NIESNU2019

Today, students ended their curricular activities at 1210hrs instead of the usual 1620. I found out that today was club-day- which is actually like our CCA days. However, while we have it once or even three times a week in Singapore, students in SNU High School have it once a day. Since my teacher was in charge of the Business club, I got to see the activities covered today- which was doing a round at the science fair and my, was I impressed!  The fair took place on the last floor- where the Science labs and classes usually take place. The level has the usual open lounge space in the middle that every level has but what's unque is its high ceiling. The high ceiling has a floor to ceiling window which allows sunlight to permeate through the glass window and give vibrant natural lighting throughout the level. The walls of the level are also decorated with the students' works such as posters, mindmaps on mahjong papers, canvas on easels with student's works and there...

The Friday of week 2 was Sports Day!  and it was such a different experience! While most schools in Singapore celebrate sports day as a half-day event with maybe 4-5 activities (like Basketball, Captains' ball, Floorball, Cheering etc) or even disperse students according to their "Houses" instead of classes, here at SNU, the day is a massive event. At 8am, students arrive at their homerooms, all decked out in their class outfits. While in Singapore the norm is to have a class t-shirt, students here go all out with their own concepts. There isn't really a theme that every class must follow so you get to see absolutely different costumes worn by the students. For my class, our (students, STs and homeroom teacher alike) attire comprised a short bright pink kimono-esque wrap that, a pair of heart-shaped sunglasses and a set of head and wrist band. Other classes had various get-ups too such as orange jumpsuits, a full cheerleading costume (complete with the pompoms- e...

As I've mentioned in my first post, it turns out that all student teachers have their practicum together in SNU High School (or Middle School and two other affiliated schools) in May, which means that during this time, over 100 student-teachers are doing their practicum. This also means that STs are practically everywhere. It's really easy to spot them too- formal dressing (which means blazer included!), always rushing, and always stressed. For the first 3 weeks, I shared a conference room with about 20 other student-teachers from the English Department. I thought that's great! I can ask them a whole bunch of stuff!... well...or so I thought. They were really polite and tried to be as welcoming as possible but I could tell that they were really stressed out with daily assignments in the form of lesson plans and reflections. You can just feel the tension the second you step into the room. When I asked my peers about how they spend their day, they told me that they pra...

  One of my favourite parts of this trip is the sharing of resources. While watching my partners facilitate their lesson, I've discovered so many different apps, websites and games that they use during class such as: Class123, a high coverage class-management website that offers tools to award points to students, check their attendance, timer and even decide their seating plan KAKAO Talk - while this is similar to our version of Whatsapp, the services are more diverse and even include a game-like function that my partner ST used during one of her lessons ClassroomScreen - This is a site that I chanced upon while planning for one of my lessons. The site acts as a virtual board where you can pin important notes, the time, a timer, select names randomly etc which I found quite helpful in my lesson. I only got to try it once but it was made life easier to have visual cues to my students when I'm making announcements. I return, my teacher was very impressed with my slides a...

My, my, what a journey it has been! Today marks the last 5 days of my stint here in SNU High School and I must say, I will definitely miss it. Not only are the teachers incredibly helpful and open to discussions, but the students here are also simply too precious. I have never met a more polite bunch of students (throughout the entire school!) who are so friendly and so generous to their student teachers. Let me explain why I said that . Perhaps because the arrangement here is that all STs are concurrently doing their practicum at the school, students mostly interact with STs instead of their subject teachers for the whole of May. While it must be tiring for the students to pay attention to back-to-back "experiment" ( technically ) lessons, I've noticed that the students always put in effort to make the teachers feel like they are heard. They willingly participate in games, activities and listen to the teachers. Personally, I found this to be quite different in Si...

The first week in Seoul has been a dream. There's so much life in this city! While a lot can be said about the city alone, I think what has been just as intriguing is the school experience.  You might wonder why the name of the school is "Seoul National University High School", well...because it's just that! In this very unique setting, the school was created for the purpose of allowing student-teachers to carry out their practicum there. Imagine if NIE had an NIE High School, where all the Year 4s will spend 4 months doing their final practicum; that's exactly what this is.  Now I understand why my CT forewarned me that in May, over 100 teacher-trainees from SNU would be in school to do their practicum. You would understand why I was incredibly confused at first, hahah. This brings me to the school culture. Perhaps due to its affiliation with SNU (Education branch), the school seems like the most ideal school to be in. All the classes that I've observed...