WEEK SEVEN REFLECTIONS (9/4/2012 – 13/4/2012)

History

For this week’s tutorials, the emphasis was on continuing with the lecture (on the topic of pre-war nationalism in Vietnam) and basically providing students with the overall analytical framework to tackle this new topic. The aim was for them to bear in mind the underlying factors, especially the impact of key external events such as the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, that contributed to the origins and development of pre-war nationalism in Vietnam, following which students would be able to identify and relate to the specific Vietnamese nationalist organisations that were directly inspired by the key external developments. The final 20 minutes of each tutorial was devoted to conducting a fill-in-the-blanks test on pre-war nationalism in Burma, which would help students to consolidate and synthesise what they had already learnt to date about the topic in question.

     

Project Work

For PW, the focus this week was on guiding students in the planning of their research process. The PW teachers introduced to students the four primary research and data collection methods, namely observations, experiments, surveys and interviews. As well as getting students to acquaint themselves with the research process, much attention was also paid to assessing the reliability of the data collected as student needed to be aware of the flaws of a biased research methodology. The PW tutorials were devoted to individual consultation sessions regarding the students’ proposed preliminary ideas for their PW.

     

Ten-Pin Bowling

As part of the rotating basis for our CCA observations (as part of the NIE practicum requirements), I switched from Hockey (Boys) to Ten-Pin Bowling. In many respects, this was a much more comfortable (at least from the perspective of the teacher-in-charge) and relatively low-risk CCA compared to hockey. Moreover, being an indoor sport, it was not subjected to the exigencies of weather conditions, whereas the competition schedule for hockey had to be constantly adjusted due to poor weather causing games to be postponed. The only problem for ten-pin bowling was the need to conduct training at an external avenue, which necessarily posed transport and related logistical issues for the teacher-in-charge.