Tutorial 1 - ESE Experience

ESE EXPERIENCE @ CHANGKAT CHANGI SECONDARY SCHOOL
 
I was posted at Changkat Changi Secondary School, located at Simei Estate, in the last week of July 2009 as an untrained contract teacher. My CS1 is Mathematics and my CS2 is English Language. When I was there, the school was in need of Mathematics teachers, hence, I was given little experience to teach English. The only experience I had was in the end of July 2009 when I first came in till the final year exams 2009 (about 4 months).
 
When I first received my posting, I had a nervous feeling about the school due to the negative comments and feedback I've heard about the school before. I've heard that students in the school are notorious and will challenge the teachers in the face. On my first week, I had a culture-shock and I could not understand that "such students existed". Basically, I came in with an idealistic mindset and students in Changkat were definitely not how I expected them to be.
 
School Environment
 
However, the school has a strong colleague/staff support, so much so that this neutralizes the emotions I had towards the students. As time goes by, I began to learn alot of valuable things in the school. Given the students' profile, the school focuses on the value, CARE. Care can be seen everywhere in the school from staff to staff, teachers to students, management to staff and students to teachers as well.

The school also has a good discipline department so, teachers do not have to worry about handling difficult students and late-comers single-handedly. There is also an NT department to focus on the NT classes.
 
The school is handicapped-friendly. Hence, there are ramps and an elevator to better navigate teachers, wheelchair-bound and handicapped students. Resources cannot be kept in the classrooms because they will get spoilt by the students. As such, teachers were seen carrying portable projectors, visualisers, laptops and many other resources to and fro classes. They do so by using trolleys.
 
The classrooms have very little windows and a large wall separating the front door and back door of the classroom to prevent any disruption/distraction from the outside to students in the classroom. Ventilation in the classroom is very poor but there are wall fans in every corner of the classroom. In some classrooms that are located in the far end and have little passers-by, CCTVs are installed in these classrooms. Classrooms are bare from in-built resources and have little holes or cupboards to prevent students from cheating or have any opportunities to cheat.

Tables and chairs are vandalised but to prevent them from getting vandalised further, some classes have their tables wrapped in wrapping papers or blank papers to showcase their art talent.
 
There were very friendly, kind and helpful cleaners all around the school. As such, the school is generally very clean. Bushes and gardens are well-maintained.

Student Profile
 
Students are not academically-inclined. Most of them come from a difficult family background. They are frank, hyper-active and attention-seeking. Students choose teachers to learn from and they do not like to study in class, rather meet teachers after school hours for one-to-one remedials or group-study and consultations with teachers. Similar to YISS, written by Jiet Sie, students in Changkat do not consider JC as their option. They get demoralised easily when they fail and tend to take the "flight" factor rather than the "fight" factor. Late-coming is common, especially in the tier-end classes of every stream.

The school constantly monitors late-comers every month and form-teachers have a set of procedures to follow to monitor late-comers. To increase the morale of the students, the school shows the recognition of excellence and success very openly to the students. Apart from that, the school often have inter-class competitions to create a sense of belonging to the school as well as to impart a sense of competitiveness amongst students to make them strive to be better.

English Teachers / 1 or 2 EL lessons I have observed that is good for provoked further thoughts
 
English teachers in Changkat are creative in carrying out English lessons. 

One of the teachers I know, used music to teach grammar (tenses). Students were told to identify the different parts of tenses in the lyrics of the song "Yesterday". From another teacher, drama was used to teach Narratives and oral communication. Most of the English teachers in the school shared with me that group work and videos were often used in their lessons.

In my own experience, I was given 2 classes to teach. One was a Sec1NA class and the other was a Sec2NT class. For the Sec1NA class, I was paired up with another contract teacher to teach but I was not given the full English timetable. In fact, I only had to come in once a week and most of the time when I come into lesson, the other teacher will already have something prepared for them. Since the both of us were new and had no experience, most of the time, we were told to give the students assignments to meet up to the English department's quota of assignments. However, there was one time when the both of us decided to try to use the movie, 'High School Musical' to teach Characters, Setting, Plot etc. The students seem to have a greater affinity to watching movies and videos because for the subsequent lessons, they kept asking,"What are we watching today?". This explains why most of the teachers like to use videos in their lessons as well.

For the Sec2NT class, I observed that the teacher did little teaching and gave the students plenty of worksheets. This, I observed, worked very well because the students are the hands-on type and they need to do something, rather than sit and listen. There's one thing to take note of, though. They were given work to be done individually because when they're in groups, they tend to talk endlessly about things unrelated to the lesson.
 
To encourage reading in the school, after every morning assembly during silent reading, there will be English teachers or students who will read out-loud on stage. The passages read will have a moral message behind them. School councillors were to stand in front of the classes in one straight line and read. Teachers were also told to bring a book to read and stand amongst the students at their respective classes.

Change in perspective of literacy teaching and learning

From what I remembered when I was in secondary school as a student, I had interesting and fun English lessons. I learnt to debate, act out skits, watched videos, did group work, write journals etc. As a student, I even had a chance to discuss world current issues with my English teachers and I learnt the different techniques to answer different types of comprehension questions. When I become a teacher, I had these thoughts in mind to share what I know with the students. However, later did I know that teaching English is not like teaching Mathematics where there are set of rules/steps to follow. It is not a routine subject where I can teach step by step technically. I realized that I will constantly need to be creative in teaching English to get the students to be engaged.
 
Yet, being creative in my lessons alone do not help because the students are not well-exposed to the world and their foundation of the language is very poor. When I was assessing the students' work, I realized that they were quick to jump to conclusions and claimed what they hear from their social circles is the truth. Some even wrote without paragraphs and full-stops while others wrote abbreviations or spellings they learnt in the cyber-world. They even give answers like "IDK" in close passages.

Areas I need to work on to be a confident EL teacher
 
I am interested to learn anything from the technicalities of sentence structures, upgrading my content knowledge as well as expanding my vocabulary because I am definitely not well-equipped in all aspects of the English Language. Last but not least, I would also like to learn how to be creative in various ways to get the students to be engaged during English lessons.
 
Written by,
Noorhuda Yahya