When I was a young teacher...

                                         
                                                      With my junior college colleagues

                                                            Young and innocent...

I ended last month by attending the Teachers’ Conference. It’s a privilege to listen to the keynote speakers and this year, they did not disappoint. The two speakers who resonated most with me were Professor Marilyn Cochrane-Smith and Professor Elizabeth Birr Moje.

Professor Cochrane-Smith told a compelling story about two young trainee teachers and their experiences during their first year of training. She looked at the factors which shaped their learning experiences and commented on four aspects of  successful teaching practice: deprivatisation, high expectations for all students and oneself as a teacher, taking an inquiry stance on the work of teaching and participating in multiple overlapping learning communities.

I don’t really want to discuss the technical aspects of her research but for those of you who are keen to read a bit about her work, here is a link which discusses her work into inquiry as a stance in learning: http://www.kdp.org/publications/pdf/record/Centennial/Record_Centennial.pdf

During the session, she challenged participants to recall their own learning experiences as a teacher and this brought me back some 33 years ago when I started on my professional road to becoming a teacher.  Well, before I came to join the then Institute of Education (IE), I had taught in various places in KL.  I taught History in my former secondary school where, I am ashamed to say, that I taught in the only way I knew how to - from my own History teacher- and that is to dictate or copy out copious amount of notes on various topics. Then I taught English in two different private colleges and even taught General Paper in Malay for a spell. Did I have any clue about teaching? No, but I relied heavily on my glib tongue and my rapport with the students to see me through each lesson.

My days at the IE were no better. I remember many long lectures about the psychology and the philosophy of education but nothing which prepared me for how to deal with forty girls in the classroom. Thank goodness they were good girls whom I sufficiently charmed so that they never gave me any disciplinary problems. But I taught them English and Geography and while I did pick up a few tips for teaching Geography from dear old Mrs Ng in secondary school, I was completely clueless when it came to teaching English. It didn’t help that I was supposedly trained for teaching Literature so no training in teaching English language was provided for at IE.

Nowadays, we would look to our cooperating teacher as a mentor; I don’t even remember one in my time. There were 2 other trainee teachers with me; one taught English and the other Science but competition, and maybe foolish pride, prevented us from sharing any teaching tips. But we did get together to groan and whine about our supervisors.  Needless to say, my supervisor was not impressed with my teaching. I remember after one mediocre English lesson, he told me to try and do more group work. Honestly, that didn’t mean much to me then apart from physically grouping the students into smaller units and I promptly did that when he next visited. Well, he was not pleased again because he said the group work did not serve the purpose of the lesson. Now, on hind sight, I knew what he meant but at that point in time, I remember being frustrated as I did what he wanted but he was not satisfied.  Explicit teaching was not a part of the norm then and supervisors often just talked and rarely showed.

After graduation from IE, I was posted to a junior college where I started teaching General Paper (GP), again a subject for which I had no training. In those days, junior colleges had lecture theatres where lectures were given to prepare these elite students for the real world of university studies. My first test was to give a GP lecture to the second year students and I remember lecturing on something about national languages. Don’t ask me why I chose that topic but I recall that the Head of GP then was suitably impressed, either by my knowledge of national languages or the smoothness with which I delivered the whole lecture. But beyond lecturing, I sure didn’t know anything about teaching GP although in my years at that junior college, I had a lot of success helping students to move from a low to a high grade in their exams.  Not surprisingly, after I joined NIE as a staff member, one of the first papers I ever wrote and published was on teaching GP.

We didn’t talk about how to teach then; nor did our senior colleagues give us advice on teaching. We just did our best and there was nobody to call for help, no books we knew that we could consult, and the Ministry remained a fortress on a hill that we never went to until our turn came for the fateful tea and interview. I remember too having to direct a play as a trainee teacher and to coach students for the drama festival. Yes, I was a drama student at university but that didn’t prepare me enough for these extracurricular tasks. But somehow I had to make it work.

Was teaching private then? You bet it was. Nobody knew what went on in our classes and I only remember my Head visiting my class once. Nobody thought we needed help and perhaps we didn’t think so either. 

Fast forward thirty years and what a change. Teachers now not only get all sorts of help, support and training, they attend conferences and present their ideas on how to teach! They get bonuses for good performance. An average teacher today has access to a range of services and upgrading opportunities. True, her workload seems heavier but she does not have to do this work in an uninformed way. Some sections of the Ministry are even a tad friendlier; why, you can be their Facebook friend now!  The improvements in the teaching service in the last thirty years have been most impressive and having seen the changes, I have to admit that the government has done plenty for the profession.

Thinking about these changes, I was somewhat taken aback when another expatriate friend criticised the teaching service here by describing a teacher’s negative experiences in a neighbourhood school.  True, I cannot deny that there may be still a few tyrannical principals who live to control the teachers’ every move.  I don’t deny that there is a lot of extra, out of classroom duties in the form of co-curricular activities. And yes, there is still some politicking, backbiting and backstabbing in the staffrooms of schools. But this happens everywhere, not just in schools.  I would say that by and large, our teachers work in healthy and often happier environments. I would say that the opportunities to develop themselves as teachers are plentiful and few teachers would describe themselves as oppressed.

But even so, many trainees in their first year out in schools fall through the cracks. I know of a number of my own supervisees who eventually left teaching for other jobs.  I know though that it’s not always because they hate teaching or the conditions in schools.  Professor Cochrane-Smith’s story reminds us that many factors contribute to a young professional’s transition from trainee to full time teacher, and many of these factors are related to the kind of support they receive, their attitude to and understanding of the nature of the job and the kind of socialisation process they undergo as trainees and young teachers. As experienced teachers, we can do our part to initiate young teachers into the profession. Sadly, I still hear stories about senior colleagues discouraging young teachers from staying in the profession and discrediting it with negative comments.   But the number of confident young teachers is certainly growing.

Indeed, nowadays, we don’t even speak of teacher training but of teacher education.  The education and growing of teachers is an activity that deserves the best of our resources and the best of our young talent.  Although parents have taken on much of the education of their children, it cannot be denied that children still spend a large proportion of their time in school with teachers. Harriet Martineau asked:

What office is there which involves more responsibility, which requires more qualifications, and which ought, therefore, to be more honourable than teaching?

None, I think and I am very glad I became a teacher. Indeed, I see myself teaching for a long time to come. 

Writing Fears

From the Singapore Writing Project blog:

http://writinginsingapore.blogspot.sg/

Dr Jia Jia and Singlish in Writing

Photos taken from this website: http://www.edvantage.com.sg/edvantage/features/people/1038164/They_have_1_5_million_YouTube_hits.html

So, I hear that Dr Jia Jia will be featured in the National Day rally. Hey, that's the sign that you have really arrived and made it as a national icon. Like Phua Chu Kang, Barbarella, Ah Meng and Taufik. Wow! 

I like that little guy. He's super cute and he says some outrageous things although I know his dad tells him what to say. He's our own Sophia Grace except that he does not sing...yet. And he's got his own big brother side kick too! And if you don’t know who I am talking about, Google Dr Jia Jia.

But much as I like Dr Jia Jia, I am not so sure that I am a fan of what he's doing. I find some of his jiajiaisms like “delicious” instead of dyslexia, clever and amusing. And all the Hokkien and Malay phrases are endearing- si bei pai seh, jin pai tung, jia lut, Tak boleh tahan. Trust me; at the right moment, they are just the thing to say. But I do get upset when Dr Jia Jia mangles his English grammar to make his Singlish sound cute. It’s not cute when Big Brother says “The impacts of iPhones and iPads on kids” “I sit bus to school” or “You cannot like that one”.  And it’s not cute when their tenses and sentence structures don’t sound anything like English, especially when we see them in the subtitles.

Ironically, I read that the original intention of the Dr Jia Jia’s videos was to discourage the use of Singlish (The New Paper, Monday April 2, 2012). However, I don’t see any evidence of this at all in the videos I have seen.  

I can hear all of you crying out, “Wet blanket”, “Purist!” and the like, but wait. I admit the English teacher in me can be critical sometimes, but you must also agree with me that you don’t want your children to speak and write Singlish all the time. As adults, who have mastered the language, we are at liberty to play with it and to use all the Singlish we want, because we know when to switch back to proper English. Unfortunately, for young children, especially those who do not get enough help with learning English, this may end up to be the only kind of English they will learn. And say what you like, this will eventually be a hindrance to their education and careers.  People who support Singlish, saying that it promotes our national identity, are people who either have already a good command of English and use Singlish as their fun language or are those whose English is less than stellar and don’t want to be criticised for it.

I will admit that I like Singlish phrases and use them often. My favourite words are “smoke” and “powderful” which I use every now and then, even in class.  But if I am teaching my young learners, I consider it my responsibility to teach them the correct and the standard version of the language, and not short change them with a non-standard version.  This is especially so for kids who come from non-English speaking homes. The school, the classroom and the teachers are their only sources of good English; kids gets enough Singlish from their home and play environments.  So while Dr Jia Jia looks and sounds super adorable with his Singlish utterances now, try to imagine him a young adult speaking like that still. Not so cute, right?

So is there no place for Singlish in school at all? Of course not. In essay writing, I often encourage children to add some Singlish expressions or structures into the dialogues they write in their stories. This is especially so when the characters they are writing about are Singaporean aunties and uncles or Singaporean baddies. The use of Singlish makes the characters real and gives them the distinct Singaporean identity that we want in our stories. The uncle in the wet market in not going to say,
“And would Madam like some fresh kembong today?” 
He’s more likely to say, “Aunty, today got fresh kembong. Want or not?”
And Aunty is likely to say,
“Is it? Expensive or not?” and not
“Really? Is it going to cost me an arm and a leg, my good man?”
Similarly, the bad guy who does not like the way you are looking him will probably say,
“Look what? Never see before ah?” instead of
“Who do you think you are looking at? Haven’t you seen me before?”

Dialogue, in its very nature, is meant to be casual and conversational and capturing the right voice in writing dialogues remains a challenge for all writers. So it can be quite painful to read the dialogues of local characters that are written in full sentences and in super correct English. They sound extremely stilted and completely unSingaporean.

Make no mistake. I don’t advocate using Singlish in the actual narrative, only in dialogues but I find that teachers often penalise students for doing so.  I don’t think this is right. There is a place for Singlish - in appropriate dialogues - and this should be allowed. I am often amused by how teachers pounce on examples of written Singlish but are happy to allow their students to use all manner of “broken” English in their everyday conversations.  While we don’t always write the way we speak, you cannot deny that our speaking habits often leak into our writing.

What should we do then? Don’t ban Singlish in the classroom. It won’t work. But point out its place in writing and in speaking. The occasional Singlish is fine and even desirable when we seek to be a part of the gang, but it’s important for students to know that for each Singlish phrase, there is an English equivalent for it. And when there isn’t, there is still a grammatical way to express that thought.

I don’t think we should over-correct children’s speech; being the English police is not always fun, but when certain Singlish phrases get overused or if the proper equivalents should be learnt, do highlight them for teaching and discussion.

Often, speaking carelessly is a bad habit that can be corrected; it is no reflection of one’s IQ. Teachers can do so much to help their students develop the desirable speaking habits. 

As for Dr Jia Jia and Big Brother, I trust they are learning the right habits from their respective schools.   

A teacher affects eternity...

Recently, we had a small gathering of former school mates. We were all from the same primary and secondary schools and two of us, Singaporeans, were there to meet up with our friend who was visiting from elsewhere. I haven’t spoken to this friend, P, for 40 years so it was great catching up. After a while, our conversation drifted to the topic of our former teachers, and invariably, we talked about the one teacher who left an indelible mark on our memories of school. This was our Maths teacher at secondary school, Mrs A.

I remember writing about my experiences with Mrs A before, but I did not know how my other school mates felt about her; we have never spoken about our individual experiences before. We were all from a convent where most of the girls were of working class backgrounds and a large number of these girls had fathers who worked at the huge railway workshop near our school. Indeed, in those days, most of the houses in that neighbourhood were built for the railway workers (and referred to as railway quarters) and their families although these days, it will cost you an arm and a leg to buy a place there.

The truth is I don’t remember many things about Mrs A, but a few unpleasant  incidents have been tucked away in my memory all these years.  My friend E, remembered her as a rather racist person who disliked dark skinned girls.  She recounted an incident where she saw Mrs A staring daggers at another dark-skinned classmate. “I shook with fear”, she said watching the hatred and anger in Mrs A’s face then.  It was rather dramatic and I did wonder if perhaps E’s youthful imagination went a tad into over drive then.  But I also asked myself why this one memory stayed with E after four decades.

Most of us remember Mrs A for her nightmarish Maths lessons. She would not just shout and threaten but she also slapped all of us freely. This was a woman who walked around during the exam peering into your test paper and demanding to know why you have left some sums unsolved. If your answer was not appropriate, like I don’t know how to do that sum, you were likely to get slapped.  I don’t know if I was born mathematically challenged but I am pretty sure I was terrorised into it by Mrs A. But, still E and I were the lucky ones who don’t remember getting slapped.

There were also all the different humiliating punishments she came up with when we failed Maths. Like being put out on show on the steps leading to the canteen with the test papers pinned on our uniforms. Or being led from class to class like criminals, with the offending test paper folded into a big bow on our chests.  We had to stand in a line in front of each class as examples of failures.  It is a miracle we did not all grow up to be insecure women, although some may have, like I did, develop a phobia for Maths.

So there we were, three grown professional women, sitting in the posh club of the hotel, each with a Singapore Sling in hand, recounting tales of Mrs A and shaking our heads with bewilderment. I imagined our younger selves similarly bewildered by the unnecessary cruelty and humiliation. What possessed her to do those things to us?

Mrs A has migrated to another country but several years ago, she was invited to a gathering of old girls (one that I did not go to).  My friend, P, recounted how she made a special effort during that event, to take a picture of Mrs A.

Why? I asked.

“I needed to show my children the teacher who slapped me two days in a row because I could not do the sums on profit and loss,” she replied.

Professionally, we have all come a long way since those days and we do have our teachers to thank. But that evening, we never once spoke of our favourite teachers or the teachers who helped us the most. Our thoughts, that evening, were consumed with memories of Mrs A and the helplessness and injustice we felt then. True, that was a long time ago and we should let it all go, but somehow, the effect of her actions stayed with us all through the years.   Perhaps she meant well and she just wanted us to work hard.  I’d like to think that too. But perhaps it was because she didn’t think much of us poor girls who, to her, would amount to nothing. As it turned out, we all proved to be one of the most successful batches of students the school has ever produced.  But now, even as successful senior citizens-to-be, memories of the one bad teacher still remain with us. 

Henry Brooks once said: 

A teacher affects eternity:s/he (sic) can never tell where his/her influence stops.  

In the case of Mrs A, her influence is indeed lifelong; we have never forgotten all the things she did to us. And she still remains the very model of a teacher we would never want our children to have. 

On stuff we leave behind...

I went to a sale of second hand books, DVDs and CDs a few weeks ago and came away thinking about my own mortality.

As I went through the many books, some read, some unread and the equally impressive collection of music CDs, some of popular classics, others for meditation and designed to provide relaxation, I could not help wondering about the person who has passed on and left all these behind. I understand he was a librarian before and I could see that we have some interests in common e.g. in wellness, spirituality, exercise, language learning and in travel. But the more I browsed through his things, the more questions I had about this person and his life.   Were these books and DVDs evidence of his seeking for peace of mind and for an understanding of what he was about to encounter?  Were the CDs of relaxation music used to help him sleep at night? Was he looking for peace of mind through yoga and meditation? Did he find any of this in his last days?

I felt some sadness for him and for what he left behind. Clearly, these were his precious things; he found solace and comfort in the books, in his fengshui figurines and in his collection of animals and comic characters. Now they lie desolate, without much worth and only regarded as junk obstructing the smooth handover of the house to the next owner.

As I stood outside the house looking at the intimate detritus of a life, I wondered about my own junk.  What will people make of my stuff when I am gone? Will they analyse my book titles and make judgements about my character or speak of my eccentricities? Is it worth my while leaving behind things I love for my loved ones who may not love these same things, regardless of their value? Is it not better to give the living less work by discarding them when I can and still have the time to do so? But who knows how long we will live, and can we live without the bits and pieces that define our lives and give us comfort?

Perhaps we should consider going the same way we came- empty handed. In the end, all our material goods will come to nought anyway; we can’t take them with us.

Such food for thought for me and for all of us growing old.

Do our children read in school?

I had lunch with an expatriate friend yesterday and as usual we talked about education matters since she is also an educator. She then told me about her friend (another expatriate) who recently decided to pull her son out of a well known local mission school for boys. Her reason? She said that her son did not read a single chapter book in his whole time there. I think Singaporeans will be shocked to hear this especially since getting a place in this school is like winning the lottery. Most people will think that this is a trivial reason for such a drastic decision. After lunch, I thought about this on the drive home and I had to admit that her reason was not all that frivolous.

Think about it. How can a school curriculum offer nothing solid for students to read apart from excerpts of texts which are usually not more than several hundred words long? That has been the situation with the basal texts that we have used, for example, the Primary English Thematic Series (PETS) or even the current supplementary series that I am working on, MC English.  To be fair, these basal readers have been commissioned by the Ministry; the guidelines for developing the texts were given to publishers and writers.  True, there is a place for basal readers in the curriculum and the latest series is filled with adaptations and excerpts from children’s literature. But they are still short texts and cannot qualify as real books.

Some of you may say, “But there are the STELLAR books!" Right, but honestly, how long are they? Should our eleven and twelve year olds be reading more? How do our children learn to read and write effectively without reading any chapter books of quality?

Well, many of you will say that this kind of reading is probably done at home. But most of you will also agree that this kind of reading is crucial to any child's language development. Don’t schools and MOE emphasise the importance of extensive reading all the time? Yet isn't it strange that we don't make our students read and we don't give them grades for reading extensively to motivate them to read?

I have on many occasions urged schools to give out lists of award winning books or create any list of recommended books for their students and make it compulsory for them to read at least 10 books from the list every term. I have yet to hear from any school which has done this. I know of schools which have introduced literature into the curriculum. Their students read a book a term or a book a year. And this book is always the predictable Charlotte's Web or some Roald Dahl title. Some schools even read a rather badly written series of moral stories as literature. The students who really read will finish their book in a day or a week. Those who don't care to read will have their interest killed, either by the long drawn affair with one book or by the boring moralistic tales which are badly written. What then is achieved by introducing literature?

It’s time to seriously consider introducing students to good literature and to make reading a significant component of language learning, instead of confining reading to just comprehension periods. The truth is, we all know that our students don’t do enough reading. It’s time to do something. Let’s stop paying lip service to its value. Nobody would deny that reading is a valuable aid to language learning, to writing and lifelong learning.  But why are we not doing anything to make our students read?

After listening to my friend and thinking things over, I realised too that what she has described is true but it’s a truth that we conveniently ignore. I know I often do not mince my words when I speak about what’s wrong with our education system.  But I must confess that when an outsider criticises the system, and points out the lapses, I do get quite defensive. This time though, I was truly left with nothing to say but to admit to our failing.

Whether our youth turn out to be avid readers or not depends on us, teachers and parents. How do parents feel now knowing that their children never have to read a complete chapter book in their entire primary school career? Does it make us feel confident that our children can proceed to secondary school and be ready to take on the reading tasks there? Or do we think that reading chapter books is something children should do at home and that school should just concentrate on teaching academic subjects? What do you think?

All Children Can Learn

                                                              Miss Seah Jiak Choo

It’s the end of March and for me, the end of a hectic but interesting month. The month began with the Singapore ASCD AGM and our guest speaker this time was none other than our former Director General of Education, Miss Seah Jiak Choo. I have heard her speak on one or two former occasions and each time I have been struck by her honesty, her no-nonsense approach and her genuine love for what she does. Again, she did not disappoint us this time.

My greatest take away from her talk entitled Teacher Leadership has been the fact that all teachers are leaders by virtue of the fact that they all have followers who are growing and contributing to the greater good- yes, their students. I wonder if teachers know this. She went on to say that some teachers are more successful than others as leaders and this is because some have no opportunities to develop their leadership skills.

Another significant gem from her that is related to what I wrote about in my last post is the fact that all teachers must be obsessed with the belief that all children can learn. I thought that this is such an important idea for all teachers to embrace because it is the premise upon which we function as teachers. If we no longer believe in the fact that all our children can learn, we will be no longer effective as teachers and we should then leave the profession.

This message was reinforced for me a week later when I attended the ASCD conference in Philadelphia.  Yvette Jackson spoke about a pedagogy of confidence where educators start teaching from students’ strengths instead of focusing on their weakness.  Yvette described a weakness as an undeveloped skill.  It’s not that students don’t know but it’s that they don’t know... YET! But they will get it eventually.

The secret to teaching these children is to change the input; find another way of teaching them, change the script so that they are not constantly exposed to the same script and the same input. Think of how often we insist on giving weaker children watered down materials and easy tasks. Our intention is always good and that is not to frustrate them.  But the opposite also happens.  Too many dumb down tasks will result in no learning and a loss of motivation. Remember the rich do become richer and the poor can become poorer.  Weak students need more rich input.

I compared this to fertilising plants when discussing this topic with my teachers recently. We need to spread a lot of good fertiliser around in our garden to encourage the plants to grow.  It’s true that sometimes the plants cannot take this. I know this from firsthand experience. Some plants will even die from too much richness, but most will show some growth but there will be some that will blossom and grow even faster and stronger. Teaching must be like spreading fertiliser. If the input is not rich, none of the students will benefit. If it’s very rich, some may be lost but there will be many others who will benefit.

Yvette offered seven principles for a pedagogy of confidence, and in a nutshell they are:

1. Identifying and activating strengths
2. Building relationships
3. Nurturing high intellectual performances
4. Providing enrichment
5. Incorporating prerequisites ( as in providing supporting help and materials)
6. Situating learning in the lives of students
7. Amplifying student voice

Finally, an interesting activity we did together was to develop a bubble map (semantic web) of the strengths of underachieving students. In fact, this activity is best done with students themselves. I bet they never thought deeply about the strengths they have. Once they have identified their strengths, think of how you can build upon each of these individual strengths. Begin your planning with that strength in mind and see if you can give your lesson a new twist.  Yvette’s example was that students do not understand World War 2 but they all understand conflict. Begin with conflict.

Ultimately, as teachers we need to flip the script and reframe the issues. It’s only when we are equipped with a new and more positive perspective of our underachievers that we can begin to help them to learn.  Our pedagogy can then be one of confidence.