Snippets of hope

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by Sim Hong Jhun

Monday, May 9, 2011 @ 9:29 AM

In my opinion, the past few lessons were quite successful because they could more or less understand the lesson, as could be seen from their so-so performance in the worksheets we gave them. We implemented a point system, which spurred them to perform well and participate, as well as allow us to sort of control them when they were getting too noisy. I found out that they had very diverse characters and attitudes towards our lessons. The boys generally thought the lessons were interesting and participated very very actively sometimes too actively. The girls, on the other hand, were soft and slightly afraid, but I think they were more warmed up after the second lesson. Chang Hua and Aloysius particularly surprised the both of us as they had a lot of general knowledge about history and geography.

Through a short oral survey that we conducted with them, they thought that fiction books were more interesting, and they felt our worksheets ranged from the easy to average range. SO we shall make tougher worksheets :P Currently, we are still contemplating what to do for the finale, which will probably on the last Thursday of July, if nothing sudden pops up.

On the second lesson, I tried teaching, but I think they thought Ranald was more interesting. I think I should try to bond with the students more by teaching and talking to them during lessons. Also, I think we should alternate between fiction and non-fiction so as to balnce their learning.

by viggy

Sunday, May 8, 2011 @ 9:47 PM

At this point in time, I am worried about my RE project, particularly my contributions to the group. I have done a fair amount of work by writing out the proposal, coming up with a group name and doing behind-the-scenes research on my topic. However, I have been unable to visit the school for a rather long time, meaning my service hours are below average in the group and definitely need to improve. I am trying to work out a way to make more hours, however, at this point in time, I cannot because I have the exams to worry for. I believe it should be fine, once my group starts making their weekly visits on Fridays as previously agreed.

Currently, I have read some articles on whether IQ is a suitable indicator on whether a student requires special attention or whether they are gifted . It is to be noted that IQ is not reliable as it is merely a test out of which you get a few questions correct and a few wrong. It does not answer the questions what the definition of IQ is and how it can be measured. It merely asserts the fact that doing well in a test, is indicative of intelligence which is flawed reasoning. It has also been written that students have multiple intelligence"s". meaning that there are different categories of intelligence. This concept suggests that it is possible that Autistic kids are not at all special needs, but simply extremely gifted in one intelligence, but severely lacking in another. As for special needs children, the truth may be that they are only unable to learn certain types of things and that they may actually excel in others. This would revolutionize the way special needs students are taught, and the tests being administered to find out whether a student has "special needs"

I read these on http://iq-test.learninginfo.org/iq02.htm

Reflections - Daniel by Zooeae

@ 6:27 PM

Reflections 3: May 8, 2011

Our first official lesson had finally taken place some weeks ago. As expected we were ecstatic to have the opportunity to try out our lesson plans that we had worked on and refined for the past few months. It was a rather false start for us that day, since our lesson only lasted an hour due to the students having other commitments afterward and generally a small turnout of only half the class. Our friendly group member Vignes also happened to be absent on that occasion. Nevertheless our lesson still continued as planned.

Frankly speaking after that hour of interaction, much was on my mind from the lukewarm response we had received. After much reflection I figured the problem was that we didn’t know how to engage them in a classroom setting. Regarding this we would need more research on pedagogy for special needs students and perhaps to facilitate our research even an interview with an expert in the field.

Nonetheless we are not discouraged, and hope to be able to connect with them and hopefully when the exams are over and we resume our sessions, the turnout would be better and the class more vibrant which would benefit both us and them.

Reflections for First Lesson by --Freeze

Wednesday, May 4, 2011 @ 8:57 PM

Well, I personally thought that the first session was unexpected for us. First of all, the group that was there was only half of the students that would be joining our programme. Moving on to the lesson itself, progress was slow and we were unable to engage the students greatly. However, Daniel and I managed to get many takeaways from it and we probably have a better idea how to conduct our lessons in future. We learnt later from Ms Jey that our group of students tend to be more quiet, and thus it would take a longer time for us to foster a good relationship with them such that they can open up and both we, as the teachers and they, as the students can enjoy the lesson.

The first problem I saw with the lesson was that while we were telling the students to read the book in turn, some of them could not see the book and thus could not keep up with the storyline. One way for us to improve this would be to photocopy copies of books for them to refer to, and another way was what we did during the lesson - we utilised the whiteboard so that everyone could see the words clearly and we could explain it with annotations. I personally feel that giving every two people a copy of the book would still work better as the books contain pictures that can help them to understand better if they do not understand the words totally.

The second problem was that our progress was extremely slow, and it was not close to what we had previously expected (we planned to finish a book a lesson, but only managed to explain 2 paragraphs in the entire lesson). We acknowledge that this was partially because our lesson was cut short (the students had a performance after the lesson and had to leave early). However, I feel that it should not be totally attributed to that and even if we had not ended early, we would still be unable to cover all the content. I think that one way we can improve this is to make the lesson more exciting by providing incentives for them to answer the questions that we posed to them. Regarding this issue, I believe that the research we will be doing on pedagogy will help give us new insights on how best to work around it.

The last problem was that the students were not exactly engaged in the lesson and did not seem to enjoy it. This, in my opinion, is the most troubling issue at this point of time. As students ourselves, we understand that if we do not understand the lesson, there is no way we are going to participate actively in it or pay attention. These are essential for learning and if they do not take place, we will not be reaching our objective of teaching the students in the first place. As I mentioned before, Ms Jey told us that relationship with the students has to built over time and I believe this will improve slowly as we go along. One way in which we could make the lesson more interesting for them is to occasionally chat with them during our lessons and not keep to teaching the content the whole lesson. Additionally, as mentioned before, incentives could be used to keep them engaged in the lesson.

To summarise, I believe that even though this start was not what we desired, it was not a bad start. At least, we learnt valuable lessons regarding how we can improve our lessons and move on from here. One thing we can look forward to is that the entire class will be here (including Vignes) and it should at least help to relieve some of the tenseness in the lesson as more casual conversations can flow.

Clarence