Gatsby Meets the Coffee Bar: Learning Without Borders This October

Ada (Academic Writing) and Francois (English Literature) joined forces for a rare double-teacher class built around The Great Gatsby. Their challenge to students was to stop reading the book and start investigating it.

In small teams, students brought their literary instincts into academic territory. They traced symbols, compared characters’ fates, and questioned what the Jazz Age glitter was really hiding. But opinions alone weren’t enough. Every argument needed evidence, so each group built its own pie charts to turn scattered details from the novel into data-backed insights.

Then came the creative part. Teams designed research posters that captured Gatsby’s world, dazzling on the surface and hollow underneath, and presented their findings to the class.

The result was a room full of students who didn’t just have opinions about a classic. They could prove them.

Our Cixi campus took a different route to the same destination. The International Division launched a new course, Economics and Personal Finance, and its final exam isn’t a test. It’s a coffee bar.

After building their foundations in budgeting, costing, and break-even analysis, student teams were handed a real startup budget and one mission: open a campus café. They wrote business plans, researched the market, hunted for the best supplier prices, designed menus, and set their own prices.

When the doors opened, students ran the whole operation themselves. They worked the till, coordinated orders, and tracked every sale, all during breaks and after school so that lessons stayed undisturbed. For the first time, “cash flow” and “profit margin” weren’t just vocabulary words.

A novel and a coffee shop don’t have much in common, except for how they were taught. In both classrooms, students asked their own questions, worked in teams, and had to back up their ideas with evidence, whether that was a pie chart or a profit-and-loss sheet.

That’s what we mean by learning that lasts: not just knowing something, but knowing how to use it.We can’t wait to see what comes next.