Carmen's Reflection 5

Reflect on your teaching practicum so far: What have you learned from your experience during TP? What kinds of challenges do you foresee as you develop as a Literature teacher in your specific school context?

Teaching in St Andrews Secondary School (SASS) has been a challenge so far. The students vary greatly in terms of attitudes. The Express classes are generally well-behaved though a little chatty. They are the easier bunch to manage as just a little scolding and reasoning with them will work in getting them to cooperate in class. The normal technical classes are a little more difficult to manage. They are very weak in their studies and according to the teachers, they have very low self-esteem. They tend to carry the mindset of being too stupid for junior college or local polytechnics. Hence, a lot of encouragement is needed when teaching them so that they do not lose hope and give up on their studies.

The normal academics students are the great challenge of the whole lot. Normal academic students are what the teachers refer to ask “neither here nor there”. According to the teachers, the students are not very smart but definitely not dumb. In other words, they are just slow learners and many of them have learning needs. When teaching them, you need a lot of patience and you need to be prepared to teach the same thing over and over again to them. Teaching a normal academics class, I realized that they are very poor at retaining information, especially if it has something to do with their academics. Many times, I find myself repeating the same things over and over again. Also, since normal academics students are very poor at self-discipline, I found that conducting group works with them is impossible. When we let them work in groups, the boys find it very hard to restrain themselves and will choose to talk instead of doing the assigned task.

Since SASS is made up of majority normal academic students, I foresee a lot of challenges teaching Literature there. Firstly, group works are a big no-no for most classes. Role-playing is another big no-no for normal academic classes as they tend to get out of hand and act out of the context of the lesson. Hence, most of the lessons have to be quite teacher-centered.

Secondly, most of the boys, including the express students, are not very confident in their essay writing skills. They tend to ask the teacher for help. Even when the teacher goes through with them the answers, the students are unable to string them together into a proper essay. I found many of the Literature teachers resorting to writing up model essays for them to copy. The teacher has to scaffold to the extent of tying up the answers for the students to copy and use it as reference for similar questions.

Also, the students are overly reliant on videos. Rather than reading the text, I found that the teacher has to keep showing them clips on the movie of the text so that the students know what is happening in a particular chapter. Even though the videos are not good representations of the text, the teacher have no choice but to let them learn through the watching of the videos because the student will not read their books at all (the normal academics students). I found that this was so during the many periods of lessons that I had to help relief for the normal academics classes. When asked why the students refuse to read the text, most of them replied that they had no choice and had to take up Literature to meet the minimum subject requirement.

All in all, I feel that teaching Literature in SASS will be quite a challenge. I find that the teachers have made a lot of effort in making the lessons interesting (even providing extrinsic motivation like giving treats). However, most of the students are uncooperative during the lessons. As a result, the students are unable to learn much from the lessons and a lot of precious teaching time is wasted in maintaining discipline in class.