Jarod Yong

A simple yet powerful writing programme: the Pen Pal Project. How do you feel when you ask your students to do a writing assignment? For me, it's less than pleasant. Even with the "better" classes, I have to flex my teacher muscles just to get my students to hand in their work &, most of the time, I get half-hearted work which is hastily done, short &, after reading a few of them, repetitive. I spent my early teaching years pondering & experimenting to pique my students' interest in writing & motivate them to write more. I started by asking what would motivate ME to write? 1) An authentic audience 2) Social interaction 3) Novel experience With these 3 factors, I experimented with all sorts of programmes like getting my students to make their own big books because we didn't have big books at that time, getting students to tell stories to other students, & show & tell. None worked as well as the Pen Pal Project which I started exp...

Imagine using candles every night for 3 weeks. We'll find a way to carry on despite our circumstances. Nonetheless, do continue to pray for us. This is not the first time we've had  electricity  or  water  problems at school. We've had them since my first year here. Back then, outages rarely lasted more than a few days. Last year was when things started to get worse. We had 2 lengthy power outages for up to a cumulative 2 weeks. Long-term solutions should have been implemented then. The best thing is, every time something happens to the water or electric supply, ALL the teachers, students & staff will band together to make things better & soldier through the extremely difficult circumstances instead of pointing fingers or merely complaining. We always have teachers who are willing to step up . I'm eternally thankful to be part of this family so early in my teaching career. It is only in difficult times do we learn the true meaning of esprit de corps ...

See that trolley? See those portable generators? Early every morning, they would put the portable generators on the trolley & push them to the office where they ran the generators so that we could do some basic office work on limited devices. Every evening, they would move those generators to the hostels & quarters to light up corridors & the school hall so students could study at night. Imagine the same people doing it every day for weeks without fail. Imagine students running away from helping because of the trouble it took to bathe after the hard work! If this isn't heroism, I don't know what is. They could have just as easily stayed at home & done nothing but complain about the situation. I'm sure that you are well-aware of the power outage at my school . You might also be aware that, because I was the one who appealed to the public for help, I am bestowed with an abundant  halo effect  which resulted in me being thought of as...

My first thoughts were: What? Is this a virus? Scam? Still, I clicked on it to find out what it was about. Today, I turned on my laptop & found this peculiar icon on my taskbar. I wondered for a moment whether my laptop was infected with a virus but I'm really careful with viruses & "free" toolbars so it was likely that this was a legit icon from Microsoft. So, I clicked to find out what it was about & unveiled a wonderful present from uncle Bill & co.