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Emo

So here I am again, on this pouring Sunday afternoon. First thing I had to say about my previous post would be what my students would call that being "Emo". But being "Emo" aside, I would like to add that those D&T teachers I worked with, as cavemen as they were, were really sweet and more than happy to go out of their way to provide me with their materials, advice and chocolates. So yea, as much as I can be a mascot for PMS, I am not a total ungrateful wretch...

We spent the whole Friday doing ICT.. I spent the whole Saturday doing ICT.. and its now Sunday and I am staring at:

• Have you come across any of these pedagogical approaches as a student?
• What is the relationship of these approaches?
• What roles do the various ICT tools/interactive resources play in these approaches?

Being melodramatic, I would say that the rain feels for me. I feel like my students now when they come lamenting to me that they actually hate E-Learning as although they get 3 days off school, they actually have more work and spend more time doing them than they would have had if they had lessons in school. My dears, I feel your pain!

I feel more tempted to broach the topic of work(school)-life balance mentioned by PM Lee Hsien Loong during the National Day Rally rather than the topics I am supposed to discuss but I have been promptly informed that the influences from my western counterparts affecting my freedom of speech and opinion is possibly going to get me into trouble in conservative Singapore. I was already wondering (and being somewhat disturbed) that why is it to deal with things like bullying (refer to E-Learning assignment), its always to report them to authorities/teachers/police. Its no wonder that many of our kids are so extremely socially-shy (I am tempted to say socially-stunted) among their international peers. If they were taught to go running to mommy and daddy each time they got teased, and never learnt to stand up for themselves and learn social skills, its no wonder that there is a lack in self-confidence and the fight for survival to distinguish oneself from the rest, which would describe the majority of us (myself definitely included). Think back to the high school debate show we saw on tv and the discussion then when one of our top schools were trashed beyond hope by an international school. Anyway, when I last spoke to an "angmoh" friend about the phenomena of "Don't friend you!" today and "Friend you!" tomorrow, I deducted that such things were just not within the scope of understanding within their framework of social rules.

Student A once complained to me in the most seriously pestering way that Student B was disturbing student C. So I took Student A to Student C and asked Student C if there was a problem with Student B. Student C said no (as she already solved the problem herself). So I told Student A that for 1, why does the problem affect him if it doesn't affect the victim, and for 2, why is he complaining on behalf of Student C when it had absolutely nothing to do with him? Of course we encourage everyone to blow horns at one another, but I really think there's something to learn in establishing social rules that are still upright and care-taking. We know that we are all pretty good at complaining left right center, but is this attitude of constantly whining to the teacher the reason why we still seek to complain up down left right even when we are no longer kids?

I digress.

My brain feels as brittle as those pumice stone-scrubs for the feet after all I had to think about pedagogical implementations.

Okay. One thing I had to say about pedagogical approaches is that I am glad they are emphasizing more and more on team work and pushing students to stop wanting to be spoon fed. I asked that same angmoh friend about social issues during his childhood (about situations similar to "Don't friend you!") and what he said was that he was too busy playing and being excited about finding out (which sounds pretty much like a whole lot of Inquiry-based Learning) and making things to really have any time to fight/quarrel etc. Its either that these people really have had a great social development since birth or really good pedagogical approach in school I guess.

During my days doing English Literature, I now feel proud of my Lit teachers as they succeeded in making us think both objectively and subjectively through things like (what I now realize probably is) Knowledge building. The problem with Literature is that its essentially a whole lot of talk about nothing and it could be argued forever. So plenty of exercises relied on overly discussing topics in groups and building on top of it in layers as a class and then compiling it as a whole set of notes. Having 38 brains thinking about the same thing and over analyzing it gave us more or less all the different perspectives we needed. We started attracting attention (in amusement) from the public when we unconsciously continued our bombastic banter while taking the public transport which could be somewhat considered of a job hazard but the end result was of course, that all of us scored in our Literature papers.

To give some scope in my blog (I burst out laughing just after I typed that phrase as to treat your blog as an argumentative essay is somewhat abnormal but I guess I am doing this thanks to Pavlov's Conditioning and Reinforcement Theory after life in JC), I shall now discuss Anchored Instruction as the pedagogical approach a math teacher undertook to teach angles to her Primary 5 students while I was teaching there a few months ago. She had this online program that was done in animation that showed this character (which the students are familiar with as she had been using the same program for all her lessons) asking itself questions on how to find answers to problems given to her. This character was a space girl in a really weird outfit and really quite 2-D but I guess the kids liked her (enough to prefer it to regular maths lessons). Anyway, for this topic, the character had to find her way around on a visual map with the character herself and landmarks drawn in relation to one another on the screen. The character was asked how many degrees she had to turn so that she would be facing the landmark that she had to walk towards, as well as the angles of which the other landmarks were to each other. So the students were in the role of that character and the teacher paused the clip after each question to allow students to give answers. Sometimes students would argue about the answers (whether it was clockwise or anti-clockwise), giving them opportunity to discover the flexibility in thinking as well as to solve realistic problem situations.

(At this point, I feel like my brain that has dried up to a raisin that was forgotten in the fridge for a century.)

Anyway, for all these efforts, I still have to commend on dear Bandura's Observational Learning (Social Cognitive Approach). This is because in spite of all these pedagogical approaches, the way I learnt to speak (in non-singlish) is more or less a copycat of one of my (excellent) English teachers. I only realized this when my students started imitating the somewhat dramatic emphasis I have for certain words and topics which was picked up when I was a student myself. (Yes its embarrassing, but hey, at least I know they are paying attention right?!)

On an aside, I have begun to dream of word classes, forms and function of words thanks to my English Content Upgrading classes and am already littering this blog with >.< terminology from Education Psychology classes and insanely giggling to myself. So I will have a break now and do something normal like doing some reading on a dinner food menu instead..

Catharsis

So due to the fact that the technical teachers were from the dinosaur era, during my ESE, I became the only person in that department who actually liked using computers and all the gadgety stuff...

I was tasked to prepare a lesson that was identified as just not working out at all. So I used MS PowerPoint with all the related animation to show how to start drawing and measurements to take note off, and used Photoshop to aid me in things like coloring surfaces to make it clearer for understanding. Plus, I integrated the softwares like Solidworks and Rhinoceros that are pretty commonly used in the industry (since I have a degree in Industrial Design which was where I was forced to learn these things) to show things like hidden lines and perspective views that are pretty difficult for the students to comprehend. And lastly, bothered to go for the workshop for teachers to use the software Lectora to prepare E-Learning material so that for the first time in history, D&T was involved in the E-Learning week (although none of the students did it because they never thought D&T could ever prepare an E-Learning course). Yes I could say that I was feeling rather smug about myself then.

It all sounds fine and dandy. And considering the time and effort, really diligent and hardworking. The drawing presentation I did impressed my subject head so much that he wanted me to take over the other teacher's classes. And I more or less got the shove over by that teacher who was supposed to take that lesson so the presentation I did more or less became research material to disect and analyse to the both of them (I had to surrender the presentation and that's that).

Well, on the bright side, I did manage to handle the whole Image Boards creation topic (which is one hour per class for that week) to the students at least in the end (because everyone being engineers, no one really knew how to do it so once again, things got shoved over to me.. And I really wonder if D&T teachers go back for some content upgrading??? I was the only person who knew that the products seen on the cover of the textbook was actually designed by a famous Italian designer!) And the students came up and told me that for once, D&T was fun and exciting. I think that was simply the highlight of my stint there.

And to end off this frustration which I am just letting out here, I was told in the end of my ESE that I would make an excellent teacher blah blah blah, but there was no hope of returning to that school unless one of them transferred out or the other one retired. So could I please just surrender all my work to them and good luck to the rest of my life byebye. It feels like I was already dragged into some kind of politics that I was just simply blind towards, and didn't and still don't care about.

To end off, the future is here. But if dinosaur men don't wanna join the future... *ROAR*

Tracked down

Weizhen, a dear design classmate, has tracked down my new blog:

8/5/2008, 4:51:02 PM, evancheerio to lynn : u started a blog with lynn@NIE! haha
8/5/2008, 4:51:18 PM, evancheerio to lynn : just happen to chance upon it when i went to see your profile for fun...

...so now I guess I now have to be more.. well.. HelLOW Weizhen!

I still feel abit like an alien who has landed on Planet Education so my fellow aliens from Planet Design (and etc.) kinda like to poke and prod to see what kind of mysterious rituals they hold at Planet Education.

Weizhen, by the way, I am not supposed to be writing about such things but am supposed to be diligently reviewing my work because my professor reads this (see comment in the previous entry). And so here's presenting to you, fellow aliens from Planet Etc, this is "what I learnt this week".

First things first, I finally found out the ICT stands for Info Comm Technology. Call me slow but I was really wondering why nobody bothered to spell it out at all. Like, I get the gist of it and I know what it's supposed to mean.. but I really didn't know what it stood for exactly.

Secondly, there's alot of talk about ICT in Education, according to the recent news. And more and more discussions on how to make classes more engaging, more pupil-oriented and the many concepts on self and experiential-learning. On that note, I do understand the importance of it as I have witnessed the D&T Department returning $10 000 of the $13 000 budget they were given for upgrading, as they were all still satisfied with their blackboards, cramped and stuffy class conditions, and old machines and tools. And a student getting traumatized as she was badly scolded into not being allowed to color her work in a gradient shade via mixing of colors, but that everything had to be in flat color as that was considered so much nicer according to the engineer teaching design.

Last lesson, we were given this wonderful class management framework of engaging students first in group work, allowing for breadth of work before zooming in to individual work so that there is enough material for each person to work with. Things that provide opportunities for Collaboration, Authentic activities/environments, Scaffolding and Evaluation formative/meaningful (CASE). All about exploiting teamwork to push out the best in an individual. And then I think back to the D&T lessons where the teacher just drew an isometric drawing from start to finish really clumsily as he doesn't really know how to operate MS PowerPoint and talking to himself with students talking, sleeping and doing 101 other things (and this is in a girls school that doesn't really have any discipline problems as all students come in with a PSLE score of more than 260). And my brain just gets stuck in the thought of.. Okay, ICT is really cool and I can see this big beautiful picture MOE has for teachers and all these ideas of teacher-student collaborations, teamwork and fun-learning. And then I see this scenario in school. And I just wonder what happened in between? Suddenly everything you hear about the Masterplan II and III, RSS etc. all becomes just a bunch of mambo jumbo..

I think the "death" of a teacher occurs when enthusiasm about life dies, and the need to constantly keep up with the rest of the world in order to stay relevant disappears through being too absorbed in School life, which probably gives one of the reasons why its difficult for teachers to be employed in other sectors after that as well. And which is probably why many of us have interesting stories to tell of teachers who seemed abit less normal perhaps.

I don't know. Looking at how it is so very important to use ICT and all, and looking at the examples given, I think a general vivaciousness and optimism results in a much better application. I say this because I too get irritated on behalf of the students when they have to use some irrelevant software, or do something irrelevant to their learning as ICT had to be used for the sake of using ICT. Especially when the student realised she could teach her teacher how to use the software she was teaching her and even recommend a more relevant software..

In that sense, seeing the 2 extremes, I'm kinda glad we have ICT classes at NIE to at least give us that kick in the butt, removing the wool over our eyes and really gearing us for teaching in the "Modern World of Technology"...

I think I can just summarize my general feelings to just these few points: I know what is expected, and I know what are the steps that need to be taken. Optimism too is a key survival tool. But the question to myself is how to ensure that this fight for life, doesn't die in this hustle bustle on earth?

To be or not to be

Going into teaching was a pretty big thing. To give up design to teach was more or less an incredulous joke to my design peers and my professors started having this funny turn up of the nose when they heard about the fate of one of their so-called... better students.

I guess people choose different paths depending on what their own goals in life are; regardless of social norms. Perhaps I am indeed throwing my future away because its almost like joining the monastery and I can no longer have the glorified high-flying life of a designer, giving up the rat race and the thrills of the corporate lifestyle for the safe civil servant's life.

Well, I have my own plans. And doing this is a step towards what I want and hope to achieve. Its hard for me to explain the big picture now, but according to my capabilities and strengths, I make the most of it this way. Really. Trust me on this.

So there is a purpose why I need to have a blog here:
Its almost something like joining the Alcoholics Annonymous (AA) as I need to reflect on

• what I already KNOW about this week's topic,


• what I WANT to learn,


• what I LEARNED this week and


• what QUESTIONS I still have.
  

On that note, I feel somewhat of a need to use this opportunity to reject previous assumptions on design teachers (or just the teaching profession in Singapore in general):

Well, I LEARNED that there ARE relevant opportunities in design and technology and that what teachers are now equipped with do meet real world standards.

Its rather difficult to have QUESTIONS at this stage as its during the course that the questions get answered. But in general, I feel that I will have the constant question of relevance. How and why is this or that technology or method relevant (eg. too much effort + too little outcome = poor efficiency). How to take something and re-evolve it into your own tool. Such questions are purely rhetorical as its pretty much up to yourself how to figure that out...