Well, what an interesting 3 days it has been at YCK. For a start, it was a lot more relaxed than I'm used to - I only have to teach 3 periods on day 1, 1 on day 2, and none on day 3. Although this excludes 3 periods of relief on day 2, and 4 on day 3. Still that makes about 4 period each day, which is only 50% of a school day. Not bad lah.

What else has been interesting? 2 boys in my class almost got into a fight yesterday - I had to step in to stop it. And I asked the two boys to sit separately during the lesson, and I spoke to them after the class. And to my surprise, (both) the parents of one of the boys came to school today and asked to see me! (wah, day 3 already kena the parents) But well, the parents just wanted to find out if their son was being "bullied" in school, and since I "detained" their son for a while after class yesterday, they'd asked to see me and find out more. Of course, given that I've only been in the school for 3 days, I'm not exactly the person with a wealth of knowledge on the students, so I could only tell the parents what I knew/saw (which wasn't much to be honest), but they seemed fairly satisfied with my replies anyway.

(of course, the above meeting-with-parents also caught the attention of the VP [vice-principal], and the office staff was asked why I (as a relief teacher) was handling it alone. [although my "teacher mentor", whom, i later found out, was the form teacher of afore-mentioned student's class did actually come into the office at the time of the meeting-with-parents, although she left me to handle it after i explained to her what it was about] and the office staff was also quite curious why a relief teacher had parents looking for him during his stint. my life is sooo exciting)

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some other stuff I've noticed about the school (system):

1. There is now the position of a full-time school counsellor (FTSC), whose job is to sort out the misbehaving students, who get sent to the RTC (it's an acronym for something centre, but I find it more amusing to remember it as a place for Really Talkative Children)

2. Classrooms are locked when not in use - teachers hold a key to their "home room", and it's locked when there isn't a class. So for my relief lessons, I had to draw a key to enter the classrooms. Well, security for the projector and PC in the classroom I guess, although I first observed this during my school placement @ the Netherhall (UK) school. It'd seem to be the norm nowadays with all the ICT equipment.

3. The number of MP3 players, handphones, PSPs in a class will require some arithmetic genius to work out.
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And I've gotten my laptop back! Hurray - the Powerbook is alive once more. :)

Labels: Singapore, Teaching