Category: Blog
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Problems | Education | Reflective | Learning Skills Are Abstract But Buildable
I have been thinking about learning skills. Not Mathematics skills. Not English skills. Not Science skills. The skills underneath those skills. The things a learner does when they meet something they do not understand. And somewhere in the middle of thinking about this, I became slightly annoyed with the phrase: critical thinking skills. Yes. This is…
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Problems | Education | Reflective | Knowing Our Jobs
Sometimes the most obvious things are the easiest things to forget. An engineer engineers. A doctor heals. A teacher teaches. It sounds almost silly when I write it down. Of course a teacher teaches. What else would we be doing? But the longer I teach, the more I wonder whether we sometimes become so occupied…
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Problems | Education | Reflective | The Problem Becomes the Lesson
I have been thinking about something that happens almost every day when I teach. Every student seems to carry a different problem. One is fast, but careless. One understands today and somehow loses it next week. One takes much longer to form the idea. One reads well but cannot translate the words into Mathematics. Another…
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Problems | Education | Reflective | The Invisible Education
Children learn more than the lesson adults deliberately teach. A reflection for parents on the quieter education carried by tone, correction, uncertainty, example, peer behaviour and the ordinary ways a learning environment treats a child.
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Problems | Education | Reflective | Is Tuition Really Too Taxing?
There is a discussion I hear quite often in Singapore. Children are tired. School is demanding. They have homework. CCA. Examinations. Then tuition. So the conclusion seems obvious: Tuition is adding too much load. I understand why people say this. Sometimes they are absolutely right. There are children moving from school to tuition to homework…
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Problems | Education | Reflective | The Oddity of Giving One Lesson to Three Students
There is something slightly strange about teaching three students at the same time. I can give what appears to be the same lesson. Same topic. Same explanation. Same worksheet. Same ninety minutes. And three completely different things can happen. One student flies. They understand quickly, connect the idea to something they already know, complete the…
