22S10

Our service learning project this year involved mentoring students from St Andrew’s Secondary School (SASS). The project spanned across four weeks, with one session per week. We walked to SASS to mentor the students on 12/7 (Tuesday), 20/7, 27/7 and 3/8 (Wednesdays).

We mentored SASS students on two subjects, namely English Oral and Mathematics. Due to the fact that the virus is pretty much under control this year after a two-year hiatus, we are lucky to have the mentoring sessions back into physical state again as compared to the last two years when it could only be carried out virtually, which affected the effectiveness of the programme.

For English Oral, mentors and mentees were given the same worksheet, and mentors taught mentees on the structure of the oral exams and the techniques to answer questions and perform well in oral exams. For Mathematics, mentees were given two worksheets, each with around 8 to 10 questions. Since they have learnt the concepts tested in the questions prior to the mentoring sessions, mentors let mentees complete the questions on their own first. When mentees did not understand parts of the questions, mentors helped by giving them hints and guiding them step by step in solving the questions. After that, mentors marked mentees’ work and gave some comments as well as pointed out some areas where mentees could improve next time they face similar questions again.

Generally, our class felt grateful after completing our service learning project because it allowed us to see from the perspective of academically weaker students and understand their needs so that we could provide the most desired and sufficient guidance to aid them in their studies. As a class that takes 4H2 subject combination, we are often deemed as being academically stronger than the rest of our peers in our cohort and most of us may not have interacted much with academically weaker friends in secondary school and in JC, therefore through this project, we have gained perspective of academically weaker students and acknowledged them. Even though the programme only lasted for four days and six hours in total, and we only taught the SASS students two subjects, but we firmly believe that we have left a positive impact in them and we definitely learnt something new through our interactions with them.

Some of our classmates’ reflections are as follows:

• Justin Hartanto: Through my interactions with the SASS students, I have learnt to emphatise them and tried to understand their difficulties, thereby providing the appropriate guidance to help them excel and achieve their goals.

• Chadre Rafhelle Luna Laus: During the course of the programme, I discovered that even though the students might be academically weaker, that does not mean they are lazy and are not willing to put in the effort to study, therefore I tried to push them more and encourage them to challenge themselves. Through this, I hope to show to them that their limit is higher than where they think it is.

• Wang Ruihan: I think my mentees were generally willing to learn. They paid attention to me when I was teaching them, and devoted their effort to completing their tasks when it was time to do so. They understand that there is time for work and time for play, so during the mentoring sessions they paid full attention to their work and constantly asked me questions so that they could learn as much as possible during the sessions.