Day 4 : Effective teaching may be the hardest job there is

Today was the last day of PACE session, I tried to pay more attention on my mentee, Adam because their PTS examination started on next week. I taught him some techniques to answer the questions in the the examination if he really doesn't know understand the article; for instance, find the similar words or phrases in the article. Due to lesser time we had, i wanted him to repeat again of what he understood my explanation to double confirm how much he has gained throughout the session. I was quite disappointed when he ran out from the class and went to play football with his friends. Although he came back to class after caught by Ms. Rabi’ah, he didn’t show interest to continue doing his exercise. He hide the exercise paper in his bag by telling lie to everyone that the paper was lost. Then, Ms. Rabi’ah asked him to do mathematics exercise and he pushed it to me. I felt sad by his action as he seemed to look down on me by assuming me do not know how to do. I may not doing well in English, but Mathematics is my strength as compared to other subjects. I was fine and did not force him doing more as he looked so unwilling.

At the moment, i thought of it was might be all my mistakes as he maybe felt uncomfortable with me of i did not know how to explain everything with good Malays. Being a teacher is not that easy as we think, we have to diversify in all areas before teaching other people. What i have gained from the whole programme is the outcome of helping the students in difficulties. I have tried my best to help Adam on his academic. After three weeks interacting with him, he is actually quite smart as he can pronounce most of words correctly and finish all the tasks without me keep on pushing. Conversely, he is just lazy to think and understand what i am trying to tell him. As it is too late to teach him all the grammar terms such as english tenses, so i tried to let him understand more because much learning does not teach understanding.

To be honest, teaching had never come across my mind in any situation as i had low patience in explaining things step by step. PACE project has given me an opportunity to strengthen myself in this aspect and i took it as a training to learn how to be patience; so that i would give my best to handle this. In a nutshell, I was quite happy that I was given an opportunity to experience of being a teacher.