as told by KHOR HUI SHEN, SK Temuno Teringai volunteer
Monday blues. Volunteers had to wake up earlier as our teaching session commenced at 8.00 am. That was probably the 3rd or 4th day of waking up super early due to the previous early hiking and pasar tamu session. Signs of tiredness descended on the faces of the volunteers. Yet, all the volunteers were still excited to enter the class to teach their respective students.
As usual, volunteers entered the standard 6 classes to teach English and Maths. For 6A, most of the students were attentive and quiet as usual. On the other hand, there were a lot of commotions in 6B. Personally, as a volunteer from 6B, I felt that the kids in 6A grasp knowledge relatively fast, so the learning curve of the kids curve upwards. As for 6B, kids lose attention quite fast, therefore volunteers need to use different kind of teaching methods to make the lesson livelier. My group can be easily claimed as the noisiest group. Firstly, my voice was loud especially when I was too excited during the teaching session. Secondly, it is due to the fact that some activities require walking around.
However , today my group was quieter than usual. Maybe it was due to the Monday blues, but it can be assigned to my own perspective on the start of the week as well. I was assigned to 3 kids during the start of the project, naming Welfred, Samlin and Welnidaus. Samlin and Welnidaus are one of the top students in class, so they were quick to understand my teachings. While for Welfred, for a simple English word as “sit”, it took him 15 mins to memorize the spelling. During the first week, I was patient when I taught him. Yet today, I seemed to lose my patience to teach him. Thoughts of I couldn’t help the students ran through my mind. Laughter during class reduced, as well as the patience to teach.
Few hours later, we entered the standard 5 class to teach them English. The smile they gave to me when they see me was indescribable. It was as if they like me and hope to have me to teach them again. Standard 5 students were bubblier than standard 6, probably because standard 6 students were stressful as they were in the midst of preparing for UPSR. Just like sunshine, their laughter swiped off my Monday blues. Before leaving the class, they remind me to teach them again the next day. How sweet of them.
During dinner, volunteers were discussing about the students and we found that students’ performance were deteriorating. We inferred that it might be due to the hectic schedule, whereby they started their school at 6 am and finished the additional classes at 6pm. I think that their schedule is more hectic than my high school. However so, thinking of it, having the hectic schedule is important for their education because if most of them do not self-study, so the only way to make them study is through asking them to go for additional classes.
After dinner, volunteers headed to their respective classes to teach the standard 6 students. “ARGHHHHHH!!”, Midori screamed and ran out from 6B. we went in and saw a gigantic (a bit over to use this description) toket. While all of us ran to 6A to hide ourselves, we saw another bigger toket in 6A, and all of us screamed again. The kids were making fun of us, scaring us by telling us that there is a toket beside us when in fact the toket has already climbed out. However scary were the tokets, I felt glad that they managed to lighten up our teaching session.
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