The RGS in China By Bill Gibson (63-69), RGS Maths Teacher Way back in 1983 and 1984 Dave Merritt (63-73) and I took a group of RGS pupils to the then Soviet Union, visiting Moscow and Leningrad (now St Petersburg). Some of you reading this article may have been on one of those trips! Later the RGS developed an exchange partnership with a school in Tambov. This came to an end in 1992, but in recent years there have been RGS visits to Moscow and St Petersburg.
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ow, near the end of my teaching career at the RGS, I find myself preparing to take a group of RGS students (as we now call them) to visit China. This has come out of visits by me to Shijiazhuang, the capital of Hebei province, in December 2009 and 2010. (Hebei is the province which surrounds Beijing.) I went out to try to discover why Chinese secondary schools seem to produce such good mathematicians. The answer seems to be: (a) mathematics is seen as a very important subject, (b) the Chinese students want to do well in it, and (c) they work extremely long hours. My visits were arranged by a contact in Newcastle who helps to arrange partnerships between schools in our region and schools in Hebei province. These visits were for my own interest, so I paid for the flights myself. Dr Trafford kindly gave me some days off school to facilitate the arrangements. Much to my surprise, the Hebei Ministry of Education paid for my accommodation and transport once I arrived in China. In October 2011, several schools in Newcastle were approached about the possibility of taking a few Chinese students from Hebei province into their Sixth Forms. The RGS, Dame Allan’s and the Church High School expressed an
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