End-of-year hols 2008

My plan for the end-of-year hols:

So here's my to-do list:

1. Plan Pros Retreat in early-2009
2. Long-term plan for Students
3. Get credit card [UOB/POSB Everyday/DBS/Maybank]
4. Buy semi-SLR @Funan [Panasonic Lumix DMC-FX3 @$799]
5. Download songs
6. Watch borrowed movies [I Am Sam, Pursuit of Happyness, Pulp Fiction, Aviator]
7. Plan for wedding [plan brothers & sisters' New Year's Day party]
8. Read Spencer Kagan's Cooperative Learning, JK Rowling's Harry Potter, Neil Humphreys' Be My Baby, Gary Chapman's Five Love Languages, Bill Hybels' Axiom

Visit to Science Centre

Brought the 10 winning students to Science Centre where we saw an exploding hydrogen balloon, live electricity, F1 simulators and many more.

Didn't get a thank you though. =[

Schools Digital Media Awards

Am doing this before November this year. Sounds quite interesting and can actually put my RadioPro skills to use, though I got D for that module. Have to use Audacity or ProTools to create a 3-min radio package on SOMETHING. Will worry about it in Term 4 lah. Will probably involve all the kentangs in my class and with Kalai's help, this should be fun.

http://www.evideo.edu.sg/sdma/

Making the ban(ner)

I am SO impressed by my class' artistic talent. In barely 2 hours and between 10 students helping out, we cut out all the letters for sticking on the banner, almost completed the pictures of racial harmony and the S'pore flag in crayon, and even found time to watch me lose in the aforementioned football tournament. Hats off to 5 Joy. =]
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22 Jul 2008, 2220hrs
Our class is making a banner for NDP and I've assembled a elite team of art & design specialists to create it (me excluded). There's gonna be painting, scribbling, drawing, pasting, gluing and other messy verbs thrown all over the place.

I really enjoyed today hanging out with them and generating ideas for the banner. Just watching them interact with one another in their endearing Mat-nerisms made for quite an entertaining afternoon. Picking up a few Malay words from them here and there too.

NE Show

It wasn't that bad after all and - dare I say it? - I actually enjoyed it. Weather was more or less perfect with little sun except during the waiting at the beginning, a stiff sea breeze and not a hint of rain. I got to know my students a lot better, my colleagues a little less so, but all in all it was good fun.

I learnt a little lesson about the deployment of toilet passes from last year's NE Show batch, took some photos with Iskandar's camera (which he'll pass me a copy of) and basically just took in all the sights and sounds. I exhorted those around me to sing the national anthem with the same vigour on Tuesday morning but I somehow don't see it happening. =]

I think once will do for me, though.
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01 Jul 2008, 2222hrs
Having managed to siam NDP in NS, it's all coming back to haunt me now.

Have to being 5 Joy to the NE Show on 5 Jul. Yes, that's my Saturday burnt. I'll be baking it the sun and broiling in the humidity from 1pm to 10.30 at night - and that's just a conservative estimate.

Please pray for good weather on 5 Jul, otherwise we'll need to come back on 6 Jul. Pray for nice fluffy clouds to cover the sky but no rain too. Perfect.

Thank God 7 Jul is a holiday. =]

Remedial

Can it be? I enjoy giving remedial more than actual teaching. The pressure of book checking is lifted and I can afford to be creative with my lessons. Proceeding with diagnostic tests for English and heuristics for Maths and maybe Science. But having fun so far and I hope I can remove the stigma of remedial in the students' minds.

5 Joy

I'm the new form teacher of 5 Joy and I must say that I've done things very atypically so far. New teachers are warned not to smile, joke or do anything that can give away the fact that they are actually human, especially during the first week.

Well, guess what? I did - and I feel much better for it. I have chosen to take the trust-trustworthiness equilibrum with this class and with my tolerance for behaviour also going up, this has resulted in a less threatening classroom environment. As one student put it, they don't even dare raise hands in another class. I introduced the notion of appropriate and inappropriate noise, so they know how they should react to different situations.

Slowly but surely the tide is turning from ignorant apathy to daring responsibility. Students are beginning to tale risks as they know they won't get shot down if they get an answer wrong, because they realise I'm rewarding them for the effort.

I've also impressed on them that interesting lessons require a partnership - participative students and an interactive teacher. They responded well to my Maths lesson today, even though it's a simple manipulation of practice of fraction-decimal conversion. Didn't take too much time and effort to plan either.

I really hope to keep this up, and once the class desktop and e-Beam are up, who knows? The sky's the limit.