Ramblings...
Miscellany (July 2005)The teaching profession is a busy and demanding one: endless assignments to mark, co-curricular (CCA) commitments, meetings, school events, courses, dealing with students etc. Remedial sessions would be coming up soon. Over the past few weeks, I had been so busy that I hardly have time to reflect on my teaching. Art was totally non-existent. In short, school life was almost everything.
Looking back, I enjoyed my sessions with 2N2. Being a Normal Tech class, the students are very weak in English. I only tried a few things with them. 1) I tried to encourage a reading culture by putting up articles from Teens and Teenage magazines on the class notice board. 2) I tried to provide more interesting materials for them to read. I have given them comprehension passages on musicians or celebrities such as Avril Lavigne and Coldplay. They are also exposed to texts from Readers’ Digest and Penguin Readers. Classroom teaching is almost zero. Every lesson, I would just give them a passage with some comprehension questions for them. I would then attend to them in small groups or individually. The girls are generally diligent and show positive attitude towards learning, while the boys have some discipline problems which may take a while to handle.
My sessions with 3E7 were terrible. I prepared very little and they were largely bored and uninterested. I guess I am still unprepared to really handle upper secondary as well as I can handle lower secondary yet. I had to prepare my materials from scratch and I certainly did not have time. I am totally unfamiliar with the upper secondary syllabus and its requirements yet.
With 1E4, some sessions worked well and others not, depending on how well I had prepared the lessons. I thought the session when I gave them the National Geographic article worked quite well, as well as the session on the London Blast article from The Straits Times. This morning I spent about two hours marking their test scripts. Some students performed better than I expected, but their English is generally weak. I am also their co-form teacher (with Shi Ming), and thus far I think I have not carried out my form teachers duties well. There is much room for improvement.
Art lessons were generally more unsuccessful than successful. Though I enjoyed the Powerpoint session with 1E3, I am not sure if they enjoyed it as much as I did. I guess the project was of a scale that was too ambitious, but I thought I really should try to stretch the students. At 1N1, I had to provide the visual research AND the materials for them, so they merely execute their works or designs, which defeats half the purpose of the project. However, I am currently quite pleased with some students’ works, though I thought they could have been much better. One group of students came up with their own project to design weapons, and used wooden strips to make a sword. I thought that was quite innovative. At 1E3, only Rabiatul and Sherlyn have their visual research thus far. I am waiting to see more work done by the students before I can develop their projects further. When I first planned the project questions, I had expected to see a variety of works from the students. Instead, large groups get together to do similar projects. Many students opt for photography, which strikes me as an easy option especially since I know very little about photography and the students will know even lesser still. As I was telling my friend Liang Zhu, the students would go around clicking just about anything and call that ‘art’ or ‘photography’, which is a seriously misguided idea. Over at 1N1, many students follow Shu Ting to do jeans design simply because I passed her a magazine on jeans and that solves a lot of visual research work that they have to do. One group of Malay girls did some poster designs and the work was quite poorly done. At 1E3, many are opting to do manga, and I’m going to push them to do it REALLY well. I tried to find a book on T-shirt designs at Kinokuniya yesterday and at Bras Basah today, but could not find any. That means Gloria and some of the 1N1 girls have to do their visual research on their own.
With NPCC, I guess the best thing I had done was to complete the mural. I need to get to know the cadets better.
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