What Motivates A Student?

I observed more lessons today as part of my teaching attachment, and was informed by my teacher mentor that she wanted me to invigilate the test she would be giving her Normal Academic class tomorrow. Of course I said yes, but tonight I’m going to pray hard that everything will be ok and that they will take the test without incident and that they will behave themselves.

Our project is on how to motivate the different kids from the different streams. Honestly, I don’t think two weeks is enough to do this project. I’d like a few years!

I don’t remember exactly what made me like or dislike teachers, but I usually liked the teachers who taught my favourite subjects. So I always liked the English teachers and the Literature teachers.

However, thinking back, there were only two teachers who made a very great impact on me. One was my Higher Chinese teacher, who has become my role model for the kind of teacher I want to be. Our class was terrible at Chinese, and he walked into class on the first day of Secondary Four and announced his belief in us (well, his belief in himself, rather). He told us that every year he had taught he had turned some of the worst students into A-students. It might have been blatant propaganda but it sure worked on me. From that day on I started to nurse the hope that I could perhaps get an A in my Higher Chinese.

He always put in a lot of effort into his classes, keeping us occupied with worksheets, short stories, and compositions. He read out short stories that his own students had written, which were simple and interesting. He gave spelling tests every day, over and over again, until we’d finally mastered the characters. He had a very precise “People’s Republic of China” accent even though he was a Singaporean, and to top it off he’d written a book before, which he boasted of time and again. He knew his subject and loved it and his enthusiasm infected me. He always teased me about my being “auntie”, because I was always cleaning the blackboard and sweeping the floor. He was flamboyant, not a little good-looking, very camp, dramatic, and sarcastic. I had tremendous faith in him.

I took my Higher Chinese Prelims and got a miserable C5, but when I got my O-level Higher Chinese grades back, I couldn’t believe my eyes. A2, and I’d written “the museum of the plants” instead of “the botanical gardens” in my essay, which I’d cried about because my father said that it was an unforgivable error! I attribute the A2 to Mr Tan Kar Chun, because of his faith in himself and in me, which may have brainwashed me into having such faith that I could get an A. Who knew but that it was all psychological, because I’ve never been good at Chinese. But it certainly worked.

The other teacher, surprisingly, was a Chemistry relief teacher we had for some time, when my other teacher was on maternity leave. I can’t even remember his name. But I remember that he was a retired Chemistry teacher with an unremarkable face. We didn’t think much of him at first, because he was old and slow and unlovely, but his remarkable methods of teaching soon won us over.

He would heat the test tube over the Bunsen burner with his bare hands and encourage us to do the same. He would give us little tips that I put to good use during practical lessons. For example, he would reiterate time and again that any gas bubbling out quickly from the test tube would always be carbon dioxide, because only carbon dioxide would give “vurgurous eefarvarsense”. I can still hear him saying “vurgurous eefarvarsense” now, as I write about it. During our chemistry practical exam for the O-levels, every single gas bubbled out rapidly from the bottom of the test tube. “Vurgurous eefarvarsense”, I thought, and confidently wrote “carbon dioxide” and described everything carbon dioxide did for every one (colourless, odourless, extinguishes a lighted splint, not least of all vigorous effervescence observed!).

I wasn’t a typical hardworking student. I would dream away during class and look out of the window at boys. I never really paid attention except during English lessons. My Geography teacher remembers me with horror as the girl who answered, “What is the physical barrier which separates China from India?” as “The Great Wall of China”. I used to memorise answers by writing songs about them, or by thinking of dumb mnemonic thingys (I still remember the Banjaran Titiwangsa, a mountain in Malaysia, because I used to think “the BANana goes for a JALAN jalan with his TITI whose surname is WANG and they SA niao together!” – translation: the banana goes for a walk with his younger brother whose surname is wang and they urinate together…)

But the things that motivated me were belief in the capability of my teacher and unorthodoxy in teaching methods. Yes, these were the two things that motivated me.