New year, New Syllabus, New Teaching Methods, New...New...New

(: It has been 3 weeks into the New Year already and I am already extremely stressed. Since I am in the Pilot Program (Future School Program) this year, I have had to much more independent studies as compared to last year. In this program, students are required to do their own research on the upcoming topics at home. After that, the teachers would start a class discussion in school so that the students can exchange ideas as well as clarify their thoughts with the teacher. I feel that to be in such a program, one must possess high responsibility or discipline. If a student does not do his research at home, he would have no understanding on the discussion topic and thus unable to engage in the discussion, thus meaning that he would be simply wasting his time :)

I feel that the subject with the most significant change this year has to be History. Mr Ho, my history teacher, has put in a lot of effort in thinking of ways to engage us in independent learning. This year, we have a new IT component, Classjump, an online discussion board that we can discuss and exchange views on certain topics, as well as provide feedback to the teacher. I feel that this is a wonderful inclusion to our learning it has really helped me a lot in my independent studying.

Other than that, my Language Arts class has also of adopted some new ways teaching. For starters, we have a lecture period of an hour every week in which 3-4 classes are joined together and given a mass lecture. With this, students will be able to experience a different teaching method and I believe this will prove very useful in the later stages of their studies as most colleges or universities adopt the lecture system of teaching.

This year in Language Arts, we are reading the award-winning one-hit novel by Harper Lee, "To Kill A Mocking Bird". It is an interesting book which highlights the situation of segregation between the whites and blacks as well as numerous social problems through the daily lives of a young girl, Scout.,who lives in the town of Maycomb.



Hope you have enjoyed this more academic wise post, until my next post, goodbye for now.