20S12

For our SL project, we have to go to St. Andrew’s Secondary School (SASS) every Tuesday from Week 3 to Week 6 to tutor the secondary school students English and Mathematics.

8 people went to SASS each week for 1.5 hours with each person going twice. For the people who are unable to go because of circumstances such as having their H3 lessons on the SL days, they helped their friends by providing advice on how to handle some students or help re-explaining the O Level concepts that many of us have forgotten.

In SASS, we spent 1.5 hours teaching groups of 4 to 5 students Mathematics and English each week. We used the learning resources that SASS provided us with, which are oral passages and comprehension papers for English and past mid-year papers and some tutorials for Mathematics. The students we handled also vary in attitude and capabilities. However, we still teach everyone equally so that everyone can reap the most benefits out of this whole experience.

Many students felt apprehensive about teaching the secondary 4 students at first, as many of us were still rusty in our O level concepts. Some of us were also nervous about our abilities to garner their attention and teach them the correct concepts.

However, all the preparation of revising old notes or going through the material helped the teaching sessions run more smoothly on the day itself. Tutoring the Secondary 4 boys was described as tough by many of our classmates. Some of the boys were more talkative and thus many of our classmates were able to practice being more patient and firm with students. They were also stuck on many questions and even though the questions seemed easy to us, having done O levels, we still did our best to understand their confusion and be more sympathetic.

Many of us felt a sense of accomplishment afterwards, having been able to help them with their questions, even though there may not have been that many questions. Thus, our class felt that this was a truly meaningful activity.