2nd Visit

For the second week of the visit to the school, the group allocated half of the visit to doing activities and the other half for completing a scrapbook for presentation purposes during the closing week. First of all, let me start by saying that the second week visit was quite packed and full of miscalculations which made it a very hectic one.

For the first half, we had one of our group members teach the whole class on the three tenses which are the present tense, past tense and continuous present tense. Two problems rose from this. One was that the group member assigned to teaching the students was a Hong Kong student, so the teaching style was very fast paced and some of the slower learners in the class could not catch up to the group member’s pace. This led to some of the students having confusions about the lesson as we had them do a worksheet to assess their understanding of the topic. The other problem was that the group member assigned to teaching had mistakenly taught another type of tense and grouped it under one of the three tenses when teaching. This had also caused confusions in some of the students who actually knew that the tense that the group member was not supposed to be one of the three tenses. In our small group, we were able to clear up the misunderstanding but I don’t know about the other groups as we all had our hands full at that time and did not have time to inform the others about it.

However hectic the first half, the second one was more. I had dreaded the scrapbook part since the last visit because based on my own personal experience going to special needs schools for two semesters when I was doing International Baccalaureate, I had never preferred to carry out artistic activities. I had a ‘personal assistant’ to do that for me. My worries turned out to be true. During the activity, I had exactly no idea which goes where and when the students ask me on the decoration of the scrapbook, I practically asked them back what they were talking about. The students were better at art that I was. I had to actually ask around for opinions on how to do some of the decorations on the scrapbook from the leader and also, unexpectedly, Dr. Tida who was passing by also gave some opinions. In the end we managed to finish the scrapbook eventhough it took us a bit more time than the other groups. I admit that I could not do art that much but if I had researched a bit on decorating scrapbooks and such I would not have had that much problem as I had for the second day.

In a nutshell, the second visit made me think that planning thoroughly is something very vital in conducting activities. Truth be told, the second week visit was without much planning. Not as much as the first visit. The only planned part would be the tenses lesson part and that was only planned by the person teaching the tenses. The group member did not inform us of anything or gave us any layout of how the activity was going to be carried out so the group hardly did any error checking on that. For the scrapbook half, I think if I had planned a bit earlier on how to decorate some parts of the scrapbook it would have gone off without much complications. It was purely my weakness on that part.