Hong Peng's Reflection

The past eleven weeks of Practicum have been meaningful and pleasant on the whole.

Teachers in the school are generally allowed to teach lessons in their preferred manner, although academic achievements are a major focus of the school. Teachers are generally self-motivated and do work very hard. As a results, everyone appears to be busy most of the time. Ironically, i bonded better with teachers from the other departments such as Mathematics, Science and Chinese, than my own ELL department. The only time the ELL HOD actually talked at greater length with me was when i happened to be browsing for resources in the department cupboard and was "coincidentally" asked to catalogue and arrange all the English Language and Literature resources in the cupboard. Besides that, i was left on my own most of the time, besides some help from my CTs. I also did not manage to observe many of my CTs' lessons since it took a while after i joined the school before my CTs, and allocated classes / lessons were finalised.

The department does not teach using textbooks so i had to find and prepare my own resources for the English Language lessons. As the department also has stipulated weekly activities for the students such as newspapar reviews and spelling, the workload was rather heavy, since there was a lot of lesson planning and preparation, as well as marking to be done. We were expected to particpate in outside-curricular activities, such as the school's annual road run, track-and-field meet, and speech day. In addition, as trainees teachers, we also had to help out with some of the activites. For example, i had to set questions on air pollution for a National Environment Quiz, act as track umpire for the track-and-field meet, and be a tester for the school's NAPFA test. As a teacher, i guess such co-curricular duties are unavoidable, but i think they really add on (somewhat unnecessarily and even detrimentally at times) to the teacher's main job of teaching.

The school's culture is quite liberal and students are often praised rather liberally as well. The school makes it a point to give recognition to students who gain positive achivements, such that students will feel good and be more confident of themselves. However, akin to Lionel's experience, i feel that the students tend to be over-confident and even outrageously arrogant sometimes. For a supposedly relatively good school, the students are admittedly quite smart, but are poor in their languages. In addition, there is ample space for improvement in terms of discipline and moral development. Perhaps the school might have made the students feel too good about themselves? Alternatively, it could just be a condition of the society today.

With regards to pedagogy, i think i have to work harder in terms of engaging the students' interest as well as pitching the lessons at an appropriate standard. In some classes, some students did not react too well to inductive learning where i got them to identify text features in groups; some of them clearly preferred a more deductive teaching approach. Yet, in other classes, teacher-talk can be too boring for the students. On the whole, the students' low language ability and lack of interest in the subject seem to hinder the teaching and learning process too.

Last but not least, classroom management is certainly another tricky area for me. Being strict with them causes students to sometimes fear (or hate) me, while being more lenient means my class will almost certainly start their own partying in a different world... I know that there should ideally be a balance, but that supposed balance is really hard to ascertain and achieve...