Reflection

The school that I was posted to for contract teaching was Yuhua Secondary School in Jurong West. My CS1 was Physics and CS2, English. I started teaching there since the start of this year and the whole experience I had there was nothing less than exciting. Although there were disappointing times, but it only served as a stepping stone to improve myself.

When I first stepped into the school, I was given two lower secondary NA classes to teach on my own, so that was quite a shock to me given that classes started the next day and I had no head or tail where and what to begin. After a few, nervous lessons, I managed to find some time to sit in another teacher's class. This teacher that I observed took a very serious and disciplinarian kind of approach which I believe resulted in students cursing and swearing at the back of the class because every lesson seemed like a scolding session to them. That experience made me think about how would be a better way to go about handling children from NA classes.

The school environment was pretty run down since it was an old school. The students mostly come from non-English speaking homes and some of them, from broken families. Therefore, teaching them required a lot more attention to their backgrounds and why they behaved the way to do.

The EL teachers were mostly very friendly and helpful, and would render any advice that would be necessary to teach the students.

After going through these months of teaching English, I have actually learned that trying to get students from non-English speaking homes was not as easy as how I pictured it to be when I was a student. I have come to realise that we really need to have different teaching approaches when trying to deliver education to different types of students even though its the same content.

I would probably need to be more proficient in English language, learn what are the different ways of delivering content and also classroom management techniques because using the best delivery methods would be futile if the class is unable to focus and pay attention.

-Bernard