Being stricter

I was a lot more fierce today in my sec 3 class, or in the words of a teenager, bitchy. The following conversation took place after a boy said that he already worked out a certain answer. But because I knew that he peeped at the answers from the back, I snapped at him.

Me: You have the answer right? Show me your working now? Where is it?
Boy: EH, it disappeared.
Me: So you think you're very funny? The next time you do something like this, you can jolly well get out of my class. You're not welcomed here at all if you're not serious about your work. You understand?

My snap could be due to my lack of humour and most importantly, my lack of tolerance now. Because now I believe that an excellent teacher deserves excellent work! [Janice, you have to agree!] Now, I'm also a lot less emotionally attached to my students. A true professional does not see a rowdy and uncontrolled class as her fault but the students' fault. It's more of a survival technique really, how else then could you avoid depression if the students insist on being naughty?

I'm glad really and I really thank God that though I had an exhausting week, it went quite well. Despite my harshness towards my students, after school, they can still smile at me and say hi. Gestures like that are so appreciated cos they mean that they understand what I say and do in class even when I'm strict!

I'm tired already

I can't wait for my Mummy's birthday to come, 1st April. I've got a surprise!!!

Watch this:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pEBmuQxXlHU
It's a song about Abraham going to sacrifice his son, then it nicely moved into how God sacrificed Jesus.

It's been 3 days of teaching since Tuesday. Oh gosh, it's tiring! After a week of blissful break, coming back to teach almost made me wanna run back on my heels. Some things have changed, I'm a lot more emotionally detached from my students, a lot more impartial, a lot more strict. And I've also started communicating with the form teachers, HOD and the teacher I'm replacing everyday via email about general work covered and behavior. This keeps everyone in the loop what this young and naive teacher is doing so that they can stop me anytime I do something wrong.

SMU is really gaining a momentum and foothold in the tertiary education arena. One indicator is their lack of hard-core selling at the scholarship talk which I attended. Why do I say that it is an indicator? Only schools that confident of getting the best students wouldn't bother trying hard to woo the top students! Prof Ong said something to me that hit me quite hard, 'Anna, do you think it's fair for a 21, 22-year old to make a decision at such a young age to be bonded to an organization for 6 years? Young people change their decisions easily. That is why scholarships without bonds are so important.' He's right. And I absolutely do not disagree.

Timely reminders

Sigh, I've been staring at the screen for minutes already, at a blank of what to write. Since yesterday, I've been writing a lot in my life and spiritual diaries. So after quite a bit of emotional diary writing and confronting myself with difficult questions and feelings, i feel at a lost as to what to blog. I could write a million things but these million things seem so shallow.

Let me share my thoughts on some verses I came across in the Bible in the book of James.
1:11 says 'For no sooner has the sun risen with a burning heat then it withers the grass; its flower fades, and it's beautiful appearance perishes. SO THE RICH MAN ALSO WILL FADE AWAY IN HIS PURSUITS.'
This verse arrested my attention because I'm a 'rich man'. With all my gifts, I could still perish and I thank God so much for showing me this verse so that it will stop me from getting drown in my pursuits.

1:22-24 says ' But be doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves. For if anyone is a hearer of the word and not a doer, he is like a man observing his natural face in a mirror; for he observes himself, goes away, and immediately forgets what kind of man he is.'
God, through this verses, showed me that I'm exactly like this man! During sermons I can give my utmost attention but leave forgetting what I'm supposed to change in my life.

1:27 says 'Pure and undefiled religion before God and the Father is this: to visit orphans and widows in their trouble, and to keep oneself unspotted from the world.'
God only wants pure and undefiled religion from us! How significant is that??? We are to show love, nothing but God's love.

I'm so thankful for God's grace in showing me these verses. Just as it was a timely reminder for me, may it be one for you.

Jesus heals

Good Friday and Easter [Resurrection] Day have just come and go. For Christians, you probably have heard this before but I'll say it again anyway:

God, in His great love, sent the Perfect Son, Jesus, to come down to this earth and to later die on the terrible cross for our sins. He was the perfect sacrificial Lamb. By His blood, our sins are forgiven when we choose to believe in Jesus. Some people ask, 'What's the big deal of having your sins forgiven?' I think that the greatest need of everyone is to have their sins forgiven, to have that yoke of bondage taken off to be carried by someone else. No amount of money, looks, fame, sex, intelligence can take away your sins, that's why Jesus had to be the only one to set us free. And guess what? He also rose from the dead after 3 days in the tomb. Not everyone sees the significance of this. It means that we serve a living God!!! He is the real God who overcomes Death even! Well, there are a lot of theories out there on how Jesus did not resurrect blah blah, well go read The Case for Christ by Lee Strobel. It'll be a good book that'll explain a lot of stuff.

My church did a healing rally and the invited speaker was very anointed and many people got healed of long-time ailments and pains. My God is the great HEALER!!! Come on and shout unto God with a voice of triumph!

So I hope Good Friday wasn't just a public holiday for you and that Easter was a chance to chew on a yummy chocolate egg. It's so much more than that.

Shing shing Vocab 2

I started picking up reading again. And when I say reading, I mean hard-core reading for hours. Well I have the time for it now. These are some of the vocabulary I picked up! Time to shing shing my vocabulary. If you've not read one of my earliest entries last year, 'shing shing' means to sharpen.

Words I have no clue about: Cabal, disingenuous, arbiter, apphorism, nostrums, pundits, nonparil, derring-do, attest, lexicon, egalitarian, yellow journalist [i'm pretty sure it doesn't mean a Chinese journalist], virulence, ombudsman, white noise

How cool is ENGLISH.

Go watch August Rush!

I watched a great movie called August Rush today. It's the first movie since Pirates of the Carribean 3 [I think] that I'm really impressed with. It made me feel emotional, thrilled and scared altogether. So needless to say, it's a must-watch especially if you love music. The movie is about an eleven-year old boy called Evan, played by Freddy Highmore who is also starring in The Spiderwick Chronicles, looking for his parents. This innocent orphan displays such a sweet spirit of purity and depth without saying much in the movie. It's a feel-good movie la, so of course such movies have their fair share of skeptics. But it was such a good movie to me.

I bought my first Chinese book today from Kinokuniya. It's $7.25, whatever you say, it's super cheap! I'm inspired to pick up Mandarin again after reading about Dr K K Seet, one of the judges in The Arena, he speaks impeccable English. [I privately dislike his British accent though] But he's also fluent in Chinese. Talk about Huayu being really cool! This novel I bought has simplified Chinese characters and they are a little bigger. Tiny chinese characters scare me. They make me feel illiterate.

Finally, allow me to include an abstract from non-fiction book, The World is Flat.
'When I asked Bill Gates about the supposed American education advantage - an education that stresses creativity, not rote learning - he was utterly dismissive. In his view, the people who think that the more rote-oriented learning systems of China and Japan can't turn out innovators who can compete with Americans are sadly mistaken. Said Gates, "... Who has the most creative video games in the world? Japan! I never met these 'rote people' ... You need to understand things [through rote learning] in order to invent beyond them." '

I was quite comforted to read that paragraph, it really does give the Singapore Education some justification for it's supposed stiff learning and emphasis on Mathematics and Science. [Hear me clearly, I'm not saying that arts are bad but it's time that the my arts and humanities friends stop bad-mouthing the science people and vice-versa.]

BNSS no longer need my services anymore until they call me. So until then, I'm gonna do a lot more reading of English and try to brush up my Mandarin. And then... look for a new job.

I love Slack!

You won't believe how slack a day I had at school today. Because Mdm Wong is back, I no longer have to do her timetable. Mdm Wong, by the way, a nice person. Physically, she looks unexpectedly better than I expected, she has this regal appearance. So I only did 4 hours of babysitting today, ie, go in the classes I was given and made them do work. The Sec 4 class was like funny cos as I passed 4D, the ppl were like going 'yay' cos they thought I was going to relief them. But the class I was supposed to babysit was 4C! So when i passed their class completely, there was like sounds of dismay. 4C was happy to have me because having me around means it's a free period. Come on, I'm a student too, we all know what free periods mean right?

4C had many people from different places. I met students from Cambodia, Java and Bali. There was a handsome student and he comes from Cambodia, he kept pestering me to guess where he comes from.

Me: Philippines?
Boy: OI, why you give me so low score? [I have no idea what lingo is this] When I ask other teachers, they say america lor.
[On hindsight, I can see why. He is really handsome with the typical Eurasion features, oddly though]
Me: Papa New Guinea? Haha. I know, Vietnam? Laos? Thailand? Sarawak? East Timore?
[They kept saying no after each country I named.]
Boy: Teacher, you so smart but your geography a bit lousy ah.

A lot of my students are whining now COS i'm not teaching them anymore. Not all though. Anyway, all of them so need to buck up after such a long break under me.

Vox lesson 3

I went for vocal lessons with Cat today and we did The Freedom We Know. This song is one of the most difficult to pull off not only because it's in a crazy key of G [esp since it's a praise song!], also because it's full of groove. I learnt from Cat that CHINESE are bad are catching the grooves of songs so a lot of practice is needed. Today was the 2nd lesson we did on The Freedom We Know, by the end of today's, I pretty much nailed it. [I THINK I THINK I THINK!] So after a total of 3 hours of singing this song, of course I'm quite 'sian' of it already.

The next song I want to master is Beautiful Savior! Anyway, I'll only be singing praise/worship songs because my voice is only for God's glory and not mine.

Have you seen her?

A student told me that 3 or 4 other students saw Mdm Wong! So when I emailed my HOD, she was like, 'Strange, I have NOT seen her.' What a laugh!

I wanna eat Jane's Cake Station's durian and chocolate cakes. I heard they're fabulous.

TO BE HONEST, I'm fairly uninspired to write anything now first because it's the March hols now, that means that as a teacher, I'm now a bummer. Well not exactly either cos I am giving 2 hr remedials to students everyday. But even those remedials are very informal, it goes like this, 'I've not planned anything. So now you can choose to do your holiday hw now or ask me to go through past lessons with you.' For today, half the time, I was sitting there reading a book. DO NOTE THAT BY COMING DOWN FOR THESE REMEDIALS, I AM NOT PAID. So, since March's income is slightly tighter, so shall my budgeting be.

Blokus

I brought a new board game to school today and it's called Blokus. It's an ultra cool game. This week's the March one-week holiday for the students but I came back for a couple of hours to give small-group remedial... FOR FREE. The remedial was an informal one, rather than having it at the classroom, I got the 5 of them to be an the concourse tables. We kicked off with a game of Blokus and then Math for 1.5 hours, and then 2 rounds of Blokus again! They loved it.

SO embarrassing

The boys in my class were kicking the soccer ball in the classroom today. 'Bing, Bang, Biong!' It's was in the last minute of their recess before my period and I was there 3 minutes early. The racket in class, to me, seem a normal affair. At the back of my head, I believe I knew that their behavior in class wasn't right but I didn't say anything. So imagine my horror when I saw my colleague Scott standing at the window. You see, the fact that those few boys were making a scene is unsurprising but it was totally in my presence! 2 Chinese words came to my mind, 'xia shui'. I was completely embarrassed. So when Scott came in to scold them, I felt like a fool.

That was my sec 3 class. At that same time, my sec 4 students happened to pass by and was actually talking to me before Scott came in. When one of them saw Scott, he immediately covered up for me and say, "Ms Han told them to stop but they didn't." Yes it's a lie and it's terrible. Whatever you say on how nice of that student to cover up for me so quickly, it's still a lie and it's wrong. I meant to clarify that with my colleague in the afternoon but I forgot!

I discovered a new technique to teach. Well not really to teach but move on in the lessons. Usually, because they're forever talking and I flare up after a while if the noise doesn't die down. When I think about it, it's because about 75% of the class would have understood what I'm teaching. THE REST DON'T UNDERSTAND. So while i explain concepts another few thousand times, the rest got nothing to do right? Talk LOR. That's when I get angry.

Oh yeah, new technique: Teach fast. But as clear as possible. When I teach fast, they have no choice but to catch up and pay attention. Of course they complain about the speed, but when I ask them if they understand my lessons, they say yes. So see??? It works!

Thanks 'Dra

Beautiful Indra went to buy some lozenges for me while I waited for Bus 5 to come. [from the board, it was scheduled to come in 17 min] I was coughing badly due to an extreme and sudden itchiness in my throat. Indra, I can't believe you were so nice. If I were you, I'd think that this friend of mine is so troublesome. MUAHZ. Thanks.

ANGRY.

I hereby declare that I don't want to teach anymore. [I'm still not sure if I'm saying this in a fit of anger.] It's just too hard when the kids are so unwilling to learn and they learn so slowly. Tell me the name of the shop where I can buy patience.

Why BNSS?

Many of friends question why [why, why why?] do I want to teach at BNSS. They know that my life is a pretty sheltered one and having been in good schools, especially all-girls' schools, they thought I was just asking for a beating by applying to teach at this normal neighbourhood school.

My answer [hopefully a pretty frank one]: I love Singapore but I know that I don't exactly have a healthy experience or knowledge of what's really going on at the masses' level. My friends are all intelligent but elitist Chinese and we talk different. I really do want to know what reality is for most people.

So now that I've taught at BNSS for several weeks, what do I have to say?
Teaching wise, I obviously faced many difficulties, first of which was the culture shock. People wise, I found the kids very fun to be with and they never fail to make me laugh. We talk very colloquial english, like my words of 'yeah sia'. During recess, the boys play soccer and when my math lessons are after recess, they always stank. Attitude wise, they are a lot less reverent towards teachers than I was back then.
The teachers here are awesome. It takes a lot of courage for a teacher to go down to a student's level and work with him/her. Coming from one of the top schools, I know you'll never get that kind of treatment from teachers because the teachers never had to. I've met teachers who refused to teach a certain student and even ignores him/her because of grudges held against the way the student had treated the teacher. As a teacher in BNSS, you can never be that high and mighty.

Every student is unique. There are some kids I give a lot of attention to and others virtually none at all. But in my heart, every child really is unique. This knowledge makes me feel good cos now I know I must have had a place in my teachers' hearts last time.

I got treated!

I had a fantastic [but late] lunch with my colleague, Ms Ramah, who is also the HOD of math at Sun With Moon which is a Japanese restaurant serving excellent food. It was a nice time though no doubt, there was the age gap between us and all, we got along just fine.

Through my conversation with Ms Ramah, I learnt that being an HOD is no fun at all! The workload is crazy and the hours are basically 24/7.

Rahma: If I could give you one advice, I would say just go for what you want to do without weighing the consequences too heavily. In this way, you will never regret your decisions.

Wise words, I would say. She advised me to take Finance in university since I still do not know what exactly I wanna study yet. I KNOW I wanna be an FSO, but I really do not know what to study. According to her, a lot of doors will be open to me if I take finance.

After lunch with Ms Rahma, I went off on my own to buy my Mum biscuits from Marks & Spencer. Gosh, it was affordable but really expensive [in my opinion]. But my Mummy is really the nicest person to me. If my future husband wants to be the nicest person to me, he faces stiff competition! So the biscuits were worth it!