July 03, 2008

My pain

There are times when I walk out of my tuition sessions feeling, honestly feeling very guilty and very bad and very discouraged and disillusioned (whoa, that's a lot of negative energy...). Most people who know me well enough think that I'm a good teacher. Most of my students' parents seem to think so too. At the very least, I score high in the departments of Patience and Effort. Most of the time, I think I'm a good teacher too. Maybe not as good as any of those winners of MOE's Teacher of the Year Award.

But, there are times when I feel extremely bad for barking at my students. At the same time, I feel extremely disheartened and disillusioned about the whole education business in Singapore. These are the times that I feel the pain of being torn. Yes, 'torn' is the right word.

Increasingly, I feel disheartened about the education system in my country. The rate of disappointment increases by folds in the last year, since I became a full time tutor.

I find myself having to un-teach students what they have learnt in school - the misconceptions, the rushed and therefore, incomplete understanding of a topic - and re-teach. I find myself cracking my brains together with my students for an unnecessarily long-winded and tricky Maths question. I find myself at a loss of words to explain a needlessly difficult and abstract comprehension passage. I find myself digging hard and deep into my vocabulary bank to find a suitable yet not-too-difficult word to fill in the blanks of a cloze passage. I find myself, sometimes, lost in trying to cope with my students' school work. Of course, I find myself, half of the time, disorganised as I struggle to mark, check, explain, assess, (un)teach between English and Maths (sometimes, Chinese too) in not more than 4 hours a week.

On top of these, I have to manage my student. Manage their excuses for forgetting to do work, their lack of focus, lack of attention, excess of distractions, and the rewards system I gave each and every one of them.

Sometimes, I lose it at work. Like tonight.

I made my student cry. haha... As if it's something I can be proud of. But, honestly? I feel more torn and more pain inside than anger. Not exactly because I feel sorry for making him cry. But because I'm upset that there are matters, other factors at play for his learning that I can't control.

There are plenty more players in the education of a child than just a 4hours/week tuition teacher. I question the capability of the child, the amount of family support, the personality of the child. I question the school teachers, the teaching in school, the system, the expectations of the system. Most of all, I question myself.

I wonder, a few times, every now and then, if I'm slowly becoming the kind of teacher who is only doing what I'm doing because it's the only thing I can do and not because I still believe that I can contribute however little to these kids' learning, their growing up years, their first few steps in understanding this world.

During times like tonight, the fact that I can't answer that question myself scares and depresses me.

Posted by 杏 cy （Jancy） at 22:46