Another high school visit (and a butterfly museum!)

A couple of weeks ago, I had an opportunity to visit another high school in Taipei. It was organized by a Kappa Delta Pi contact, an education professor at a local university. The high school is one of the best schools in Taipei. I had no idea what to expect from the visit, other than I hoped to learn more about the education system. When we arrived, we met with the principal and academic dean. Someone brought us tea. And there were formal pictures of him giving me a school banner and some gifts (a scarf, pen, brochures about the school, etc.). In the picture, from left to right are the intern who translated for us, the principal, me, the professor who organized the visit, and the academic dean:



I learned quite a bit about the school from talking to the principal and academic dean. After about 30 minutes of talking, the principal had another meeting, so the translator, professor, and another school office employee took me on a tour of the building. The school has 3,000 students, so the building was very large.

The highlight of the tour was a visit to their butterfly museum. It's an exhibit of thousands of specimens from the collection of a science teacher who taught at the school for 30+ years. He wrote numerous books on butterflies, while continuing to teach high school biology.



Taiwan was once known as the kingdom of butterflies, although now the numbers of butterflies are dramatically lower...in part to development, but also because of the use of butterflies in artwork for exportation. Behind us in this picture are some examples:



This is an exhibit showing how the aboriginals made the artwork. They used cut up pieces of various colors of butterfly wings and glued them down to form pictures, as one would use paint strokes: