Shih Wen's Reflection 5

b)

Practicum has taught me the practical skills for teaching Literature. The school offers only lower secondary Literature, and I was assigned to teach Secondary 1 (Academic) students. For my stint in the school, I am required to teach 7 compulsory poems namely

·         “One Art” by Elizabeth Bishop

·         “Funeral Blues” by WH Auden

·         “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” by Robert Frost

·         “The Daffodils” by William Wordsworth

·         “The Tiger” by William Blake

·         “Neighbours” by Alfian Sa’at

·         “Evening Song” by Leong Liew Geok

Students do not have mid-year examination for Literature and they are assessed based on two Literature Quizzes and one Literature Project (all in term 2). It sounded promising at first…

6 weeks into practicum (5 weeks of actual teaching), I have taught the 1A students similes, metaphors, personification, “The Daffodils”, “One Art” and have given them a quiz on an unseen poem (“Funeral Blues”) which tests them for their understanding of the literary devices taught. I have 3 periods with them a week, each 30 minutes. They have also missed two periods in week 2 due to a leadership camp. With so little time and so many areas to be covered, I cannot help but to wonder if students really enjoy Literature in the midst of all this hectic business, being bent over backwards with homework, quizzes, project etc. What I have yet to cover (and must be covered by week 8 of my practicum), are 4 poems, a quiz, and a project presentation. My Co-operating Teacher gave us full autonomy in coming up with the Literature Project. As such, a fellow trainee and I designed a Project for students where they would have to imagine themselves as Literature teachers applying for a position at a school. Then there was a painful, unison outcry of “eeeeewwwww...” and “noooooo…”. I was perplexed. Why the outright negative response? It did not take me long to realise what the school, or I for that matter, killed the joy of learning Literature in the first place. It was clear. The students hate Literature, and they cringe at the thought of becoming a Literature teacher. How do we expect students to appreciate poetry when they are drilled non-stop with technicalities under the pressure of a tight curriculum? The irony of it all is that while examinations are taken out of the assessment process, students are piled with more “summative assessments” which seems rather like “mini formative assessments”.

It is not hard to foresee what challenges lie ahead as I develop as a Literature teacher in my school. Without support from the school in terms of a better Literature curriculum and programme, teachers become robots fulfilling one task after another in a systematic manner, stunting professional development. There is no room for AFL (Assessment For Learning) or SDL (Self-Directed Learning) to take place since both require time, a luxury which Literature teachers in this school do not have. Last week, I raised the issue of not being able to complete the compulsory poems which should be taught to the 1A students by term 2 week 6 and requested to drop two of them so that I could concentrate on the remaining two. I was turned down by my mentor as she proclaimed that MOE requires students to complete all 7 of the poems. That raises the issue of the jarring gap between policy makers and schools. While I am not particularly aware what is exactly required of the students (i.e. whether they have to complete 7 poems by second half of term 2) from the ministry, I am very sure somewhere that along the way, information has been miscommunicated. As educators, we talk about differentiated learning all the time. While it is evident in the choice of different streams available to students today (i.e. normal, express, special etc), it is non-existent across students in the same stream from different schools. In other words, Normal Academic stream students from one school might have the same academic competency as Express stream students from another school and vice versa. Do we then teach them the same, and cover the same grounds for both groups of students? That brings us back to the state of Literature in my school. In my school, I am always told that “Our Express stream students are equivalent to Normal stream students from other schools.” It is not hard to make the connection of what our Normal Academic students are equivalent to in other schools. In the end, I was asked to cover the rest of the poems in a superficial manner, and that I can take just 2 periods (60 minutes) to cover each poem. I made the calculation. I am still short of 1 hour for the last poem, but what can a trainee/beginning teacher do to but to oblige?

I am not sure what kind of change I can make when I eventually become a beginning teacher. In the case of my current school, I would probably learn to adopt and adapt what is thrust into my arms t make Literature less painful for my students.