Disappointed with the school. Putting my student's future in jeopardy

I was both stunned and concerned when my student revealed her mid year exam results to me.

Maths -- 20/100 Highest in class -- 40/100
English -- 16.5/100 Highest in class -- 34/100

The first reaction I had was to stare at the results gaping in disbelief. An EM3 student wouldnt even be getting such a result, not to even mention for an EM2 student! Then wouldnt I have done nothing in helping her to improve after 3 months of guidance and advice? Am I such a lousy tutor? No doubt disappointment with myself set in and I doubted my teaching directive time and again after knowing her results. But over the past 3 months, I truly felt that I had learnt and adopted a few new teaching techniques in which school teachers have even heaped praises on. So what truly went wrong?

I went through her papers and realised that the difficulty level of the papers is on tantamount to those of top schools: Nan Hua, ACS Primary, Nanyang. The first thing that struck my mind was that the school is trying to mimic the standards of the top schools without considering the actual standard of the students. I came across an even more absurd incident in the Eng papers. The section which usually uses a short passage as an excerpt for comprehension cloze turned out to be a poem by William Wordsworth. I could only comprehend the poem after 4 or 5 times of thorough reading and evaluating. Words like "daffodil", "glee", "gay", "vales" and "solitude" are surely not words of their level. Given their present level of cognitive ability, inferencing from a poem of such high standard is beyond them surely. No wonder no one in her class passed Eng or Maths.

Another alarming issue I found out was that her class teacher, who is in charge of the class's Eng, Maths & Science, have been frequently absent from school either due to leave or she being deployed out of school for other matters. Few or no replacement teachers were hired in place of her absence, & on those days not only did the class missed out on learning, they also missed out on practising. I really could not take it lying because Im a person who expects others to demand something from me which in the first place I had to be provided with the resources to perform. In her case, neither was she provided with the resources nor was she given the right platform to demontrate her true potential, not hidden potential by doing difficult papers.

I had written an email to the school's principal touching on these issues I have lamented so far in this blog. Im really concerned whether what the school had been doing so far is beneficial to the students afterall. Somehow on the other hand, I feel powerless to effect any change directly in the school, except to improve and gear up my guidance for my student personally.

"Reap what you sow"

The Birth of A Small Idea

My student made my day today.

I am currently teaching 2 Pri 6 students for tuition and after teaching them for a month or so, I realised they have a common problem in recognising present and past tense; singular & plural verb. It caught my attention that I needed to devise a method to allow them to understand the concept easier, even without my assistance. So I invented (I had not seen anything close b4) a window that organises what verb to use for a singular present tense or a plural past tense etc. I thought it was rather effective when I explained to them how the window works & they could grasp the gist of it rather quickly. I thought that was it.

Today my female student told me of what happened in her class yesterday. I was elated to know about it & that gave me a great boost to teaching. As I had reminded her to revise on the assessment book which I had gone through with her, she had heeded my advice & brought it to school yesterday. That was also the book which I had drawn the learning window on. As she was reading it in class, her teacher walked past her table & chanced upon the window. She picked it up & asked my student who did it for her. She explained the principle of the window & her teacher said: "You have a good tuition teacher. Can I borrow this to photostat for the whole class?"

"Wow! That's great!" I shouted in my heart. A teacher recognised my efforts! Not only did she borrow the window, she even photostated the maths assessment book & the PSLE Model Composition book for the class. Actualie I am happy not because Im capable or what, it is that the initial thought of wanting to help my students overcome their weakness actualie turned out as a blessing for her whole class. Who knows one day the teacher might adopt the window for her future lessons, then even more students will benefit.

An idea started small may eventually blossom into a tool important for others to learn from. That's what Im hoping for. I will continue to think of creative ways to help my students overcome their learning weaknesses, turning them eventually into strengths.

With perserverance, anything can be possible.