I know many seniors (trained teachers now) have kept marvelous personal blogs to document their own reflections during training, and have continued to keep them even after they've started work. I doubt my ability to command such high levels of discipline, and simply wish to keep it for as long as I can.
It's been a long and (relatively) arduous journey of 16 years (+2 for NS) to get myself educated both academically and spiritually. All this while, I've known that I haven't thought of doing anything else apart from joining the Education Service when I qualify. It might have all started as a baseless dream, or aspiration as some like to call it. But eventually it became almost like reality, like something I've spent my life working towards. Today, I finished my degree, I qualify for NIE and I am appointed to service. It's almost like a dream come true! But therein lies everything that I never knew about the teaching profession; the difficulties behind it, the training and demands required of a teacher; the changing landscapes of Singapore's education system and the many new initiatives which were rolled out only in the recent few years which made things very different from when I was in school even though I've only graduated less than a decade ago.
I hope that in this journey to becoming a trained teacher, I can find within myself, renewed strength to stay in this challenging profession. I wish to shine new light upon my childhood dream of becoming an Educator, and to really understand this aspiration before I embark on it.
"The best learners....often make the worst teachers. They are, in a very real sense, perceptually challenged. They cannot imagine what it must be like to struggle to learn something that comes so naturally to them."
- Stephen Brookfield (Becoming a Critically Reflective Teacher)
Cheers!
