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Moi

Teach. Sing. Write. Fly. Dive. Rave.

I'm not the girl your mom warned you about, her imagination was never this good.

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2/2/18, 11:41 PM
2 February

I teach Literature and EL. My teaching philosophy is very NIE MOE centric. I want to help students think for themselves. I believe that is the one skill I want to equip my students with. The gift of thought.

I have been putting this off for awhile now. Writing.
It’s been tough. But I didn’t want my memoirs to be filled with complaints. I wanted my mind to be in a better place. And I think I am now.

Just a recap, I placed myself in a spiral of choices and I felt stuck in a place where rules held me back and I trapped myself in self doubt and trusted the insults from my students too much for my own good. It was terrible victimizing myself. But these records are not one to frame the Singapore’s education system, rather, it is one that is truthful and honest, one that exposes a little Dream in a teacher who lived wanting to influence her students to thinkfor themselves. A teacher who’s dream started as a camouflaged excuse to sign a bond 4.5 years ago so her family wouldn’t have to face the financial burden of supporting her university education. A teacher that put her empathy to the test and experienced life like one of the lowest form in a position of “authority”, where it’s not about money, but rather, being treated with complete disrespect by the very people she set out to believe in and see the potential in. They said you needed patience to be a teacher, but the truth is that you need patience to be insulted and yet still choose to do good. So this is my story, cut and served to you in the most honest form that I can translate in. My memoirs of a teacher.

A huge disclaimer, these experiences are honest but one of a kind and I’m sure it doesn’t encompass the experience of every teacher out there. This is just me ranting, reflecting, and growing.

Let’s begin by describing just the first hour of an every day life at where I teach.
I wake up and begin at full gear by 720a.m where I face my form class of 40 kids. I have seen this class for more than a year now since I’ve followed them up from Secondary 1. I spend the first 40 minutes of the day as a broken recorder, “tuck in your shirt”, “why is your socks printed?”, “you have detention, remember to go for your smokalizer test as well..” and till date, I dread this part the most. Because they would throw tantrums, yell, refuse to comply, be defiant, and all you can do is hope they would fight and get into trouble. Because you have to be the one protecting every one. Because you are vital to keeping them safe even when they blame you and spit nasty insults at you, you stay calm, put on a customer service smile and speak calmly. You take their punches kindly and return them with a hug of comfort. It is hard because I’m basically converted to a creature I don’t even recognize especially when I can’t use my usual defense mechanism, to run away. But it is through these minutes that I put my character to the test.

I will stop here now. I am on MC today, and my phone rang multiple times informing me that my form class had a couple of cases. A student punching the window till his hands bled, a bit hitting another boy, another boy throwing another boy’s bag and a couple of bleeding victims. It is truly a bloody Friday let’s just leave it as that.

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