2007 ~ 2012 |
A NEW CAMPUS AND THE BIRTH OF SASS
On other days, it’s Dr Yeoh Seng Guan or the late
Benjamin McKay—rest his soul—from whom I draw
educator inspiration from, learning how to be both a
friend and an educator to my students, which actually
works (with varying degrees of success) with students
like mine, who tend towards the bottom half of the
learning ability pyramid. Rather than a challenge
to their minds, many of these students require an
understanding of their hearts—and the only way to get
that is by giving them the three things many of them
lack at home: care, attention and a friendly, listening ear.
“Have you always wanted to be a teacher?”
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You have no idea how often I was asked this at my
first school in Singapore—while I was getting my post-
grad diploma in education—and the first two years of
my teaching career. It’s like, the obligatory ice-breaker
whenever we are going through freshman orientation
or even when we were being interviewed for a position
in a different school.
“Um … I kind of fell into it by accident.”
I’ve always seemed to surprise people with my answer—
but then again, it’s hard not to when you’re surrounded
by people who reply with textbook answers like:
“Of course!”
“It’s always been my dream!”
“I was inspired by my own teachers to spread the
knowledge!”
I can’t lie; I have never wanted to become a teacher.
Despite my so-called teaching pedigree—my mother
taught for over forty years in government schools, my
father worked for the Ministry of Education and my
older sister is an associate professor of her British
alma mater—teaching was about the last career I ever
considered. Not surprising, when I grew up watching
my mother working into the night marking papers
and listening to my father grumble about the state of
education in our country.
And the stories, my god, the stories! They should’ve
been enough to terrify me away from this profession
for life!
But, in retrospect, I guess I should’ve seen it coming.
Not that it started when I myself was a secondary
school student. People who knew me from my angst-
ridden adolescence burst out laughing when I told
them I was going to be a teacher. My best friend, for
instance, could not stop cackling and kept telling me it
was karma coming round to kick me in the backside.
Adding insult to injury, she could only pray that I
would never get a student who was like me back in
secondary school—or, god forbid, a whole class of
students like me.
“You don’t realise it, but you are a good teacher. You
have this uncanny ability to take complex, complicated
concepts and simplify them to make them easier to
understand.”
These were the words a good friend of mine told me,
when I first broached the subject of making education
my full-time career. She brought it up because I was
having serious doubts about my ability to teach. I
didn’t believe her back then—I’m terrible at accepting
compliments—but after six and a half years here, there
might be some truth to what she had to say. Because
when you work with students like mine, students
who’ve practically given up on improving themselves
because their social and economic backgrounds have
conditioned them to believe that nothing will ever
make a difference, a piece of pretty paper that claims
you have a bachelor’s degree from a prestigious
university is not what’s going to impress them.
But you know what does impress them? How the
university taught you to utilise the brains God gave
you to be creative and innovative, and find ways to
turn these students’ stubborn mindsets around that
they can change their fates.
If I had gone to any other university, I would have left
ages ago. I might not have even survived those four
months of contract teaching; I’d have given up and
moved back home, back to comfort and security
and solid knowledge of the familiar. But had I not
gone through those four years at Monash (Honours,
not exactly a walk in the park but god bless Ben for
getting me through it! I still miss him, so much, a