More writing and a writing camp

                                                   1. Free Writing Time

                                                     2. In the silent writing room...

                                                         3. The daily prompts

Don’t remind me. I know it’s December and I haven’t been updating this blog since September. It’s true that I’ve been busy but I am always busy and that hasn’t stopped me from writing one more thing. But October was spent in Jakarta (two trips) and November was my personal development time. But in between all these activities, I was busy writing too.

Yes, writing the Teacher’s Guide for the P4 textbook, writing and rewriting various bits of the materials and most of all writing a 16-page, 7000 over word piece on one of our English textbooks.  After that was done, I was truly exhausted from writing. Writing is not difficult for me but writing is always a pain, and I still struggle to put words on paper and to organise thoughts. True, the end product is always satisfying but getting there is another story.

After the many writing exercises, I was planning for the beginning of the Bay Area Writing Project’s (BAWP) Singapore Writing Camp that I was jointly organising with the Adam Khoo Learning Centre for primary and lower secondary children. The camp ended on 2 December but what an experience that was! It left me completely exhausted but also totally invigorated. I am once again charged up for more writing adventures and here I am back at the computer.

In the next few posts, I hope to share some lessons from the camp with you-- lessons that I hope will help you rethink your own writing life as well as your pedagogical practices. In the meanwhile, I am busy setting up my writing group and getting my drafts in order in my writing journal. And in case you are thinking, oh, good for her but I have no time and nothing to write about and I don’t write well. Well, I too have little time and I am just wondering how to fit in my walk, yoga practice, writing and swimming into my working day. But busy woman finds time and every one can write; they just need to find their writing voice.   Read my upcoming posts about our reluctant writers at the camp and perhaps you can find some inspiration.

And in the words of Elmore Leonard, There isn’t any secret. You sit down and you start and that’s it.

Cooking my troubles away

My solution to a problem is always to get busy. I organise, clean, sweep or if that’s all done, I cook. I would say that I am a B+ cook, verging on A sometimes but over the years, I’ve lost some of my skills because I don’t cook as often as I used to. But I can still whip up a meal for 20 people at the drop of a hat. I have not stopped collecting recipes and I maintain an active account with allrecipes.com.

My love for cooking and recipes began from my love for reading. In my youth, there were few bookshops and not much reading material available. There was a mamak store in my neighbourhood where an Indian uncle sold a small selection of paperback books including an odd Enid Blyton. I bought them all and one day, I realised that I had bought and read everything he had. I asked him if he had anything else left for me to read and he offered me some back copies of Women’s Own, a women’s magazine, at a cheap price. I took them and that started my interest in cooking and collecting recipes.  At twelve, I already had a bulging book of recipes and knew a blancmange from a soufflé. It helped that my teachers loved to cook too and they often asked me to help copy recipes for them into their own books in my-then-beautiful handwriting.

I started formal cooking lessons in Sec 1 and the first lesson was to reconstitute milk. Looking back, I must say that this is truly a last century task. I bet most of you don't know what reconstituting milk was all about. It’s simply making milk from milk powder because we did not have pasteurized milk in tetra packs in those days. This was quite a skilful task as milk powder in those days didn’t dissolve easily, and it was very easy to end up with lumps in your milk.  After that, the first thing we made with the reconstituted milk was a banana milk shake. The first real food I made was scones, using the rubbing-in method. Looking back, I am grateful for these cooking lessons which went on for 3 to 4 years of my secondary school life. I learnt a lot about basic cooking methods, cleanliness in the kitchen, balancing diets and even won a prize for dish I created - Tutti Frutti Jelly – in a nation-wide contest when I was in Sec 3 or 4.

Cooking is always therapeutic for me. Many people cook as a hobby nowadays and have huge designer kitchens and fancy equipment to show off their skills. In my time, we didn’t even have an oven. My first home- made one was an aluminium pot with sand inside. There were hot coals under the pot and more hot coals on the lid and the cakes or cookies just got cooked or burnt in between. Still, the excitement of a perfect batch of cookies was hard to beat then.

Nowadays, I have more fancy equipment although I would say my collection of cooking equipment is modest compared to my sisters’.  Last weekend, in a cooking frenzy, I made some apple-oats and some cranberry-chocolate muffins. Needless to say, I made too much and I still have two sad boxes in my freezer. Were they good? I think so. Hey, these are healthy muffins, and my son grew up on the apple-raisin muffins. The recipe came straight out of Sunset magazine. But truth be told, on bad days, I crave for fat-filled, moist cupcakes not low-fat, chewy muffins.  

I learnt to sew too in school but cooking has been the one subject that has seen me through many good and bad days. I’m sorry that many young people don’t care to learn how to cook although there has been a great increase in food and eating in recent years. Unfortunately, there’s not enough interest in basic cooking.  

Here are a few interesting thoughts about the subject:

Cooking is like love. It should be entered into with abandon or not at all. Harriet Van Horne.
 

When men reach their sixties and retire, they go to pieces. Women go right on cooking. Gail Sheehy.

And they shouldn't stop.

Have we done enough?

Two weeks ago, I had to go to Tan Tock Seng Hospital for some tests since my recent mammogram showed some irregularities. I did not give this too much thought although it was yet another unwelcome piece of news that I had had that week. I turned up at the clinic armed with a book, a sweater and a water bottle and was prepared for a long wait. The clinic was full, and again, I was reminded that breast cancer can happen to any woman.  Then the request came for me to do a second mammogram.  After that, I had hoped for the best. So I was not eager to respond to the next request for an ultra sound. It was while lying on the bed with cold gel all over my chest that I started to ask myself if there was anything I could have done to avoid this situation. I must confess to getting nervous at that stage especially when the nurse had to call me back for a second ultra sound after I had changed back into my clothes.   After some reflection, I realised that there was nothing more I could have done.  I have faithfully gone for mammograms once every two years, exercised, minded my diet, and done enough I think without becoming paranoid. And there is no history of cancer in my family. Finally, to cut a long story short, I found out that while there was an increase in the calcifications, these were not cancerous.

After that incident, I got busy working on a seminar for my PSLE students. I wanted to make sure that my teachers have prepared the students well. But as I busied myself, I started thinking about the parallels between my experience at the hospital and preparing students for exams. The PSLE is around the corner, and I know that after that, we would often ask ourselves if we had done enough to prepare our students for it.  Did I teach them that? Did I remember to revise that with them? Could I have taught that skill/item more efficiently so that they will get it right? It’s exactly like what I did, asking myself, if I did I enough to ensure  that I won’t get breast cancer.

Well, I think  there’s no point asking those questions because asking them means that we think we can cover all bases for the exams.  Just like life, we can’t take care of every single thing in an exam.   If we can predict everything, then we are either gods or the exams are a sham. In English especially, it is difficult to say how well a child will do. I, like many teachers, often fall into the trap of saying one can get an A* this way or that way but the truth is, a lot depends on the child, other children, the day, the test and a whole host of other factors.  Language tests are also not objective, although this does not mean that they are always scored subjectively.  A child who fails to get the A* he or she deserves can still go on in life and succeed.  A child who scores A* and hates the subject will end his or her learning of the subject after the exam.

My son, Junior, is one example. He struggled with Chinese all through his school career.  But not passing Chinese at PSLE and not offering Chinese as an exam subject in secondary school did not stop him from learning it.  Now at 21, he travels to Taiwan often to meet his business associates and no one speaks English there. Junior has to speak Mandarin and also to learn some technical terms related to his products. I am only thankful that although he was weak in Mandarin at school, he did not leave school with a negative attitude towards it. He can still learn the language now.  These days, he even speaks Mandarin in Singapore when he has to.  Could I have done more to help him with Chinese? I don’t know.  But I know I tried my best.

So if you are worried stiff now about the coming exams, don’t add to your stress by asking, Am I doing enough?, or  after the exams,  Did I do enough? Ask instead if you did all you can and if you did it with the right intention.  You can only do that much; the rest is beyond you. 

As for me, I am returning to my usual life style. I reckon I am doing enough and I should instead learn to enjoy my life more, instead of worrying about things I have no control over. 

Happy Teachers' Day and Some Prizes to be Won

                                                      Win one of these 2 T-shirts!

It's Teachers' Day again and if one is cynical, one can just treat it as a day for catching up on marking, completing administrative chores or setting exam papers. But wait! Why do that? If we have a day to call it our own, we should celebrate it. After all, how many professionals have a day to call their own? And when I say celebrate it, I don't mean go shopping.

We should celebrate it by reflecting on what makes us special. Yes, we are special, and I am sorry that nowadays, many people try to take that away from us. I say, don't let them. Instead, affirm our work. Take time off today and sit quietly for a while and reflect on why you are a teacher and what you want to do as a teacher. Think of the 40 faces you are in charge of every day and project ahead and imagine them ten years down the road. How can you make that road easier for them? Like it or not, they are your family, and your desire to do your best for them makes you special. Some, among the 40, won't have another person who will want to do that for them. You are super special to them.

At Teachers' Day lunch today, I asked some of my young teachers what makes teaching special for them. A young male teacher told me this without even pausing to think.

You get to watch your kids grow up, over and over again through the years. You don't feel you have to let your kids go, as parents do when their children grow up. For teachers, the gap is filled up almost immediately by a new batch of pupils.

Other responses include:

• Teaching helps you keep in touch with things and you rediscover your youth always through teaching your pupils.
• Teaching helps you stay alert to things in the world.
• Teaching is a job that allows one to witness the turning point that can suddenly transform your kids. Granted, this does not happen to all kids, but when it does happen, you, the teacher, are there to witness it.
• Teaching keeps one honest as it's difficult not to be honest with kids around you.

And there could be many more meaningful reasons like these.

Why do you teach and what meaning do you find in the profession? Send me a short paragraph or post it on my Facebook account. The most interesting responses/stories will win prizes! Two T-shirts that you see in the pictures here and I am happy to give away copies of my books, The Learning Teacher 1 &2 to other good submissions. All entries must be in by 11 September. Either post them here as Comments or on my Facebook account. Or email them to learning@pacific.net.sg.

No energy to write? Enjoy this video instead.

 http://www.heartofateachermovie.com/

Happy Teachers' Day again and Happy Holidays.

Five Questions That Will Improve Your Teaching

Five Questions That Will Improve Your Teaching

Seoul and Dog Poo

Two weeks ago, I was on a lightning trip to Seoul to visit a writing camp organised by the Bay Area Writing Project (BAWP). I have known about the BAWP from my postgraduate days at UC Berkeley and was keen to see what programmes they were offering. Unfortunately, I landed in Seoul on the morning of the storm-of-the-century and was caught in a four-hour traffic jam getting to the hotel.  Our very resourceful taxi-driver worked hard, taking every short cut he could think of. Otherwise, we could have been in the jam for a much longer period. With no English newspapers, it took me a day or more before I discovered the extent of damage in Seoul from the rains that fateful day.

Our three-day trip was spent in the camp and during our free time, we were in a mall to escape the rain. Sadly, I am in no position to say much about Seoul from this trip. But I was most impressed by Incheon airport and learnt a bit more about the art of kimchee making.

                                 A "royal" procession at Incheon airport, staged to entertain tourists.

Back home, I spent the Sunday attending the Buddhism and Science Symposium, where experts spoke about the link between scientific research and Buddhist practices like meditation.  Here are some of the ideas I took away from that day:

1. The map is not the territory. Our perception of the world is just that- a perception, and not the real thing. We should not use our perceptions of people and of the world to measure or judge people or events because ours is only one view.  A timely reminder.

2. Life is not about being good. It’s about being real. CG Jung.

3. We have 5 dreams per night and 1825 per year. We all dream but each dream is unique and particular to the dreamer.

4. Here’s an exercise that Dr Marke Greene suggested. Try it.

      Close your eyes. Imagine a person who is very difficult. Choose someone of the same gender. Think of a word that describes what makes this person difficult.
Chances are that the word you chose to describe the person also describes you. I tried this and it took me a while to understand and accept that the word also described me. That was humbling and enlightening.

      5. The Ven Chuan Guan gave a lively talk during which he told a story about dog poo. Here’s a paraphrase of what he said: When we are out and about, and we step on dog poo, what do we do? We try to get rid of it immediately, either by wiping our shoes on some grass or with tissue. We don’t pick the dog poo up, put it in a bag and tie it up neatly to take it home. And when we get home, and we are asked what we did outside, we don’t take our pack of dog poo out, unpack it and share it with our family. Nor do our family members share the dog poo they've inadvertently stepped on with us. 

The Venerable’s message is this: Don’t take home your emotional dog poo and share it with your loved ones. Leave the dog poo outside where it belongs. Making your loved ones deal with your dog poo is not a loving gesture. 

I thought this was an interesting metaphor and a good story to share with everyone. Like itor not, we are all a little guilty of unloading dog poo on our loved ones every now and then when we get home from a stressful day at work. Perhaps it’s time to rethink this habit.

So, it was a Sunday well spent and after that I had a week of work and fought the flu at the same time.  National Day came and went.  At one point, it was bad enough for me to cancel yoga and all physical exercises and although work went on as usual, I never really got better. Today, I still have a bad cough after having consumed a whole bottle of cough syrup.  Ah well.  Thank goodness it’s Friday! 

Four Steps to Staying Sane as a Teacher

This is the time of year when teachers go a bit crazy with stress and work. Perhaps it's a good time to take a bit of time over the weekend and read this article about staying sane.

Four Steps to Staying Sane as a Teacher