Hihi.. I understand that some of you tutors fr Singapore have been popping by to have a look at what's going on here.. and finally I have time to write about life here..so will jus give a brief (ok, maybe not that brief a summary...)
Its a nice balance of work and play.. a typical day starts at about 7.30am where we make breakfast and pack lunches in groups of 4-6 people. We set off for school at 8.30am by foot and arrive at the respective departments by 9am. The 3 chem students (Teow Kwang 3P; Tao Tao 3K and Fang Zhou 3M) and myself are attached to Ganesan's lab where they do Organic synthesis.. and analysis. They are really really enthusiastic and grabbing every learning opportunity. It is hard for them as they are working with post grad's on their projects when they don't really know much about O Chem. The post grads, Lauren, Alex, Anna and Wendy are really hospitable and patient with the students, trying to explain as many things as possible.. at times they get stressed out cos our students ask so many questions, which is actually great. They have been introduced to Clayden and numerous reaction mechanisms and of course analytical techniques, eg. TLC, HPLC etc..
Dr Ganesan has also been really kind with his time. Last week he actually stayed back to give us some theory lessons on their projects and spectroscopy until 7pm! They were really confused by NMR.. but managed to roughly figure out what usually takes 4 lectures in an hour.. so that was quite impressive as well. Looks like we have our next olypiad students in the making. The other 20 students go to the Electronics and Computer Science department and work on interesting projects every alternate day:) Mr Denis Nicole has been doing so much for the students. We feel really grateful to him for his time and efforts to make this a good stay for us. Francis has been photoshopping amazing postcards to document our activities.. scroll down to have a look!
At about 3 plus to 4 pm Francis and I conduct Physics and Chemistry lessons for the students. So far I've done Kinetics tutorial + Kinetics Quiz.. next week we will do a little more kinetics and I can start on Chem Equilibria Tutorial. (Thanks to Jeannie agreeing to having the Chem Eq Lecture's online and Jerome, Wendy and Jaimee@Edutech I've saved precious tutorial time!)
The more energetic pp go for some exercise after lessons and by about 7pm its time to cook and eat dinner (even the boys have been making very impressive dishes! Altho I think we are running out of ideas of what to cook. Some group had frozen pizza today I heard.. ) at 9.20 pm we brief the I/Cs for the next day, followed by debrief/ briefing of the whole grp by the I/Cs at 9.30 pm and we debrief the ICs of the day at 10 plus pm. We are trying to make use of this opportunity to let the students lead the group, a pair at a time for 2 days each time. Hopefully they learn something useful even though it can be a little tempting to just be authoritarian about things :P
Can see the students are getting tired cos the poor dears have to hand in reflections and experiment reports almost every night. Contrary to what you teachers may believe, they are also busy doing their GP, Maths, PW and Bio... so be kind to them when they get back..
We go out to play on Thursday and the weekends. Last Thursday we went to Stonehenge & Salisbury, while today we went to Bath and tmrw we will be exploring Southampton.
Next week we will be looking forward to London and Cambridge in between many hours of work...
And of course we are missing school, home, colleagues, classmates, various different "sisters", "mums", good friends... so do take care and see you soon!
Love, Lyn
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