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.