Yes, I’ve neglected this blog for far too long… yes, I said I wouldn’t… cmon, half you guys used to complain about my stories in the first place.
Well, I’m back, and I just can’t hold this tidbit back. I want to make one thing clear–I realise how trivial and stupid this sounds, but I don’t care.
First, some context: I’m the “form teacher” (basically a homeroom teacher for you Western Hemisphere-folk, except form teachers here are supposed to keep super-duper on top of pretty much everything going on with their class, inside and outside the classrooms–that means knowing about broken homes, learning disabilities, abusive situations, etc.) So, wanting a challenge and an opportunity to work with kids that have been “sold short,” I requested to work with kids in the “HEY! programme” (“Highly-Exceptional Youth,” as our school calls it). In Singapore, they track kids according to test scores coming out of primary school and my kids are in the normal academic track–at our school, this means they’re labeled as the dumb ones. So, I’ve got a form class full of dyslexic, ADHD, and super energetic kids going a million miles an hour all day long. I’ve tried to ease their transition to secondary school (I’m teaching Sec 1 kids, the equivalent of high school freshman/grade 8 or 9, depending on your CDN school), by making their class a particularly “fun” environment (jokes, references to girls, etc.). That being said, I know you can’t let these kids roam wild, because they’ll go crazy and you won’t get anything done. They have especially come to realise this the past few weeks, when I’ve yelled at them at times about bullying, disrespect (to each other and to their teachers), controlling their energy/talking excessively… I’ve held them after school for a half hour, casting angry glares in their direction at disapproval of their behaviour… Basically, I’ve been a hard-ass a lot of the time recently.
Well, today, I bore the fruits of my labours… First, at Chapel (ACS-Barker Road is a Methodist School, so there is chapel every Friday afternoon). After Chapel, when some announcements were being made, our class was singled out as having an especially clean classroom at the end of the day (they were doing classroom checks at the end of the day as a periodic check-up). Though I was already smiling, the looks of “oh shit, that’s us!” and the fist-pumps coming from the boys pushed the corners of my mouth that much closer to my ears. Alice Wang (the class form teacher–I’m just a lowly co-form teacher right now…) and I talked to them after Chapel and further congratulated them for their small, but significant, accomplishment. Second, this evening, I received an email regarding dental forms the Sec 1 boys were to hand in. Out of the eight Sec 1 classes, ours was the only one to have handed in all our forms. This prompted Alice to send a class-wide email, and not wanting to be outdone, I did the same.
So yes, as I said, these are absolutely stupid, trivial, mostly-inconsequential events in my life. But they do mean a lot to me right now, because they confirm the fact that these kids are growing, that they are improving. There have been many other things going on–in particular, one of the boys playing rugby (the co-curricular activity-CCA-that I’m in charge for, along with Alice) who had been talking excessively, bullying to small degrees and essentially being a little pain-in-the-ass… I had a talk with him outlining in detail what he’d been doing wrong, why it was a problem, how/why he could change it, and why it would benefit him, etc… (side note: this kid should not be in an normal academic class at all–he’s a little genious, but he doesn’t like school so he never applies himself)–but even with all those day-to-day things that get to me and drain my energy and frustrate me, it doesn’t matter. Today is one of those days that you hear about from teachers that make their jobs completely worth it.
And on that note, time to celebrate–I believe a nice, tall ABC stout is in order…
