Day 7: The End

It's the last session. My mentee was absent again. Joy and I were appointed by our tutor to help out during the session as there will be no tutor from Cambridge. We were quite surprised that out of so many peers, we were selected. Being optimistic, we take that as a recognition.

We played a video during the session. Caine's arcade. A very interesting and inspiring video. It showcase a boy's creativity and innovation in pursuing his dream. Looking back at our country's children. Many's creativeness and ideas are killed by the endless homework, tuition and examinations. The original objective of education has been twisted. Now, the main aim of children attending school is to score as many As as possible. When children proposed their ideas to adults, they get no help in realizing their ideas. Instead, they were laughed at their wild ideas and being ignored. Adults have forgotten that they were once children. They have forgotten their dreams. They followed the society to disregard children's ideas. It's sad to see.

After the video, the students were given card boxes and newspapers to build something with the help of mentors. Most of the time, mentors were the one doing and mentees were supervising. Have mentors forgotten their roles? Or mentors were so happily being given a chance to build something?
Whichever it is, mentors should always remember their role. Lead and grow the mentees.

Day 6: Endless doubts

How successful is PACE programme? Do students really benefit from it? How much can students absorb after half a day's class? Will the learning still be effective? From what I heard, students do learned and improved from this programme, but still, my doubts are still there.

This week will be the end of Cambridge's lessons for the students. Shouldn't the lessons be ongoing? Does changing tutor from time to time affects students' learning progress? Shouldn't the tutor be someone who is attached to the students for a long period of time? This way the tutor will understand and know the students strengths and weaknesses in the subject better.

I was exposed to PT3 English paper and it is really challenging to PACE students. English is unlike Mathematics whereby lots of practices on a particular topic will help the students excel in it. English's scope is so wide and ability to understand and comprehend a passage is very important.

As I'm writing this, I am wondering what are the previous effort being put it in English learning back then. I have no idea of how the lessons were planned and what are objectives that TEEF would like to achieve with the students. But through what I've seen in 6 weeks time, there are still some parts that need to be reviewed and improved.

It is definitely a great approach to reach out and help these students to improve. May be in a few years time I could join TEEF and help them out.

Day 5: My RM0.02 Opinion

Entering the fifth week of PACE programme. Every week, students will be given a set of worksheets with different topics and learning aspects.

English itself has a very wide learning scope. From tenses to sentence structure to adjectives to... you named it. I understand that it is hard to brush up a person's proficiency in English in a short span of time.

Seeing the worksheets changes every week, targeting at different aspects every time, I began to think about how does this really helps to polish the students' English proficiency.

Just a little background of me. My mother gives tuition to primary school children since I entered kindergarten. Having a mother being a tuition teacher, I was exposed to various ways of teaching and learning. Having more than 10 years experience in teaching, she has many students who are doing great now. Her secret recipe of teaching are strengthened their base and repeat. Just these two. She would ensure that every children has a strong basic before she exposed the students to their actual academic scope. For example, a primary 4 student who can't even write number 1-10 in words will be taught on this area before moving to number 11-20 and so on. Next, repeat and repeat. Once a while, she will let her primary 5 students some primary 1 worksheets to do. It's surprising that there will still be mistakes. Hence, repeating is really important to freshen a person's memory.

Therefore, I would like to suggest those two methods used by my mother to PACE programme. Strengthened their base and repeat the exercise as frequent as possible.

Day 4: A New Insight

My mentee was absent. I was assigned to another student.

His English is not as good as my mentee. This is the first time I felt that I am really helping in tutoring. Instead of feeding him with answers, I tried to explain worksheet by worksheet to me and slowly guide him to answering them.

However, he seemed to be not interested in the PACE session. Once a while he will wander to the library connected to the classroom with his friends. Ms Rabiah and TEEF representative would have to persuade them to go back to class. My one-day-mentee is somehow the easiest to be persuaded. He will be the first to ask his friends to get back to lessons. I have no clue whether the action of him persuading his friends to get back to study is due to the sense of obeying or willingness to learn. Anyway, among the three of them, I would say he is the best as he isn't as rebellious as a friend of him. I think peer pressure caused him to behave that way.

On the way home, I was wondering how much can we Taylor's students do to affect them in seven weeks time. I was demotivated and then a short feedback from TEEF representatives and the PACE students arrived. I was enlightened with the feedback at the same thing doubting how true is the feedback. Is the feedback biased? Does the feedback really reflects how students feel?

Day 3: Some problems to look into

After 3 weeks of doing the worksheet prepared by the well known English course institution, one problem that I've always faced is unclear instruction. The instruction of the exercises are always not clear and most of the time I don't know what should I do with the exercises. Only the tutor knows what to do. Even my mentee finds it confusing. Why is this happening? Is my English level not up to their standard? I don't think so. Because, I'm not the only who thinks the instructions are unclear. I think this should be looked into.

Moving on to the tutor. From what I know, she has been working with the mentees for years. That's very kind of her. However, I would prefer if she could be more consistent in her teaching. Her instruction changes from time to time. From the handwritten answers on the worksheet she has, I think she did prepared for the class. But I don't understand the inconsistency. For example, one moment, she could be saying that we should not add any other answers out of the text given, Then the next moment she asks us to add in our own answers. Other than this weakness, she is doing good. I see the effort she has put in to make the class not that lengthy and draggy. I really appreciate that a lot.

Our education system has always been the topic of discussion. People always wish for a change in our education system. Change, of course, is a good thing. But, are we ready for it? Are we prepared for it?

Day 2: Team Work

Second week of PACE. Unlike last week, I wasn't that excited anymore. The thought of the boring and draggy English lesson killed my excitement. But one thing I'm looking forward to was the activity planned by my friends.

So, the English lesson wasn't as bad as last week. The tutor tried to speed up and of course, I tried to make my mentee proceed slower by asking him some questions. I managed to get his feedback on the activities Joy and I carried out last week. According to my mentee, he quite enjoyed the activities carried out last week and I'm glad to know that.

The team leading this week was a little uncoordinated. The crowd was quite hard to control and only a person was trying to control the situation and the other members didn't help much. Compared to Joy and I, I think we did better than them. The reason I'm comparing is to reflect on how did we perform and what are the rooms of improvement that I can learned from them.

The first game was about guessing the word through actions. It was a warm up game and it meant to be competitive. However, may be the instruction wasn't clear enough, the competing spirit wasn't there. Anyway, it was fun. One of the boy was so sporting and cooperative and creative. When he was asked to put the word "cute" into action, he surprised me by pointing a finger on his one sided pouched cheek. He managed to put us into laughter. I like his spirit. Last week, during the action game, I told him, instead of alternate between five words, just to say one. He surprised me by alternating between two to three words. Bravo to him! I shall note down to get him something by the end of the programme.

The second game was to build the highest building using newspaper. Fun enough. The first time I played it was using spaghetti. I was told that time that one's characteristic and personality can be seen during the game.  The team leader told me that his aim of the game is to let the boys know that a strong base will bring you far. However, I think he did not manage to let them know his objective. It could be due to time constraint and the out of controlled situation, also time control. Reflect to my team's time management, I think we did not do any better than them. So, I shall improve on my time management.

So, that's basically sums up my second day with the boys. Looking forward to the activities next week!

Day 1: Ice Breaking Session

This is my second community service module. PACE. Seven sessions in total and we have to break up into groups and each group will be leading one session. So, Joy and I paired up. After a short session of brain storming, we managed to come out with 4 activities to be carried out today.

I've divided my thoughts into three sections as below:

First Impression & English Lesson by Cambridge

A wave of nostalgia hit me when I entered the school. The sign board on the wall that reads something like "well done for coming to school". Students in their uniforms or PE shirts. A bunch of boys playing basketball in the court. Ah... High school life. I missed it. Those carefree and energetic moments.

I was told to look for well dressed students to be my mentee, as they are brighter and more cooperative. It turned out to be true. My mentee is quite smart. He is able to complete 85% of the worksheet by himself, of which most of it was fill in the blanks. Comprehension questions however are a little challenging to him.

The tuition session however was quite boring, long and draggy. Students are not allow to proceed further with the following pages of the worksheet. They have to wait for the rest which made us felt boring. My thought on this is that if they are able to move faster, let them do more. I don't see what's wrong with progressing faster when one has the capability of doing so.

Activities

Joy and I came out with 4 activities of which only 3 were carried out as what we'd planned. First activity managed to get all of us warmed up. I can see people enjoyed themselves. Even I enjoyed a lot seeing them playing. However, the second game was a little unsuccessful. A mentee was picked to lead the game but he rejected with the reason he couldn't speak English. The game didn't flow as well as the first too. May be the structure of game needs to be changed a little so that it can flow better without some awkward moments. Joy and I both agreed that the last game was the one almost everyone enjoyed the most, especially the mentees.

It was fun and really tiring.

Other issue
Punctuality has always been a problem to Malaysians. And I quite like Ms. Rabiah's rules in being on-time and no waiting. On the bus, I over-heard a conversation. This person didn't make it to the bus on time and he/she called his/her friend who is already in the bus. The friend told this person that the bus had already left Taylor's. I think this person thought of driving to the school instead. I just couldn't understand why people just couldn't be punctual.

That basically sums up my day and part of my thoughts. It is definitely a whole new experience to me. Even though I was reluctant at first, I'm now looking forward for the activity next week.