An Inspiring Teacher

This year my boy is fortunate enough to be in the class of an inspiring teacher.

At the beginning of the year, even before school started she sent emails to parents to go to school to collect the school text books. She didn't have to do so because it was not required at the time but she did so anyway. She gave each parent a note to say that she would be working closely with the parents and boy she certainly did that!


She gives personalized gifts of crafts she handmade, little bookmarks with the kids names on it to encourage reading. She believes very much in reading.

She buys books for them to read and recommends story books that parents can buy.

She motivates them to improve their handwriting by correcting those who do not write well because she believes that once their handwriting improves, so will their work.

She spends extra time in the morning to get weaker students to read to her from books she buys for them.

After the first test, she made appointments with parents to discuss their child's work even though it was not parent teachers day and not the official collect report card day.

During parents teachers day, she took extra effort to make comments cards for parents to give feedback.

Her lessons are always fun. 

When she taught the lesson on family unity, she made a whatsapp group and requested all parents to send in family photos to her and personal messages from home to the children so she could surprise them. She made a presentation to class with all the family photos of each one displayed and printed out the special messages on colored papers to pass to the kids. Then she made the kids write letters from their heart to their parents.

When she taught a lesson on local foods, she bought roti canai and made teh tarik herself in class and everyone ate those.

When she was teaching a module on musical instruments. She got the kids to put together a mini concert. Some sang. Some played the ukelele, several played the piano and other instruments. Then she sent the videos to the parents in the whatsapp group. One parents thanked her for inspiring her child to take up music again.

While teaching about co-operation, she set up team building exercises in the hall and the kids really had fun. After the exercise she explained why some won and others didn't. Back home, the kids could relate what went wrong with the team work, for example because there was too much quarrelling within the team. Again, parents were treated with photos of their kids in the team building exercises while the kids were doing them and the parents were busy either at home or at work. The kids looked like they were having a terrific time.

During a Chinese lesson on an ancient Chinese story or idiom, she had the kids put up a short play. It only took 20 minutes to act out and they made impromptu costumes. The  boys acted while the girls wrote the script and prepared the "costumes" including paper swords and paper crown for the "king". Again, parents got to enjoy the show too. The kids obviously enjoyed it too from the big smiles and the lesson will be learned and remembered much more effectively this way.

Recently the class had a mini party because every single one had passed up all of their homework consecutively for 10 times so she rewarded them.

Every one of her lessons have obviously been given much thought and preparation.

I wish all teachers were like that.

My boy is not in a private or international school. He is in a SJKC. So that is why I say it is wrong to stereotype SJKC because every school and every teacher is different.