dar treated me to a cable-car dining experience for 2007's pre-valentine's day celebration. the food was lovely, the experience was interesting, and my company was terrific :D highly recommended if you think that paktor in singapore is boring.

thankyou darling!


sorry darling, for the major disagreement that we had some weeks ago. you know that i really love you!


***


i have no artistic talent -.-

i cannot draw for peanuts, cashew nuts pistacho nuts and walnuts.

i really want to take a scrapbooking course. anybody wants to accompany me?

i have been so totally swamped with lesson plans, lesson plans, and more lesson plans.. perpetually busy all the time T_T

one may look at our nie timetables and say that we have it easy. i currently have 23 hours of lessons per week but that is not an actual definition of the time i spend "studying" in nie! there are readings to be done, individual assignments to be completed, group projects to be discussed, microteaching lessons to be conducted, as well as service learning activities to be carried out.

whoever said nie was easy-peasy! *growls

the english module is all about microteaching and how to enrich/enhance language ability rather than testing. That means lesser compre/compo drills but more focus on meaningful lessons for richer learning.

the geography module backs the unit-by-design model of teaching which is all about big ideas, enduring understandings, essential questions and performance-based assessments. That means helping students to understand what they are learning rather than giving facts and more facts.

then there is the educational psychology component where are countless instructional strategies for effective learning in students.

in a nutshell, my first semester of nie means being introduced to all the idealistic notions of education which promotes student-centred learning and critical thinking.

the whole paradigm of education has shifted and i really think kids nowadays learn more meaningfully in schools compared to during my time. teachers are no more authoritative figures to be revered and feared, they are now educators who cater to the needs of their pupils and engage their pupils in meaningful lessons which promote higher level thinking and scaffold metacognitive development.

i love the analogy by byrnes, where a student's knowledge is like a brick wall and each brick is a piece of information that is interconnected to other pieces of information. i think teaching used to be of teachers building up a wall in students' minds, while teaching now is more of providing the bricks to students who try to lay the wall themselves.

however, i mentioned earlier that these notions of education are quite idealistic. the current education system is still very exam-focused and it is a very tricky issue to try to revamp the system because it is very difficult to set a standard for formative assessment. it is also hard to translate the "teach less learn more" model in lessons when you have students whose parents were educated in the traditional way where more notes and more homework means that you are a good teacher.

yijun's msn nick reads, "only the brave should teach". what do you think?