In Conversation with Tutor

Yesterday, Mrs Lim surprised Shu Qi, Yi Xian, Simin and Me by asking us "Do you find me very strict?"

Clearly we are quite unprepared but I decided to tell her about the displeasure regarding "small talks" It seems that she is more comfortable with smaller groups of people hence she was able to initiate the move.

And today I plucked up some courage and decided to talk to her while talking about my issue of taking art.

The first issue I brought up is the issue regarding communication between us. I speak about the barriers and the class being uncomfortable to communicate to her.

Mrs Lim said that she is open to views and opinions and hope to get more responses from the class instead of staying silent. She has expressed her wishes to communicate with the class and develop a better working relationship for the year.

She also said that herself, being our new CT-tutor feels that it is strange to approach the class so closely bonded to Mrs Tan, she has gave one personal example of her feelings by citing the incident after the Newspaper collection where was was alone while the class was chatting or socializing together. She expressed her fear of interuppting the conservation if the class don't feel comfortable around her.

She has encouraged us to speak up but objectively. She encouraged us to voice out more in order to understand one another better and seek improvement on various areas such as how to make CT periods more interesting or how to develop a more comfortable teaching method.

Regarding the jumping here or there for chemistry topics, Mrs Lim has told me that she felt that she was a little unprepared and disorganized and expressed thanks to the people who have told her about the matter and now she gives instructions on what to prepare before the next tutorial. She understand that some of us have alot of work to do and were unable to prepare all the chemistry tutorials without neglecting the other subjects.

Regarding voicing of opinions, I have expressed concerns whether she would be upset or would our opinions be disrespectful to her, she felt that as long as the opinion or view is objective and improves on the learning experience and builds better relationship, she is open to the class's opinions and views. And, she encourages us to voice out more.

Regarding quiz tests at the end of some Chemistry tutorials, she says it was out of good intention and she meant no harm. The aims of these tests is to provide a push to make us revise our work and learn something at the end.

Mrs Lim was also curious to know about the relationship of the class with other tutors and who are the more vocal ones in our class.

On Chemistry tutorial, Mrs Lim wishes that we will remain focus so as to prevent missing out important parts of a lecture or tutorial, she is very concern that we get decent grades for Chemistry. This explains for the warning to Jansen and Me during Tuesday lecture. She also stated that its the basic respect that we should listen to the lecturer at least (but you need not absorb, I think, if you really cannot), she was afraid that we will miss out critical portions of content if we go out of focus as well.

On the side of discipline, Mrs Lim made her stand that she is very particular regarding discipline, she seems to be one that believes discipline is a virtue and something that encourages self-discipline. Its part of responsibility and part of protecting the school's image and as everyone know, our new principal is very particular or extremely particular about school's image, hence Mrs Lim's concern to keep us out of image troubles and the principal's cane.

However, talking about discipline Mrs Lim isn't that bad, take a look at the school rules and you know, as part of the school rule, all boys should wear leather belt in case you didn't notice, well, Mrs Lim didn't enforce that.

I myself felt that discipline is very important, considering that now we are J2s, we have to set some examples and considering that we are students of NYJC and we go out into public sometimes, attire is important, just recently the somebody wrote to the Newspaper of some girls (from some so-called elite girls school) causing disgrace of their secondary school, so unless you are in casual clothings, some discipline is needed. However I do find rules like entering from the front door a bit odd. Anyway, think about both sides, firstly it bores us alot, but there is reason behind that, even if you don't agree with it YET.

Mrs Lim also told me that she believes people like us are not young already and should be old enough to be responsible, therefore, she felt that she do not like to remind us too many times on certain things, and hence may get a little impatient like how I can get very impatient on people who know nuts about HTML code in blogs.

Last but not least, Mrs Lim from my experience with her, is very keen and eager to build a good working relationship with the class, however she is still very strong on discipline. It has been known that she could be quite impatient, this is partly understandable by just looking through our grades and her eagerness to get us to score better, and her eagerness to complete the syllabus and get started on revision. Hey, but at least this shows she's concerned. The worst teacher would have just leave you, becasue he gave up on you. Anyway, she's a serious yet nice teacher, at times introvert, very concerned teacher and quite impatient sometimes. (erm, speaking about impatient, our class is quite slow..........)

Anyway, shall end off with what Mrs Tan e-mailed me in the pass:
"You, your CT and Mrs Lim will warm up to each other soon enough. It is still too early to tell if there is Chemistry bet you all. "