Passion

When you have passion for something, no matter how arduous that something can be, you will still feel excited and eager to overcome the challenges that comes with it. One thing that I am passionate about is teaching, I wrote a not very good experience last year. This year I have more things on my plate and I am not involved in the preparation for staff's exam. Ironically, despite the not very pleasant experience last year, I am very heartened when some tell me that I am a good teacher and it is unfortunate that I am not involved in this year's training, Of course I have to give face to my colleagues who will be doing the training this year and give politically correct answer. It is kinda premature to say that they are lousy when they have not even conducted any session! But anyways, I feel kinda sad that I don't get to teach this time.

Apparently, in the end, I was lazy to write down about my first precepting experience last year. It is time to write it down right now as I am doing another round of precepting. I don't know if I am just unlucky to get "problematic" students or now NUS admission standard has dropped. The general trend that I notice is that the students are lacking EQ and/or people skills.

My student last year was a mugger type but apparently he was not able to mug on the correct things. He had difficulties mixing in with the rest as he was a guy (I can tell you that it takes skills for a guy to survive in a majority female environment) and he was more of the reserved type. People found him weird and anti-social which I disagreed as it was just a matter of different personality. I just told him that like it or not, at least he had to try to work as a team. My favourite piece of advice is: I don't care whether you are friends or enemies as long as when it comes to work, you work as a team and get things done. I gave the feedback on the pretense of mid-point review. Since he is the mugger type and hence more grade-oriented, after the feedback, he told me that from the following week onwards, he would come early, leave late, and skip lunch. Oooh laa laa... That made everyone find him weirder.

I also had a bit of friction with my colleague who found that I was spending too much time with the student. That really made me super duper upset and angry. Just because we have different teaching style, she has no right to say that. For me, I will go through things first, prepare the students thoroughly before letting the students hands-on. Her style is more letting students try hands-on first and then going through things as and when necessary. No style is right or wrong. Bleah.. not to mention that at that time she had no student to precept yet so I guess she said that because with me spending time with my student, she had to clear crowd and had no time to do her own work.

I thought I had someone "bad" enough last year and honestly I could not imagine there could be students more troublesome that that. I was wrong. My current student proves more "problematic". The lack of EQ and/or people skills are more or less the same. However, the current student has worse discipline issues. She was late for the whole first week despite daily reminders, she kept disappearing to the toilet, returned to "work-mode" late after lunch, etc. Bleah..

Honestly, I am very lenient as a preceptor. I used to be students "forced" to do attachment during school break too and I know very well how it feels. I can tolerate normal naughty things that students do but when you PLAY GAMES with handphone at work, that was the last straw for me. It was so busy this afternoon that I decided to give a pep talk tomorrow instead. Guess what, she left work at 528pm today before her knock-off time 530pm! Yes it was only bloody 2 MINUTES but it is a matter of discipline and tomorrow she will see my scary side. Let's see how it goes tomorrow..

Despite all the negativity, I am quite glad that at least her preparation for presentation slide was pretty well done. In fact it was like 90% done. Last year's student of mine had to re-do his slides 3-4 times because he was so blur on the organisation of the slides and his multiple spelling errors. Wew...

At the end of the day, I have to admit that I am still a newbie and am still learning to become a good teacher.