The Ron Clark Story.

The Ron Clark Story follows the inspiring tale of an energetic, creative and idealistic young teacher who leaves his small North Carolina hometown to teach in a New York City public school.
As a future teacher of English, this movie has inspired and enlightened me in so many ways.It teaches me that to be a dedicated teacher is never simple. In the movie, Ron Clark teaches one of the worst schools in Harlem. A school where violence and racism is an everyday issue. Being a dedicated teacher, he chose to teach the worst class, believing that he could guide those students to excellence. This shows the burning passion that Ron Clark has for teaching. This passion should be shared by all teachers. By doing so, teaching will be both a fun and a very rewarding career.
This movie also taught me to believe in my students capability to learn and change. Ron Clark never lost faith in his students despite being discouraged by all parties. This result in him accomplishing what he set out to do in the first place, which is to change a batch of academically poor students for the better.
Overall, this is a very inspiring movie. This movie has taught me so so much about the teaching profession. Besides that, it has also become one of my favourite movies of all time.

Arranged marriage?? No, thank you.

This topic was brought up during class and we were told to give our opinion regarding this notion.
Personally, I am not a fan of arranged marriage due to a few reasons. First and foremost, I believe it is necessary for one to be responsible to find his or her own significant other. This will result in appreciation of one towards another. I doubt that an arranged marriage will provide the colours of a relationship process. The process of one getting into a relationship is a beautiful journey, especially when one puts in much effort to court their significant other. This will lead to a higher level of appreciation that one can have for his or her couple. Besides that, I find arranged marriage a little too easy for my taste. Our parents have been taking care of our stuff ever since we were born. I believe that we should not burden them with the responsibility of choosing their daughters/sons in law. I also believe when one gets married without any effort of their own, he or she would not be able to appreciate one another.
Although I am against arranged marriage, one cannot discount the fact that our grandparents, whom majority of them went through arranged marriage, lived a happy marriage. It all boils down to understanding, caring, loving and respecting one another.
As a conclusion, I would like to note that marriage is not something to be taken lightly. No matter the type of marriage one chooses, as long as one understand the essence of marriage, they could and should live happily ever after.

My opinion on Drow Games.

Lately, My lecturer Dr. Jayakaran Mukunden introduced to us a new method in teaching vocabulary. It is called Drow Games. It is an online game where friends could challenge one another. The best part of the drow game is the top ten players will receive a price. ( 1 IPod Touch for the top player and 1 IPod Nano for each of the subsequent top 10)
In my humble opinion, this method of incorporating video/computer games into learning will definitely result in making the learning process a whole lot more fun. It is a fact that we no longer live in an era of traditional teaching and learning method. Therefore, as teachers, we need to adept to the current trend of learning. Since teenagers nowadays are very interested in gaming, using the drow game software can make learning much more fun.
One should really develop such teaching methods so that learning would be much more fun. Once the software is being developed to include more aspects of English such as grammar and sentence structuring, teaching English will be a much much fun subject to teach and learn. By rewarding students who perform well in such games further motivates learning as well. Perhaps in the near future, the government will seriously consider including gaming into the English language syllabus.

MONA LISA SMILE

For my first blog entry, I shall write a review on a movie I have watched recently. The title of the movie is Mona Lisa smile. It is a 2003 American film that was produced by Revolution Studios and Columbia Pictures in association with Red Om Films Productions, directed by Mike Newell, written by Lawrence Konner and Mark Rosenthal, and starring Julia Roberts, Kirsten Dunst, Maggie Gyllenhaal, and Julia Stiles. The story is revolves around the teaching life of Katherine Ann Watson. This movie has enlightened my understanding on the teaching profession in a few ways.
First and foremost, it teaches me to never underestimate my students. The students showed in this film are very hardworking. So much that Ms Katherine is unable to teach them due to the students having read and understand the entire textbook. Therefore, it is advisable for a teacher to come up with a backup plan in case such a scenario occurs.
Secondly, it is very hard to be a good teacher and a good family person at the same time. This is due to a teacher’s dedication towards his or her work. More often than not, a good teacher would spend much less time with their family thus leading to various problems.
Finally, it is important to understand your students. It is a job of a good teacher to understand their student’s potential in order to guide them on the right path. A good example of such quality is the scene where Ms Katherine’s advice both Elizabeth "Betty" Warren and Joan Brandwyn to make the right choice.
To me, this is a very god movie. I am sure my course mates and I have learned a lot of aspects regarding teaching from watching this movie.

Doubts after simulated teaching on applying them in real life situation.

There is an unanswered question that I asked myself after my recent simulated teaching. Can the simulated teaching that I’ve went through recently be used in real life situation? This question aroused due to my realization of my course mate’s proficiency level. There is no question in my mind that my future students will not share the same language proficiency as them. Therefore, will they be able to absorb the type of activity that I have prepared. Teaching the “Smart classes” would not pose much of a problem. However students in the weaker classes are my main concern. Would they be able to understand the level of language of the text itself, let alone the questions that they need to answer from my activities. Literature components are never easy. From my own experience, I too have suffered difficulties during my school days. I guess that this simulated teaching of mine has somehow made me understand the difficulties of becoming a teacher and the commitments that comes with it. However, it has not dented my interest and determination to become a teacher. I need input from other though to solve this problem of mine. During this upcoming semester break, I shall pay my teachers (I will never call them ex teachers) a visit and ask for their input. I am confident their vast experience in teaching can help me.

My strengths in simulated teaching.

It is important to know one’s own strength in order to fully utilize it to become better teachers. One of my strengths is self confidence. I don’t have jitters or doubts when I do my simulated teaching. This is because I know what I am about to teach and how to make it flow fluently. Besides that, I can really project my voice. My voice is loud and clear enough for my students. In my opinion, it is important for the students to hear and understand the teacher in order to learn whatever that is going to be taught by the teacher. I have no worries on how to maintain the volume of my voice, however I am more worried on how to retain my confidence in teaching. In order to do that, I have to do more reading and of course, learn to be more creative. Second, simulated teaching is done in front of my course mates. Therefore it is easy in terms of not going into panic as we are already familiar with each other. It will be a different story when I face forty students who are new to me in my not so distant future. So, I guess the only way is to retain the self confidence is to really know my stuff by reading more. And that’s exactly what I’ll do.

My version of simulated teaching VS How I was taught at school.

First and foremost, this post is not to downgrade or criticize my learning experience when I was in school. I appreciate every single knowledge and effort my teachers gave me. I’m where I am today because of them. Just want to make some comparison here. The difference of what I’ve learnt in University, in terms of how a teacher should teach and what I’ve experienced from class during my school days is entirely different. My simulated teaching consist of 4 steps. Set induction, which is to stimulate the students brains and let them know about what we are to study for the day. Second is the pre-reading stage which initiated the day’s study process by reading the text and asks students to highlight significant words and lines. Third is the while reading stage which explains the need of the previous activity. Most of time, it is for students to know why are the phrases highlighted and for what reason. By this stage, students should already understand whatever that is taught for that session. The final stage is the post reading stage. This stage requires students to write out an essay or complete activities to ensure they understand what is taught. During my school days, the teaching of literature components is different. The teacher will spoon feed the students with all the information. The target is for students to be able to answer examination question by merely memorizing and not understanding it. The reason is because there is really insufficient time to teach and ensure the comprehension of students for literary components as literary components aren’t the only syllabus that the teacher needs to complete. Second, the level of English proficiency of the class isn’t high enough. There are only a handful of students that could cope with literature. Therefore, it is difficult to apply the version of set induction I’ve learnt ( and what my teachers have learnt) in classes. Therefore, it leads to the question if the simulated teaching that we all learn as future teachers in University could be applied 100% when we are teachers one day. Time will tell.