It's been a long time since I've blogged...

Too busy eating CNY goodies and bumming around at Grandpa's place. Haha. Also busy doing my assignments.

Silly me realized that I started doing an assignment that was due much later than another which is due TOMORROW. ZZZ. And I found the stupid forum that I was supposed to make a posting during the CNY week!!! ARGH! I'm LATE!!! Realized that the forum cannot be found if you go through the main link. Have to go through a link called communication, then group pages, then click on my tutorial group! How would I know that!!!?!?!?! Thank God that I stumbled upon it and found out that a lot of people have not posted as well... PHEW. Just posted my views there. Here is it for your reading pleasure. Haha.

At-Risk Students:

If a student is scheduled for remediation, he might be demoralised. This might seem to be a broadcast to the rest of the classmates that he is not as good as the rest of them. To avoid such branding, remediation might need to be reduced to a large extent. An alternative could be to give the student a leadership role in the class, such that he might feel some responsibility to do well to be able to be fit to lead his classmates.

I personally feel that the teacher has to make a lot of changes to the teaching style for such at-risk students. The lessons need to be more engaging and authentic, in order to capture the attention of the at-risk student. The student needs a reason to sit at his desk during the lesson and not drift away in his own thoughts. The teacher plays a very important role in making sure that the student is interested in the lesson. I believe that appropriate use of ICT will be a very good way to keep these students engaged in learning.

Making learning fun makes for good learning:

Yes, I agree that learning has to be "fun". We usually remember teachers who made the effort to inject humour into their lessons. That just shows how influential such teachers can be and that their lessons are more memorable.

However, has anybody thought about what "fun" is to them? Is your definition of "fun" similar to the students'? Some people might think that playing Sudoku is fun, but it is not to me though :) So we can see that "fun" is relative, and thus we need to keep abreast of new technology that is evolving ever so quickly, such that we can capture the students' attention with new teaching methods and surprises. We will not be able to please everybody in everything that we do, so we just need to be adaptable and introduce different methods in different situations.