Charmaine's Reflections

Hello friends! Am so glad to be seeing you all again soon :) Well, for some reason I found myself working all the way up to the last day of school so my brain’s a little fried. Here goes, for as many points I can cover before boring everyone to death:

The thing that hit me hardest about two weeks into practicum is how terribly terribly busy teachers are. I found myself working about 14 hours a day on average, and I won’t be surprised if many of us were working longer hours than that. Time in school was divided amongst photocopying materials, sourcing for suitable material (this took the longest time!), seeing students and various errands (borrowing laptops/markers from the library, booking this or that room, seeing this or that teacher to follow up on discipline cases etc.) Thus, lesson-planning was usually relegated to the after-work hours – plan plan plan then BOM on the bed and sleep! Five hours or so later and it was time to get up and get going again. I was shocked by how hard it was to find a balance between work and leisure/rest/family and friends etc. I was teaching 4 classes: Sec 3 Express English Language (32 students), Sec 3 English Lit and Sec 1 and 2 Express English Lit (one class per level).

English was the toughest because the SOW was basically everything that was in the Step Ahead TB Units 4 and 5. It was like trying to do NIE unit planning assignments all by yourself in one quarter the time. I had difficulty pitching it to my students’ ability level as one third of my students were from China, Indonesia, Vietnam, Myanmar and Korea, while the rest were locals – and they were all in the top express class. I began planning with concept-based learning in mind: text types, the relation between language, purpose, style etc. I found myself faced with puzzled looks and feedback such as ‘lessons are interesting but I’m not sure how this will help me in the exam.’ My cooperating teacher sat me down and gave me a little talk on how ‘student-centred’ learning means catering to students’ needs, which in this case was to teach them exam skills and give them compo-compre practice because what they need most is to pass the exam. I gave up on teaching concepts and tried metacognitive skills: SQ3R! My pragmatic students sat patiently through the lessons and filled in my beautifully designed worksheets. At the end of it all I conducted a short survey and found that half the class could not understand what was going on, and the other half who could understand felt that they did not need these skills to be able to read and answer comprehension questions well.

In the end, I went with the flow and gave my students what they wanted/needed: structure structure structure! Summary writing skills were broken down into the most basic of steps and I spent one lesson or more on each one (e.g. converting a passage into point form on a worksheet and going point by point, asking students to decide which were relevant to the question). The actual process of ‘writing up points in your own words’ featured differentiated learning: 2/3 of the class could work on their own in-class summary assignments, while I sat in the front with 1/3 of the students and worked through the summary writing line by line.

What do I make of this experience?

I think it’s obvious that I’m still finding my way around with regards to the actual content of the English syllabus. What are we actually supposed to focus on? Text types? Language skills? Content knowledge of grammar? Critical reading skills? I don’t think there’s a one-size fits all answer though I suspect that most of my lesson prep time would be greatly cut down if this question could be answered clearly.

In the end, I think the most valuable features of my approach with these students were “extra-mile,” “beyond-syllabus” kinds of things. The school had a compulsory reading period. My cooperating teacher explained this to me saying that basically, students had to read silently on their own for one period (30 min) a week. If they did not happen to bring a book with them, they could read their textbook. The first time this “silent reading” happened under me, I observed that students took 15 min to get their books out, while only ¼ of the class had proper reading material (e.g. books …) and the rest sat chatting with their textbooks left open to any random page on the table. I was fed up with the waste of good classroom time and decided to give them stuff that I selected for the next few reading periods – excerpts from the infamous “void deck” poem, newspaper articles on the Britney sisters and their endless baby-popping, an article on dreams – their sources and interpretations – from Reader’s Digest. I focused students’ reading with guided questions that required a personal response, and got them to write journal entries for me which I then responded to individually. I wanted them to see the value of language as a means of connecting and communicating with others, and tuning in to one’s own thoughts, feelings and dreams for the future. I think my little experiment succeeded J By the end of my stint, students looked forward to reading period, actually –read- something during the allocated time, and processed and related it to their own lives. Their writing came in trickles … then the floodgates opened for some. I can’t describe how privileged I felt to read what they shared. It changed the environment of my classroom because I began to see my students as people with histories and dreams for the future instead of cheeky, clueless teenagers.

Their last assignment was a recount essay, titled “I am a ___________”, modelled after the “I am a Singaporean” series first started by Mr Brown. Due to time constraints (MYEs), this was assigned as an in-class task and they had only about a half hour to work on it during the last period of the day (3.20-4.00pm). To my surprise, they got started on it and most had actually completed the 350 word essay by the end of the day/ the next morning, even amid the frantic pace of exam preparations. When I read the essays, I realized why, because the topic had somehow struck a chord with them. Their essays revealed deep thoughts – longings for home, the inability to communicate with classmates much younger than them, run-ins with the law left behind in their home countries, and passionate pledges of allegiance to nation and religion. As a parting gift, I compiled and typed out their essays, bound them in a folder and presented one to each student, my cooperating teacher and their form teacher. I think this is the most meaningful thing I have done in these ten weeks or so of Teaching Practice.