2nd Week Sch Exp + OEA Symposium

School Experience@ WRS 2009
My time at WRS this week can be summarised with one word: Fantabulastic!
The school has been really supportive in that the management truly believed that they wanted us to experience the school through oberving the diverse levels and even different subjects.

The school bases itself on one word and one word alone: VALUES!
Governed by 3 simple values: Respect, Responsibility and Resilience. From School Leaders to teachers and right down to every student. They all sing to the same tune. Such consistency is rarely, or never, seen in any school usually.I have nothing but praise for the way the school is run and every trainee agreed the school was orderly,efficient and students were disciplined.The PE dept: Physical Education here is still taking steps to establish itself as an integral part of the school's curriculum. They adapted the Sports Ed Prog from Zhenghua and to see it in the flesh was a really humbling experience. They tied it in with Character Education and each student has a booklet for the events, programmes and most importantly, REFLECTIONS! They review their activities and students are guided to find their learning points.


Discipline Dept (Student Behaviour Management): Its refreshing to find that they approach it with a values-based discpline other than rules-based discipline. The 3 "Rs" are always their point of reference and parents would usually find it hard to refute the fact that they dont want their children to have values. The HOD also makes an effort to ensure the school's surroundings are free of any punks/hooligans that will harrass the kids so that it gives them a conducive environment to study so they dont have to fear that thos gangsters area waiting for them outside of school. The HOD knows his stuff, he asks us: What does the word Discipline mean? Well.. for the uninitiated, it means to make a disciple of somebody. So the key issue here is: Are you a teacher worth making a disciple out of? You must embody the values before somebody wants to make you their master. So it was truly insightful. And he does the restorative practices in the SEL component so as to mend and heal relations between students.


The Character Education Dept: Another pillar of the school. In fact, the dept is so strong that most of its progs are done in-house and only few of it are subcon out to vendors. What it does is to infuse its CE progs into a lesson each week. On top of that, they try to integrate with PE (Like the SEP) and also ART. The HOD is also a learned person who is into child behaviour studies and reads lots about writer like Thomas Lickona who writes about ed pyschology too.

People that I meet (Fellow NIE Trainees): Above was with Abang Rizal Hida, the girl that really clicked from day one. I gave her HELL everyday. Disturbing her to the maximum. I think i gave her a week to remember =pThe 3 MOE Scholars: Eunice from Shanghai University. Hazi and Wee Keong from NUS. Both going on exchange. Hazi going for a whole year! how cool is that.. Wee keong going to Toronto.

All the trainees! I think this bunch of people are really nice and could click with Sasi, Rizal, Hida.

The contact time was no joke. A whopping 3 and half hours. We had to read the handouts, discuss and then present on our points! But the session was good and i think i really learnt alot!

So the one week stint was really eventful and enriching. I thank God for this opportunity. When i first saw the posting i was like what?! I havent heard about the school before and I thought i was just another school in the neighbourhood. So this really changed my perception of the school.

OEA Symposium

I went in feeling really sleepy. But the keynote speech was not bad. The icebreakers were fun and I even bought a book about propless games which I think it was useful in future!

Had a good catch-up with yong hui. Learnt quite a fair bit from him. Think his circle of contacts damn big. He knows most people at the conference itself. I got to know new people as well, such as the christchurch teachers who climbed EBC, TPJC teachers. Then I also met Jeremy and Veron from campHA, as well as the CCAB peeps who I met at the outdoor camp.

Chat with Cindy today, and we were recounting the times in the camp. Think she really found us a fun-loving group.

In essence, the sessions werent really informative, me and YH felt that we didnt really get much out of it and were kinda disappointed. But the horte park walk was not bad, got to see plants and pluck fruits to eat. By the way the meals were good. We KEPT eating and eating.. Dinner was romantic.. we ate at the globe, with tribal lights and tables with groundsheets. Presentation of EBC was done whilst dinner.. It was truly a humbling experience to see what they had gone thru. Its really no joke seeing 15-16 yr olds climbing such a high altitude in those conditions.

In short, the symposium was good but hoped to have better sessions in future!

Going to Cameron Highlands plus KL tmr! Cant wait!