A Good Choice, A Silent Hope

My school attachment programme started this Monday. The purpose of the programme is to give us a glimpse of how the various policies are implemented in schools, observe how teaching is conducted in schools as well as get some hands-on teaching experience. Also, we are all given a project to do and the principal convinced us that our project was important to them because they really needed some ideas on how to deal with a particular group(or should I say class) of students.

I was posted to a school in TPY together with 3 others. It is not the kind of school that produces top scorers in the GCE exams but still, I must say that it is a great school with a compassionate, understanding and realistic discipline master, quite a number of caring teachers and fantastic students. Not in academia but in many other aspects. A number of them have already experienced many of the various 'sufferings' of life and even though many teachers say lots of unpleasant things about them, I strongly INSIST they are not 'bad' after observing them in the past few days.

On the very first day(Monday), the four of us who were posted there spent the whole day with the principal and the vice principal of the school. They gave us a lot of information about the school and shared with us the students' background. The information were mainly statistical and were presented in pie charts and graphs but they certainly were useful in helping us to have an idea of the students that we would be seeing. For example, we were told that majority of the students speak their Mother Tongue at home and not many speak
English at home so from here, we can roughly infer that most of them are not proficient in English and may not understand English that is 'too proper'.

Next, we were given an overview of the programmes that they have in place in the school, including their CCA programme which I feel really needs improvement. Other than that, I was impressed by the programmes that they have in place for the students' welfare. They appeared to be a school that cared a lot about the students who have lots of 'emotional baggage' and students whose families are not earning enough to make ends meet. That sure made me feel heartened for I had always believed no student should be left out in the 'rat race'. In short, it seemed that the school was making a serious attempt to ensure that no student is 'left to die on his own'. At least that was the impression which the Principal and the Vice Principal gave me.

In the midst of the briefing, I was already considering going back to the school when the time comes because I could identify with the school's values, mission and vision. The only disappointing thing is that they did not have table tennis and had very few(only about 4) 'sports and games' CCA. To make matters worse, I bumped into this girl playing table tennis with her PE teacher at the table tennis table in the canteen that day when I was eating and the girl was actually good! I saw that she had the basic strokes and was one with good potential. Being unable to restrain myself, I walked over to them and asked her where she was from. I then found out that she was previously from PCPS which is also my alma mater. She enjoys playing table tennis and feels disappointed that the school does not have table tennis as a CCA. She also mentioned that there were a few others in her shoes. I felt quite sad to hear that... its really such a waste! If only the school had it as a CCA and gave students like her some support, I'm sure they can get into top 4 in the Zone competition at the very least because that zone does not have that many schools that are good in table tennis. Well, perhaps I *might* be given a chance to do something for such students in the not-too-distant future...

The rest of the day was spent meeting the HODs and being introduced to them because the HODs are supposed to 'mentor' us during our attachment period. We were then briefed about the project that the school has assigned to us. Basically we had to find out more about a sec 1 NT class students. According to the school principal and teachers, this class of students is very different as compared to the previous batches of NT students, for their behaviour was much more 'atrocious' and their result was not as good. We are supposed to
interview the students and the teachers teaching that class to get information about them and try to find ways that will help them to learn better. We are also required to observe each subject teacher teach for 2 days(Tue and Wed), after which it would be our turn to teach the class.

Thus, I spent the past 2 days observing the lessons. One pattern which I observed - in certain lessons, the students were better behaved during class and would pay more attention. In some other lessons, the students would behave terribly, talk loudly in class, run around the class during lesson, throw things around, 'fight', etc... almost everything that you can think of in your wildest imagination, you will see it happening there. As a result, during these lessons, it is almost impossible for lessons to be conducted because the teachers spend most of the time scolding students. However, in the lessons which the students were better behaved, the lessons could be carried out(with hitches here and there) and the students were able to learn something from the lessons. They will also do work that is given to them, though their ability vary greatly. There are students who can finish the worksheet given to them in less than 5 minutes while others are still struggling with the first question. In any case, the main point that was gathered from this observation was that discipline is a must in the classroom and if the teacher is unable to discipline the students effectively, it will be difficult to have a 'proper lesson', not to even mention an 'effective lesson'. Nevertheless, disciplining these students seem to be the greatest challenge for every single teacher of that class as it seems that many of them love to move about, disturb their classmates and come up with 'games' to entertain themselves. Alas, the situation was much better during Maths lessons when the students were split up into 2 classes. Each teacher will then handle a class of about 20 students and learning was much much better in that situation. However, of course, the students still do talk quite a bit and disrupt lessons occasionally.

This morning, I started to interview students during their 'student-teacher interaction' time which is from 7.40am-8am, before they start their first period of lessons. This is something which the school had arranged because they felt that the teachers needed to get to know the students better and vice versa, in order to find out if they are troubled and to 'counsel' them if they always misbehave in class. Personally I think that this is really an excellent programme because from conversations with many teachers, it seems that many students
actually open up to their teachers during this session and many problems are thus discovered by the teachers, who will then try to help. I specially requested to 'interview' this particular boy this morning because I found him to be of a very interesting character. He would often play during lesson time and disturb his classmates. He would also answer back to the teacher whenever the teachers shouted at him. However, I noticed that he was actually quite good in his work and was able to finish up work given to him quite quickly. As a result of walking around the class the past 2 days, I managed to strike up some conversations with him and feel a sense of closeness with him. Found him to be an extremely likeable person with a great personality. Thus, I chose to speak to him today and got to know a lot more about him. The more I got to know about him, the more I appreciate him as a person and as a student... I hope that in the next few days, I will continue to get to know more students better during this 'interaction time'.

On another note, I finally got the chance to teach the class(half of the class to be exact, since I'm teaching Maths) today. Thanks to the past 2 days of observation, I was able to know most of the names of the students in the class so I could skip the 'introduction'. I further split them into 4 groups and told them that we would have a 'game' whereby students who answer questions correctly will earn points for their groups. However, points will be deducted if they misbehave. I then asked them what are the 'offences' that they often commit and how many points they suggest will be deducted for each offence and they were enthusiastic in suggesting the various offences and how many points they think should be deducted. Then the 'game' commenced. To my pleasant surprise, they co-operated very well and were very well-behaved... no one moved around the class and no one disrupted the lesson. I was very surprised because I recalled that even when I was teaching in primary school the last time, I never had a class that responded so well to this 'game'. I felt encouraged and
elated by this fruitful lesson I had with them and the more convinced I was that this group of students are teachable and fantastic.

After today's lesson, I know that I have made a good choice to take up the scholarship and I start to silently hope to be back in this school 2 years later...