Nerine's Reflection 4

Sometime last week, I stepped into the pantry and saw both my Lit CTs there. CT1 asked if I read the newspaper articles regarding the Literature debate. I replied that I had and he asked me what I was going to do about the state of Lit in Queensway. Knowing that we have not had an upper secondary Lit class in a long time, I articulated my passion for the subject and expressed hope in trying to set up one. I mentioned that I want to “encourage my students to love Lit and take it at the upper secondary level”. CT1 then laughed mockingly and told CT2 “Did you hear that? She wants to encourage my students to love Lit and take it at the upper secondary level.” Both of them then laughed and lament on the difficulty in teaching Lit at the upper secondary level because “it is a lot of work”. My heart sank when I heard that because I feel that as educators, our job is indeed to encourage students to love Lit and help them see the beauty of the subject. It is also very sad to see my secondary two students complaining about boring teachers and their hatred for Lit because when I taught them for 5 weeks last year, they really seemed like they enjoyed Lit lessons. Some of them even expressed their interest in taking Lit at the upper secondary level. What have 7 months done to them? To put it bluntly, English Literature is dead in Queensway Secondary School.

We have only lower secondary Lit classes because the school “doesn’t have enough resources (teachers)” to teach Lit at the upper secondary level. There are only 3 Lit teachers: 1 adjunct, 1 retiring at the end of this year and 1 who focuses largely on PE. TEXTS - Sec1s: 9 Classroom Plays by Stella Kon, Sec 2 Express: Animal Farm by George Orwell, Sec 2 NA: Singapore Short Stories. My timetable has only 4 hours of Lit each week but 6 hours of EL even though my AS1 is Lit L I teach Sec2 Express. Currently, the teacher is doing a chapter-by-chapter analysis for Animal Farm and students seem extremely bored to death. When I take over the classes after the March holidays, I really hope to introduce more fun activities to help students learn characterisation and themes of the book. It is sometimes difficult to help students progress because I can only see them 1 hour each week. Their language proficiency is also relatively low and many of them don’t even read the book. Their tests and examinations include short answer questions to the books and unseen poetry. These questions are usually very straightforward but some students somehow still obtain just 5/30 marks. There is a PGDE girl who is teaching Lit as well and we share the same goal: setting up an upper secondary Lit class, but we realise how difficult it is without support and experience.

It is very disheartening to read some of the ST articles about the plight of Lit in Singapore. Many would blame it on the MOE syllabus which introduced ‘combined Humanities’ as an O Level examinable subject. The number of students taking Lit at the O Levels have dropped from 16,000+ to just 3,000+ in the past few years. I feel that it is really up to us Lit educators to bring the number back up again. We have to start from the secondary one level and spur our students on, helping them to gain an interest in the subject. We should also equip them with the tools of learning Lit in a fun way. There is no such thing as bad publicity right? I’m glad that many articles regarding Lit are springing up and people can now consider the subject more seriously.