I have known Ms. Lee for ten years since we moved to the Tri-Valley area in 2013. My two daughters, 8-year and 12-year-old at that time, started learning art from Ms. Lee when we moved here. Before that, they had already studied painting for several years. Soon they discovered that Ms. Lee was very different and they both like her because they found her to be very humorous and very often inspire their critical thinking and promote their creative abilities, making them enjoy taking Ms. Lee’s class until their graduation from high school.
I have met many art teachers, and I have found that Ms. Lee is very different from others. With Ms. Lee’s permission, I was able to audit her classes to better understand my children’s developments in her class. During the years of observation, I found that Ms. Lee is an exceptional teacher. Her educational philosophy, inspiration and cultivation of the young minds go beyond the scope of art education.
I have observed Ms. Lee’s classes and found her to be particularly patient, caring, and wise. She is keen in identifying the characteristics and aptitudes of individual personality and performance, as well as their intellectual levels and aesthetic ability. She then teaches each child accordingly. I observed that Ms. Lee does a wonderful job of managing the classroom dynamic by addressing multiple students’ individual needs at the same time. When she finds that a student’s learning style and attitude is not conducive to learning and is hindering his or her learning in any subject, she not only immediately adjusts her teaching method to guide that child but also spends time and effort helping that child develop a more efficient learning style. She makes sure that students understand how important it is to them. I have witnessed that Ms. Lee puts her heart without reservation into the lifelong welfare of her students.
In her class, although the students are referencing the same artwork or photo, Ms. Lee not only conducts in-depth analysis of the reference to the whole class and guides them to view the artwork from the perspective of the masters, but also provides individually tailored guidance to each child. This allows them to maximize their strengths, overcome their weaknesses, and often take the children on a journey of surprise, developing their own unique expressions. Therefore, the completed works have a strong personal touch. She uses encouraging and inspiring language, which greatly promotes the students’ incentives in learning and gratifies their sense of accomplishment. This has kept my children’s interests in painting and art increasingly high. She also actively builds the children’s confidence, for example, by showing and praising their class achievements in front of the children to the parents who come to pick them up.
Ms. Lee not only teaches children the concepts and skills of art, but also incorporates those that contribute to personality development and fostering efficient learning styles into her teaching. She also collaborates with parents to teach social skills outside of the classroom. In private, she proactively contacts parents to discuss issues that children may have and work together to make them better in both classroom and home environments. For example, she often discusses with me after class, face to face or on the phone, about the issues of my children and points out areas where we as parents may need to adjust, which has usually shown in the details of how we treated our children and may have negatively impacted them over time. These conversations with Ms. Lee have been very helpful, as no one else in the past had pointed out our blind spots as parents, which really caused psychological trauma to our children, leaving them in a powerless state. Especially since both of my children are very introverted and seemingly handicapped at expressing their thoughts and feelings, Ms. Lee can infer the impact of the environment on them from their behavior and subtle body language, and thus provide feedback to us as parents.
With her help, our family began to create a relaxed and inclusive learning environment for our children, discussing how to positively guide them, cultivate their ability to learn actively and automatically, encourage them to think independently, and encourage them to speak up and express their own opinions. Our relationship with our children has also improved significantly.
In short, Ms. Lee is the most caring teacher I have ever met who cares about the holistic development of children so much so that I myself later followed her to study drawing for a period of time, giving me a different feeling from observing her teaching as a bystander, experiencing the charm and power of her guiding language from the perspective of a student.
I strongly recommend Ms. Lee to your school, and I believe she will become one of the most popular teachers in the school.
Sincerely,
— Qiuyun Shao
Mother of two of Ms. Lee’s art students
Ms. Lee Art Class 