on all the mugs with the various designs, there were, chemical formulas on them too; what’s more special was, the entire wall of the mugs make up the periodic table.
“Every time, the students come, they would, remember something from the formulas”, Wu used the café to teach the formulas and the knowledge of chemistry, turning chemistry into everything encounter for the students, and, this fun way of learning had the middle school students call out to each other, “Let’s go find Miyazaki for some coffees on the weekends!” on FB.
“A lot of people are afraid of chemistry, it’s all caused by those unrelated texts!”, Wu laughed and told, that opening any of the bottles of soda, you’d hear a “pop” that would be a formula for the gasses, and, ALL of these every day encounters and knowledge are all hidden, as a décor of the mugs; drinking a cup of coffee, the students would be able to study and decode the “chemistry code” on the mugs as they wished to.
So, this man had, turned something that’s usually dry AND hard, into something that’s easier to study, by incorporating the knowledge into something that the students would encounter every single day, and, his café serves the purpose of educating the younger generations, by making the subject of chemistry easier to understand, he’d helped the students NOT feared it, and be more opened to the subject too.