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..