Lean On Me

Do you still remember your school's song? I do. =)

The movie 'Lean on Me' is one of the best pedagogical movies that I ever watched. In this movie, we can see that school can be a battle field for some children and the environment may not be conducive and effective for learning. In this kind of environment, most of the students will become miserable and poor in academic.

'Lean on Me' is actually inspired by a true story. It tells us how a principal controls and changes his school. It is awesome and not every teacher can do it.
Mr. Clark is an experienced teacher who is invited by his fellow friends to get back to his old school in New Jersey. He returns to the school after 20 years he left the school. The environment of the school currently is not as good as before. In fact, it is way worse. He is there to make changes to the whole school. When I watch the scene where he comes back to that school, I question myself,"Is he going to succeed?"

The way he controls the staffs, teachers and students is very harsh. But I don't think it is a bad way to control them. If we live in that kind of school, I think we will do the same. Mr. Clark looks like an autocratic leader and a mean teacher but he knows his goals very well. I remember one of his lines which is "If you can't control it (school & students), how can you teach it?" What he says is absolutely right. Teacher control is very important to make sure the students listen to the teacher and learn. In this case, teacher's authority is needed and learner-centered can't be used.

Although Mr. Clark is a very serious person, he actually concerns about the students.
He concerns about students' interest. In this movie, the students do not like the school song and they do not even bother to memorize the lyric. The students find the song is boring and they prefer to sing the song as an acappella song. They love it that way. For the students' sake, Mr. Clark assigns the music teacher to teach all students to sing the school song the way they want. That is a great decision.

The way he touches the students is very special. We can see the result is printed through the students' behaviour. He changes the students from zero to hero and he manages to help the students to pass the state examination as well as makes the students believe in themselves. He provides high motivation to his students and he trusts them. It seems like he brings the miracle to the whole school hold the students' hand to walk to a better future.

Akeelah and The Bee

19th August 2010

"Can you give me the definition, please?" =)

Spelling Bee is a good activity to improve our vocabulary. I love the movie called "AKEELAH AND THE BEE" which portrays a dream of a girl who is able to master thousands of words. What have I learned from this movie? Well, generously speaking, I think this movie shows a big impact in students' life. Akeelah in this movie shows how passionate she is in Spelling Bee. She tries her best to learn all new words. But as teachers, we cannot forget that all students are born with different styles. What I'm trying to say is we need to study how our students learn instead of asking them why they cannot cope or fail in certain subjects. We must provide enough input to the students. Like this movie, the professor himself provides Akeelah enough vocab to compete herself in Spelling Bee. The input will make her confident. In school, all teachers need to do the same. Give students enough input will help the students a lot. By giving them enough input, the students will be confident enough to perform in academic. As the result, all of the students have chances to success just like Akeelah.

Ron Clark's story

I was inspired by a movie called The Triumph whereby the protagonist was an excellent teacher. Ron Clark was a teacher who always believed in himself that he was able to make changes in students’ lives. In this movie, he moved to New York City to teach. He made it and got a job in a public school in New York. He was a bold teacher who loved to take risk and challenge. For him, teaching is like taking risk.

He agreed to be a homeroom teacher to a class which had been labeled as hopeless class. The kids from that class were looked down. Mr. Clark insisted to help the students and promised a change in them. It was not as easy as he thought. It was beyond than that. His students were kind of rebellious, stubborn and uncooperative yet he never gave up. He knew what he wanted and he started to come out with his own rules to that class. It indicated he had a strategy to control the class which I found interesting. In fact, whenever he failed or students against him, he tried his best and negotiated with the students. There was a teacher presence in him. That was what a teacher needed to do if this situation happened.

Being a teacher was a heavy job. The reason I said so because a teacher was supposed to know or able to see the potential of his or her students. Mr. Clark in this movie already did it. Incredibly he managed to see the potential of his students and he helped them to shine the talent that they had. He made it as a part of his teaching. It was wonderful, isn’t it?

Mr. Clark was a good role model for teachers all over the world. He made changes and shined his students. He never looked down upon them. Therefore, he tried to a part of them. He tried to adapt the students’ styles in his classroom which was brilliant. Then he used relevant materials in class to teach and of course the students enjoyed it very much. They even scored in test. Even though at the beginning of his teaching, he used extrinsic motivation to promote students’ interesting in learning, then slowly it turned into intrinsic motivation when the students realized they wanted to graduate from the school.

After watched this movie, I asked myself, “What kind of teacher am I going to be?”

Position Paper

10th August 2010

We discussed about the issue of arranged marriage during lecture. Actually it was a discussion on how to write a position paper. It was just an issue to be used as the example to write a position paper.

At the beginning of the lecture, we were asked to study the advantages and disadvantages of one sex school. We talked about it in class and everyone had different views on this topic. Then I realised that in position paper, we should learn how to stand with our opinions and argue when it would be debated. To make it ours, we needed to stand and fight for it. I knew it didn't sound so easy but that was what we must do. Learn to express our thoughts and stand for it.

Drowgames Prize-Giving Ceremony

6th August 2010

Drowgames was part of my routines and I missed it very much. On 31st July 2010, all of the players played like crazy till midnight. It was fun even though it made me exhausted. The efforts that we put to play the game were worthed. I won the 6th place in the competition and of course i received one ipod nano as the prize. I also wanted to take this opportunity to congratulate to my beloved coursemates who won ipods.

On that day, we were told that this game was for teaching and learning purposes. We did play it as an English game but this game could be existed in many languages and terms in all courses in the world. Seriously it was amazing. All of teachers or even lecturers could use this material to teach their students. This game could be created in various level of proficiency and it would be beneficial for every student who was basically from different level of proficiency. Since it was a game, it would bring down the affective filter of the students. That was something crucial to make sure the students could engage to the lesson without any problems. I believed this game could be effective and the students would definitely enjoy it.

We were cartoonists =D

5th August 2010

I kept asking myself? Could I draw? My teammates kept encouraging me to draw. It meant I had to draw. I could not believe we came out with our own fable. It was interesting because we told the fable in comic strip form and I was loving it.

Our fable entitled as Food for Winter. The fable itself looked quite simple but the message that was conveyed was salient. We added sense of humor into the fable to make it more fun and enjoyable. In 45 minutes during tutorial, all of us were struggling to finish up the comic strip. Luckily we managed to do it. Congratulation to all of us.

In fact, I believed that fable was a very good material that could be used to teach language in class. The script or dialogue was simple and the visual would help the students to the story line. It was like reading a book except more visual and pretty much shorter. All fable carried their own values that could be inculcated in the lesson. By using fable, students would enjoy it and the lesson would be relevant and effective.

Drowgame Knock-out Competition

29th July 2010

During tutorial, we were asked to bring our own notebooks to Resource Centre. All of us quite excited since we already noticed that we would play Drowgames at that time. I played three rounds if I was not mistaken. My first opponent was actually refused to play with me because according to him, I was an expert but seriously I did not think so. For me, it was a competition, what u needed to do was performed your best. As he expected, I won that round. I played with another opponent for the second time after that and I won again. The last round I played was the third round where I lost to the champion of Drowgames Knock-out Competition. I was having fun although I didn’t win. All of us were giving our best to grab the champion title. Never mind, for those who had lost, took it as a fun time to play game with your friends or just thought as drill and practice to improve your English =). For those who had won, congratulation.

Mona Lisa Smile

I liked this movie called Mona Lisa Smile. I was attracted to this movie because I put an expectation on this movie. I expected I could learn something from it since it was about a teacher who was facing a number of obstacles through out the years while she was teaching at the girl school.

Mona Lisa Smile was a very good movie and of course it was entertaining. Why I said so? It was because the story line was perfect and the actresses were great in playing their characters. I did enjoy it and I would definitely watch it again next time. From 5 stars, I gave it 4 stars as its ranking.

From the perspective of education, I noticed that this movie revealed how education was important at that time. The teacher tried many techniques to teach her students even though at the beginning of the movie, she faced a lot of problems. In fact, this movie portrayed how women at that time tried to be perfect by gaining knowledge and it made them looked as high standard women. The teacher did a very good hard work to make sure her students would be able to achieve their dreams and become who or what they wanted to be. She tried very hard to approach her students since her students were not sharing the same characteristics. She managed to do that. In fact, she taught about life and she made the students looked at life in different ways and perspectives. That was the reason why she left her students to look at a huge painting and asked them to interpret the painting based on their own opinion. It was a beautiful job that had been done by the teacher.

As a future teacher, like I said before, I loved the way the teacher taught her students to look at life in different perspectives. Different students might have different interpretation. I wanted to make changes in my students' lives just like what had been done by the great teacher in Mona Lisa Smile.

PRPi10

When we were asked to go to Dewan Besar, we were kind of excited to have class outside of the lecture hall. Well, we walked all the way to our destination and met Dr. Jayakaran Mukundan there. That was my first time attending a research exhibition. We walked around and looked at many kind of researches that had been conducted by many lecturers and other students.
We saw a lot of new things that newly produced by those brilliant people. Research is one way of gaining knowledge and i found it was interesting.
The last booth that I visited on that day was Dr. Jayakaran Mukundan's. His research was more attractive to me since it was related to English Language. The products that produced by our lecturer and his students were really helpful for teachers (unfortunately I could not remember the name of the products).
I believed research was a good way to learn something or to be expert in something. To make it a success, of course effort was needed.