The beginning of my career

It's been ages since I last blogged. For those of you who are unaware, I have begun working as a trainee teacher about a month back. Time flies by so much more quickly when you are a teacher. I cannot believe it has been almost a month since I started. I was posted to St Andrew's for my Enhanced School Experience. I was apprehensive when I first got the posting as I did not have a favourable impression of the school. However, I can safely say now that it is quite a good school.

The staff is supportive and friendly and there are many avenues available for the trainee teachers to seek help. The students have a wide range of abilities owing to their policy of accepting anyone from their junior school. The students are generally noisy and the noise level can get disturbingly high. They also tend to do and say a lot of nonsensical things. It can get pretty exasperating controlling the class but they are generally respectful. Most of the Normal classes which I expected to give me a lot of problems were generally fine as well. There were only a small minority who were disruptive.

I have also just begun teaching lessons on my own after shadowing teachers for the first few weeks. It was nerve-wrecking at first, especially since my first lesson was English and I have no idea how to teach it. Now that I have finished my third lesson, things got better although I have to work on certain things like voice projection. Teaching can be exhilarating, especially when you can capture the students' attention. It can even get addictive. I enjoyed teaching my Biology class, teaching them about the menstrual cycle. I passed them sanitary pads and tampons and the boys got so excited over it. Although I was tired at the end of the lesson from trying to keep them quiet, there was a sense of satisfaction that I got some of them to learn something new. My satisfaction increased when a student from the class told me he enjoyed the lesson.

I am aware that there is still a long way to go and my workload now is relatively light compared to full time teachers. But I hope that I can still remain enthusiastic in a few years' time and enjoy my time in school. Then I will seriously consider staying on.

Scenes from Sentosa

When I took the beach tram from Beach station heading towards Tanjong Beach, something happened which shocked me. There was a mother and son seating besides me on the adjacent bench. Going by their accent, they are certainly not native. They should either be Taiwanese or PRCs, but after the incident, I am guessing PRCs.

I was sitting on the tram, thinking of what a chore it is to travel to Tanjong beach just to put some plaster balls, when the corner of my eye caught a white object flying out of the tram. I instinctively looked at the mother and son on my left. I didn't know what had happened. Then the mother and son rehearsed the whole scene for me again. The son was just finishing his sandwich and the mother folded the wrapper. She then took aim at the rubbish bin located at the tram stop and threw the wrapper out of the tram. Of course, she missed the target. No ordinary mortal could have nailed that shot. I was momentarily stunned. She was blatantly littering in front of her son. What kind of example is she setting? I gave her a disapproving stare but did not take further action. Thinking back, maybe I should have done more. This kind of behaviour is really appalling. No wonder our streets are increasingly littered with rubbish these days.

Maybe I didn't notice it before or maybe it is a new directive, but I noticed while taking the Sentosa Express that the staff are acting more friendly now. There are staff posted at every station platform and they have to wave their hands to welcome new arrivals and repeat the waving to say goodbye to those departing. Most of them do not have smiles on their faces while waving and I can understand why. It must be one of the most unpleasant jobs on the island. They must be waving a few hundred times each day and they have to repeat it everyday. Furthermore, they must say with enthusiasm "Welcome to Sentosa" and "Goodbye, see you again" everytime. And it's quite demoralising when many people ignore them. I am one of those who didn't respond to them. It seems quite weird to me as I am a local. And what's more, I have been visiting Sentosa so many times in the past few months. All these friendly gestures are meant for people going to enjoy themselves. Unfortunately, I am not one of them.

FYP

I have just finished putting in the last of my plants on my seawall. This is the second time I am putting them in as there were too many plants washed away in the first try. Some improvements were made to the design and an additional seawall which was sheltered was used. I believe and I hope that this time around, my efforts will be rewarded and more plants will survive. I do not expect 100% survival. The waves at the site are ferocious and I have learned to respect the wrath of the seas.

In just slightly over two months, the whole project will be over. One year back, I would never have imagined working with plants as I searched for a supervisor. I had intentionally approached only professors who dealt with animals. Life is difficult to predict and circumstances made me change supervisors in June. Hugh Tan was never my choice as the name of his lab, Plant Systematics Lab, turned me off. Plants were boring enough on their own and Systematics made it worse. It conjured an image of me working on identifying species of plants with a microscope. It is definitely not how I would like to spend the final year of my university life.

It was probably fate that he had just one half-slot left when I approached him. I was the fifth and final Honours student. He had just gotten a request from Surbana to research ways of greening seawalls. The project sounded all right, and I thought the project would be very useful if it was successful. Then, the project was very different from what it has come to now. The methods involve only plants growing behind the seawall and the site was supposed to be on Pulau Tekong. I visited the site on Pulau Tekong and getting there was quite a chore. So, it was my good fortune that Sentosa got interested in the project and provided a study site.

A senior's thesis on growing mangroves on different substrates was found and she had tried growing them on seawalls. So the idea was given to me to try to grow mangroves on seawalls also. I tried out her methods but they were no match for the pounding waves on the site. My site was far more exposed than hers. I experimented and constantly improved until I found a fairly successful method.

Working on the seawall was physically demanding and dangerous. One slip could be fatal. It was slippery and the rocks had sharp edges. The walls were steep and I constantly had to be on all fours to avoid falling off. Furthermore, I have to carry heavy objects as I maneuver around the walls. I was always exhausted at the end of each planting session at the seawall. Sticky, dirty and spent, I could not wait to get home, bath and collapse on bed every time.

It is not easy working on a FYP. Countless hours were spent, much more than studying for modules. Along the way, I had to endure failures and got into some trouble as well. Constantly asking people for help was not a pleasant experience also. But I had learned a lot as well. Searching for products on the net, buying hardware, learning to use drills and cutters, coordinating things, planning experiments, relying on tide tables, working with various people. I can't say it's all worth it and I feel like just taking modules alone sometimes. FYP just gave me the opportunity to experience things beyond my usual boundaries.

The passing

I should have blogged about this earlier but I have been feeling an aversion towards blogging lately. My maternal grandfather passed away about 3 weeks ago. He was my last remaining grandfather. My paternal grandfather died when I was only a month old.
He passed away swiftly. On the third day after he was admitted to hospital. I was there everyday in the hospital. Even on the first day when he was admitted into hospital, I was surprised at how thin he became. In my memory, he was a fit person who could walk faster than many younger people but what I saw lying on the hospital bed was a pale shadow of him.
There was hardly any flesh left on him, the muscles wasted as his body slowly catabolized itself. I heard from my mother that he had not eaten for a month and it seems he knew his time was coming. He had been trying to settle outstanding matters in the past few months. He and my grandmother also grew closer to each other. My mother recounted seeing them share bowls of food together in recent times whereas usually they would be quarreling with each other.
I saw his condition deteriorating quickly and on the second day in hospital, he was gasping for breath. Each breath seemed to suck a little more life out of him. On the third day, he was unconscious, and seemingly after waiting for everyone he knew to have visited him, he gave up fighting.
Honestly, I was not very sad at his passing. For one thing, I was not close to him. There was a language barrier and he was an independent person who was often out of the house. And secondly, his death was sort of expected since he was very old already. It would be better for him to go off peacefully, rather than struggle on.
I was surprised at how swiftly things proceeded on after his death. Some of my relatives had contacts with people in the funeral industry and soon, his body was removed from the hospital, sent to the funeral company for make up, and the funeral wake was set up at the ground floor of my place. This was all done in the night that he passed away.
I shall end my blog post here and perhaps I will blog further about the happenings in the wake and my feelings.

Teaching

I have many things to blog about since I couldn't blog while my preparations for the exams are underway. I will just start with the most important thing. My future. I have just accepted a teaching award offer from MOE and so for 4 years after I graduate I will be bound to them. Almost every time teaching as a career is mentioned, the reaction will be negative. It's almost as though teaching is the worst job in the world and only people desperate and with no other options will go down this path of eternal doom. I believe that there's some basis to some of the comments made about teaching and I do have my doubts. I've thought about the long hours, the endless work, difficult students and maybe unfriendly colleagues and principal.
After all these horror thoughts, I still decided to sign on the dotted line. This is because I feel that this is potentially the most rewarding job in the world. Not in terms of monetary compensation, but in terms of job satisfaction. The money may be good but it's never going to be enough to compensate for the long hours I expect to be putting in but if someday, a student were to come up to me and thank me for helping him/her become a better person, every effort that I put in will be worth it. It may sound a little corny, all these things about changing peoples' lives. But my own life has been changed by the many teachers who came along my way. They may not have known it but their words of encouragement gave me the inspiration to carry on when things were not all smooth sailing. I would like to be able to help my students as much as I had been helped by my teachers. That will be the best way of thanking my teachers.

What is the world coming to?