today's the day..

when i only slept 4 hours the night before :( this may seem surprising to you, but i need 8 hours of sleep, no less. i know some people (like our honourable founding father) only require 4 hours but that's how they can rule over pigs like me.

PTM

i seriously think (and hope) i won't be that sarcastic when it comes to meeting real parents who know what they are talking about. i don't discount the fact that obnoxious, irresponsible parents do exist but i can only hope they remain the minority. but if you know me well enough, i'm usually very meek when it comes to meeting people on a so-called "more senior" level to me. so much so my cousin (also teaching) thinks i'm the sort who will be arrowed to do everything in the school, from NE to Founders' Day to school magazine...

banana saviour's earth-saving lesson

banana saviour strikes me as as those energetic and infectious teacher but i guess her energy levels have been sapped greatly by history lately so she was rather subdued today :) the teacher at my school experience also used Captain Planet in teaching the topic of pollution and the class even gave me a very lively rendition of the theme song. this reminds me of the use of pop culture in the classroom. i think it is quite effective in gaining their interest but of course the onus lies on us dinosaurs to keep ourselves updated as to what is "in".

thought her slides worked well with the worksheet although she had to speed through them. too bad we couldn't carry out the role play, i'm really curious as to how we can act out the causes, effects and solutions. i suppose the lack of sleep has a detrimental effect on my creativity. sigh. otherwise i think her lesson was okay, pitched at the right level (although i'm not sure what students we were) and she was quite firm with misbehaviour, even stopping wesley from saying "hell".

my only two questions: how should you deal with "interesting" answers like lubricants and colonic irrigation? i think banana saviour handled the latter quite well but that's only because i read it last week in the papers so i sort of knew what it meant, not sure if it left the rest of the class confused as to what it is. and should you accept "lubricants" and write it on the board? during my student mentoring programme, the school i was attached to had very well-informed students. what i'm afraid of is having the well-informed ones pipe up in class about what it really is, that would so put me in a spot! to discuss and clarify the term with the innocent ones will be like opening a can of worms and yet you can't stop the educated ones from telling them all about it either. what is worse is when they misinform the innocent ones and they go away knowing the wrong things...

and also dealing with PRC students in your class. i think this might be something we will all experience at one time or another, given the sudden and continued influx. i've tutored a Chinese girl before, now currently tutoring another 2 from thailand. the funny thing is they are allowed to be in a sec 3 class although their english is not as good (but their maths is brilliant!). should we take the effort to check up the chinese translation for certain geographical terms to facilitate their understanding? give them remedial? there's also the problem of having students in the same class ostracizing their foreign peers. the good thing is geography teachers don't usually mark down for bad english, as evidenced by the school work showed to me by my tuition kids. they experience more problems with grasping the concepts or content of the textbook but once they do, they simply memorize wholesale since they are unable to express in their own words.

darren's weathering class

darren explained our queries quite well, for example the term banana saviour's "disintegrate" question and raksha's question about weathering vs erosion. i didn't catch the last part due to the multiple distractions around me but i liked how he was patient in handling our queries. the use of the DIY model to show the disintegration was useful in showing how the big rock breaks down into pieces, appeals to the visual learners? i noticed his quiz questions at the end were also targeted at correcting any misconceptions or confusion that the students might have. for example, the question of whether freeze thaw is physical, it's good he addressed the possible assumption students have that anything that requires water is chemical weathering.

darren did not get to carry out his group activity as planned which is a pity because i really wanted to see what it was all about. sounded interesting from the way he described it. like a game of "heart attack"? :)

just one small issue that darren could have improved on, that is more eye contact with the class. i observed he looked more at his computer screen and the projected image, less at the students. guess he's really the shy and genial loanshark! this might seem ok with a well-behaved class but in other cases, eye contact goes a long way in telling the students "i know what you are up to" and is also more personable when they don't feel like they are invisible?

other matters

i'm glad wesley and wenhui brought up the blue revolution debate in class. i remember talking about it to wesley and quoting wenhui's blog in which she highlighted the water management aspect of it, to which wesley quite rightly insisted it wasn't. this is a fine example of how policies written in nice ivory towers often miss the small details when it comes to application. mr elzap did a quick google on the net there and then in class to see the results and sure enough, there was a mix of views.

personally i had mistakenly thought it would be the water management aspect since that is a unique problem for our little red dot of a country. maybe that comes under SS.

structured academic controversy: after watching the video, i have a better idea of how to carry it out. clear instructions are absolutely pertinent! and of course the preparation of the material/worksheets. initially i was skeptical about how the students would take to it, whether they are able to really carry out and meet the aims of having them see both views. we were thinking students might just sit in their groups and say "oh it's just what you said just now loh" when it comes to the time to reverse perspectives. to get around this problem the teacher will probably have to walk around and monitor their discussion.

the teacher in the video was able to carry out the entire activity within 2 lessons, allowing time for presentation and conclusion/wrap up. my only concern is the time management, i noticed the activity took 50 minutes from the first stage of reading to the last stage of consensus building, not including presentation time and conclusion. will have to be really strict to keeping to the time allocated because i think the conclusion is quite important in driving home the aims of the whole activity. helps the students understand the whole rationale if the teacher can explain and round up.

but the teacher did put in a lot of effort planning, from the materials to even bringing them out on a fieldtrip to see the coastal protection structures for themselves! i went on a similar trip for a coastal management module in NUS and was indeed very enlightened because the layman in me hadn't known about the different structures (other than the ubiquitous breakwater) put in place until my lecturer pointed them out. seeing the kind of detrimental effects the structures had was also nice.

well well, am bringing my history classmates to Joo Chiat for a Peranakan-themed fieldtrip this saturday (along with my fellow "teacher", icydolphin) as part of our assessment for the history fieldtrip module. it will be a good opportunity for me to find out if i will also have great difficulties putting on the teacher's hat while dealing with my fellow NIE classmates. i've actually brought real students out before to Sungei Buloh during my attachment so it wouldn't be a first time or anything.... but wish me luck!! :)