Local School Students
Singapore has one of the best education systems in Asia. It allows young children to pursue an elite education but comes with a heavy price. With a brutal diversion system and a tendency to look only at the results, examinations put them under great pressure and steal away their childhood. Singapore's government has been promoting the bilingual policy for nearly 40 years and condones the continued speaking of one's own mother tongue throughout one's life. However, this greatly increases the burden on a lot of students, since in addition to their mandarin classes, they are required to converse in English for all their other classes. The chances of hands-on learning are then is greatly reduced, reducing their chances of effectively learning Chinese. In a competitive environment encouraging one to focus on not only what society needs, but also and what schools teach, children may have little time to think about anything other than standardized education, and almost no free time at all. Using the personalized teaching method that imparts both language knowledge and cultural knowledge at once in order to cultivate the students' habit of inquiring as opposed to just accepting information, thinking and imagining will come more naturally to them later on.
Under Teacher Alice’s guidance, I not only gained more confidence in my foundation of Chinese, but also developed a deep interest in the language. I had never liked this subject before, and I had always felt that learning Chinese was a burden and pointless. To my surprise, when I was in P6, I got Distinction in Higher Chinese and A in Normal Chinese. From Sec 1 to Sec 2, I did quite well in Chinese too. But I didn't take the time to understand the Chinese language more deeply. When I was in Sec 3, my Chinese grades began to decline. Thanks to Teacher Alice, who not only helped me correct my mistakes, but also stimulated my interest in Chinese. Her teaching method is very special and quite different from other teachers. I still remember when I was trained for the oral test and composition, in order to make me more deeply understand the meaning of the topic, Teacher Alice always extracted interesting topics in life and international news facts and turned them into our discussions, which made me personally realize the advantages of the Chinese language in real life. With Teacher Alice, I became intoxicated with all kinds of life topics, which instead became the driving force of my study and made me pay more attention to the world outside the school. Through communication with her, I greatly expanded my horizons, learned a lot of valuable knowledge, and more and more like the Chinese language. The Chinese language world gives me a subtle and broad perspective of thinking.
