The Teaching Path

How I Got Started
Well, being impatient, soft-spoken and ambitious, I never thought of imparting my skills to anyone even though I am very fluent in dual-languages. Up till high school, I believe the only ones I taught or tried to teach were a couple of close classmates any my younger sibling.

Then one fine day, I landed myself a vacation post as a Tuition Coordinator. What I had to do was extract email enquiries from the company mailbox, and handle inbound calls - all these were parents and guardians seeking tutors for their kids.

After jotting the requests down and checking on the budget, preferred days of lessons, preferred criteria of tutors, I would log into the system and conduct a search for the right tutor among our vast database of registered tutors. Then I would shortlist a few according to qualifications, gender, age and experience, call them up to see if they could take up my assignments on hands.

If they agree, I would call the parents or guardians back to confirm the matched assignment.

That was it, deal closed. Easy-peasy, and I would await my commission.

At the end of my stint, I came across an enquiry for a language teacher to teach spoken Mandarin to a group of foreign students studying at a local university. They had a good budget, and the assignment sounded easy enough.

So I secretly closed the deal on the sly, deciding to take up the teaching task myself.

Day One of Teaching
I did not know what to expect, really.  It was going to be my first time teaching. I had a rough idea of the gender and nationality of my students-to-be. The group consisted of five of them, and I only needed to teach once a week for two hours.

So I prepared notebooks and Hanyu Pinyin (phonics) materials when I arrived in my smartest outfit.

I decided to teach them the very basic of learning how to greet each other, introduce themselves, and usage of the "what, why, where, how, who" questions and answers.

Time flew by. Two hours was up, and my students were exhausted but felt enriched. They were really gems - diligent, motivated to learn on their own, and polite. Not difficult to handle at all.

I did note that I had made a few mistakes in my Hanyu Pinyin spellings - not having used this system of writing for so long - and decided to brush up at home in time for the next lesson.

There, I was a teacher / tutor! It wasn't that hard.

Lessons flew by, and during local festivals, I would bring them snacks related to the certain festivals and tell them some stories.  They enjoyed their lessons and I enjoyed teaching, until I changed jobs and could no longer continue to commit my weekends to teaching them.

More Teaching Assignments
Eventually, things changed again, and a few years down the roads I was back on an office-hour routine. Bored, I decided to earn some extra income and kill time by looking for some tutoring assignments on the side.

I taught English mainly, to middle-school graders.

Having lost touch with current syllabus, I had to purchase a load of textbooks and assessment books to familiarize myself with that was going on currently. Ouch, the standards have risen by so much compared to the time I was back in school.

So I usually rotated my students on different assignments on a weekly basis - essay, comprehension , grammar-related tasks, cloze comprehension etc. Sometimes I would try to make learning more fun with small treats, or educational games.

I also prepared some reading materials for them, as well as sourced for past-exam papers from schools for my students to practice on.

Most importantly of all, I would ask them to show me their schoolwork for the subject I was teaching (i.e. English), and spot their weaknesses so that we could work from the root source.

Some of the mistakes they made were pretty funny, but as long as they were willing to learn, I was willing to help them out. Being a tutor, one should be firm and encouraging; I also had to be careful to not use words that would hurt what little confidence they had.

It was tiring work, so after I saw them through the exams - which I derived satisfaction from when they scored better than past semesters - I decided to stop teaching.


Voluntary Classroom Teaching
Currently, I volunteer at a center to teach some high school kids English.

We don't get paid much, but these kids come from low-income families that could barely afford to give them tuition. On their own, the kids would not study so their results tended to suffer.

At this center, the principal charge the parents a very low fee per subject, and we try our best to help them improve on their various subjects.

I had heard that this class was very naughty and often disobeyed the tutor. However, I did not find it hard to get them to do work and participate in discussions- by being firm when there was a need to, and rewarding if deemed fit, too.

It is gratifying to see their scores improving, and know that we have helped them in achieving it.

Being a teacher, one has to be patient, understanding and of course, keep updated on current learning trends. I never thought I had it in me, but I never would have known if I did not try.

It could even be pressurizing nearing examinations period, where both the schools, students and even parents start stressing the teachers. Being a teacher / tutor is definitely not easy, so students, do study hard so as not to let your parents, teachers and tutors down!