Liu Jiwen: Only by establishing connections can we truly enter the students’ learning world.

The day after tomorrow is Teacher's Day. A junior high school student had been away from campus for eight months. When he finally wanted to come back, the teacher and the entire class turned off the lights in the classroom, played a pre-recorded encouragement video, and then used a cassette stove and a mobile phone flashlight to make a symbolic "stove" to welcome him back to the class. Later, the child went to school for 200 consecutive days, and the teacher even ordered a special cake to celebrate him. The teacher who accompanied the children back to school step by step was Liu Jiwen, a mathematics teacher at New Taipei City’s New Taipei Middle School. He was selected as a model educator.

Years later, the students he taught would come back to share their lives and talk to him about things. Liu Jiwen said that the value of teachers is not only to improve students' performance, but also to accompany children to grow up. For him, education has always been the same thing. "Build connections first, and then you can truly enter the students' learning world."

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"To teach a child well, you must first make the child willing to enter the classroom." This is something Liu Jiwen has always believed in after more than 20 years of teaching. He won the 2024 Ministry of Education Teacher Award. He believes that no matter when facing students who are lagging behind in learning or have interrupted their studies, the starting point of education is not to rush to finish teaching the textbooks, but to first build trust and connection.

When Liu Jiwen was in high school, almost all his classmates were aiming to major in medicine. The night before he filled out his application form, he changed the Mathematics Department of Normal University to his first choice. Because when he was studying, he liked to discuss problems and share problem-solving methods with his classmates, and gradually became convinced that he wanted to be a teacher.

When he first came to teach at Bali Junior High School in New Taipei City, he met many children who had low learning motivation and needed more attention. He quickly discovered one thing: no matter how good the teaching materials are and how wonderful the teaching methods are, if the children are not willing to learn at all, it will be useless. Therefore, he did not rush to start with mathematics, but first understood and accompanied the children, and slowly established a relationship.

The student who left school for eight months was the child he always remembered. After the student returned to school, Liu Jiwen and his classmates picked him up and helped him gradually develop the habit of arriving at school regularly. On the 200th day of continuous attendance, Liu Jiwen went to the store to order a "200th day of continuous attendance" cake. He said that 200 days may not be a big deal for ordinary junior high school students, but for a child who has been away from school for 240 days, "it is not easy!" In the end, the child successfully completed his junior high school studies.

After serving at Bali Junior High School for 18 years, Liu Jiwen moved to New Thailand Middle School and began to think about how to enable children with different levels to keep up. He recorded his own teaching videos and compiled "OmO Basics Handouts" to detail junior high school mathematics knowledge step by step. His goal is not to let every child get a perfect score, but to give children who could not keep up with the exam a chance to get a score of 60 from never attending the meeting, and to believe again that they can do it.