On the 27 November, 2015, JESIE held a special History Open Day for Senior 1 at Rugao Middle School. The purpose of the demo lesson was to give Chinese students a taste of what it would be like to be in a History class in a North American high school.  JESIE is affiliated with various high schools in Jiangsu Province; a certain percentage of programs are intended to prepare students for application to universities overseas, while others are intended to support the work of Chinese English teachers with access to a teacher who is an English native speaker. It is a valuable experience for students at both ends of the spectrum to see how students overseas learn, and is also an authentic application of English usage.

The demo lesson demonstrated in Rugao was created for higher level high school students. The topic of the demo lesson was the Spanish Influenza Pandemic of 1918. This historical event was chosen for several reasons. The first was that it had a significant global effect, the second was that that global effect included China which made the topic pertinent to the students' own past, and the third was an interesting experiment used to show the rate of infection. Great effort to prepare a 45-minute lesson plan set at an appropriate language level was made by the JESIE staff in Nanjing.  Because of the level of vocabulary, a vocabulary list was sent to the school ahead of time for the students to prepare in advance for the actual lesson.  

The Senior 1 class had approximately 38 students, which is smaller than usual high school classes. They had clearly reviewed the vocabulary prior to the demo lesson and had some familiarity with the topic as a result. The students had also kindly prepared name tags, which allowed for a more familiar and comfortable atmosphere between teacher and class. The lesson, with PowerPoint presentation, went well. One point to remember in the future is the need to write terms on the board to provide occasional visual support to new words, even if they have been added to the vocabulary list. In general, students were able to answer questions and even provide some discussion, but they did sometimes get thrown by a new word. After all, there is a difference between reading new vocabulary and actually using it.

Of course, the high point of the lesson was the experiment to show how quickly and severely the H1N1 flu virus spread through the population. Each student received a paper cup half full of water. Bottled water was used to prevent local water conditions affecting the experiment. Of the 38 cups, 4 cups had white vinegar added to simulate the H1N1 virus. Students were asked to find other people from different areas of the room, pour their half cup into the other persons cup, and then pour half back into their cups. They repeated this process four times and then sat down. They then each received a piece of litmus paper and tested their water for acidity. If the strip of paper turned orange or yellow, they were ill or dead. All 38 students were casualties.

All in all, the students seemed to enjoy both the different type of learning experience, and the chance to perform an experiment in a History class. The fact that they did not receive a lecture, but were asked to interpret primary sources in the form of pictures and newspaper clippings, use their own prior knowledge to figure out answers and guess information, and were able to get up out of their seats to perform the experiment (which was an exercise in practical science) and see how different disciplines cross appeared to be of interest to them. At the end of the lesson, they did ask if we could do something like the demo lesson again. The History Open Day appears to have been a success. It is a lot of work to create a real-life lesson like this, and lower-level material will have to be prepared for classes with lower levels of English, but future Open Days with similar content is recommended.