Just when I as a teacher, thought that I knew what learning is all about, 2 recent encounters reshaped and refreshed my ideas totally and lifted me up to a higher plane of understanding! They kinda got me all excited about teaching and learning all over again! :)

Encounter 1: Nuturing Habits of a High Achiever with your Child

I went for this talk at JE library, conducted by master coach, Michel Gargne. In case you are wondering, he is a middle aged guy, not a lady although you should pronounce his name as Michelle! He is a French Canadian with more than 40 over years of experience as a coach. In fact, he is a coach of many coaches and there are many Olympic Athletes and World Champions who are training under him. Recently, he motivated an under achiever to become an A* student in 25 days!
I will just share what I gained the most out of the 2 hours talk:

He started off with this simple question: do you brush your teeth everyday?
Of course, our answer would be an obvious YES! Unless you are really lazy!

He asked the next question: Do you brush your teeth perfectly?
I beg your pardon? Why ask such a ridiculous question? Simple: most people are just contented with how they are doing in life. They do not seek to improve any further in what they are doing.

The secret of a high achiever is simple: they have the desire to improve in whatever they are doing everyday and for the rest of their lives! Be it brushing teeth, or doing well for a subject or playing captain’s ball! They just seek to IMPROVE EVERYDAY. There is no end to their relentless pursuit for excellence! They challenge themselves and compete against themselves. They are not keen about winning against others. They are just satisfied with winning themselves and becoming better! Don’t misunderstand this idea of winning: According to Michel, there are many athletes who are willing to die young if they are given a choice to take a drug that they help them to achieve gold and experience that moment of glory! Also, after winning major competitions, many committed suicide as they are not able to adapt back to the normal life of doing simple chores and people not knowing about their achievements. Winning is not the end result that high achiever ultimately look for. It’s the thrill of becoming better that delights them the most! :)

To achieve that, they are 21 habits that a high achiever should have to become an all rounded person! They are generally divided into 5 sections: Mental, Emotional, Physical, Financial and Spiritual.

Just going to share one MENTAL habit with you:

When you are setting a goal, make it a multi-sensory goal! For example, your goal is to do well in your studies. That statement as a goal is not good enough! You need to be more specific and you need to IMAGINE and IMMERSE yourself fully into that goal! What do I mean by that? You need to specify things like, I want to score 6 A1s and 2 B3s for this coming final year exams (don’t set unrealistic goals within a short time but of course, don’t belittle yourself by setting too low a goal!). The subjects that I want to ace are e.g. physics, e.maths, a.maths, chemistry, biology and social studies. Now, you need to imagine yourself taking back the papers with the scores and grades that you wish to see on the papers. You need to feel how wonderful it is to be getting them back and how your friends are happy for you. You need to imagine how proud you are showing your results to your parents. You need to imagine how happy they are with your achievements and you are motivated to do it consistently and even better the next time.

This is what a small church choir did by imagining that they are able to sing for the Olympics one day. They practiced hard and immerse themselves into the goal and sang during each practice as if they are there! In the end, when they applied to sing for the event, they got in! Not only that, they even won the gold award for their wonderful singing! That’s the power of having a multi-sensory goal! We need to imagine and immerse ourselves in the goal each day and work hard to achieve it! :)

Michel started the parent-coach method of helping parents to be coaches to their kids so that they can nurture them as high achievers! Yup, as expected, I am keen to sign up for part 1 of the course on 23-24 Sept 06! :) Not just to help my kids but also to hopefully help all the students that I am teaching!

I recently met this guy from England who is a qualified FA licensed coach for soccer! All the schools he coached became district champions! Told ms Y about it but she rejected my proposal of setting up soccer for our school… :( hope to find alternative ways around it! :) I am planning to learn from the guy and become a qualified coach myself! :)

Encounter 2: Learning through Engagement

This was a talk for teachers, conducted by Republic Polytechnic for schools to learn about their unique approach to learning: through PBL (problem-based learning)! Each day, a class of 25 students will break into teams of 5 to solve one real-life problem a day and that‘s all they will do throughout their 3 years of stay there! A problem a day, keeps the learner amazed! (A tagline that I thought of for them!) They are using this model as they realized how humans learned in the first place: by being there (where it all happened) and doing it yourself! No one learns how to cycle until the person has tried it consecutively with experiences of falls and balance. The teams in each class will research on the net, get a bit of help through some scaffolding activities, discuss, argue, present and defend their solution or findings!

At the end of it, they felt a sense of ownership for the knowledge that they acquired and they develop the confidence to handle the unexpected! And the best part is this: they are given a personal comment about their performance daily and are assessed based on their presentations (they get to choose their 14 best presentations out of 16 per term – the school allows 2 days of “bad days” that students may have! Cool!) and they are given 4 understanding tests (30 mins each) at the end of the term, testing on their understanding of the knowledge they have learned and not on how much they memorized for exams! They get to choose the best 3 test results out of the 4 as well! great, isn't it!? :)

The school believes that students should not be seating for exams that test them on knowledge that they have already known, which they just crammed and commit to memory just for the sake of grades! What they value is the PROCESS of learning, about HOW they managed to get the solution and not the solution itself! And of course, they are always ready to accept more than one answer to a problem as it is in real life, provided that the students are able to logically defend their case!

If my kids eventually are keen on the courses offered by this polytechnic, I will definitely be first to encourage them to go there for this exciting experience of learning, just as how every human learns and how the real working world is functioning everyday! :)

End of my short essay on Learning! That’s about 1200 words! LOL!

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I love nutang! the best blog host i have encountered so far! finally, i can customise my blog with ease! a little caught up learning how to customise so i kinda like disrupted my records of stuff happening in my life! so here's a rojak entry that comprises of all that i can rmb these couples of days:

most of the students seem to be mugging hard for the common tests... which is a good sign! :) Jia you people! before you know it, it's gg to be over! a word of advice: what you do not understand, you do not own. what you own, you can deplore and use during exams or tests no matter what is the scenario! when it comes to subjects like physix, memorising is not the way! understand physix :)

a student pretended to be h** parent and called me in response to my demand to receive a personal call from h** parents regarding h** results, whom the student said are always working late. knew it right from the start but i decided to play along so that i can find out more about what is happening in the family and remind h** that studies should always be top priority, especially if the student don't come from a financially stable family. I really hope that the student can be like Farrah Gray who came from a poor, single parent family and work hard with sheer determination to become who he is today (click on his name to read more)! anyway, the student still do not know that i am not "deceived" by h** and i will see what can be done to help! h** parents, i realised, are too busy and tired making ends meet... a scenario that reminds me of my parents, who worked so hard to support my education and i was so foolish to have wasted my time and their money away when i was younger and not live my life to its fullest! we have come a long way since the days when we all squeezed together in a rented room! i am so glad that i came to realisation when i was about 17 years old, the day i accepted Christ into my life and He has ever since made a radical change in my life! :)

my WISH^toyota came true on 15 Aug 2006 @ 7:10pm! yup! I finally obtained my new car! very satisfied with it so far! thank God for His provision!
money sense: buy a car that is suited for your need first rather than for your taste! cars are always a liability (that means it will always depreciate in value!) so it's not worthwhile spending money making your car look like those models in Tokyo Drift, 2 fast 2 furious! sell your car before it turns 3 cos it will depreciate much more in value after that and most cars these days start to break down easily when it crosses 3 years old! It's applicable here in S'pore, not sure about other countries!

learnt this from my knowledgeable wife:
do you know how the term "white elephant" came about?
there is really such a thing as a white elephant that is beautiful but difficult to maintain bcos of its consumption rate! in the past, countries actually send white elephants to their enemies as gifts, in disguise to wear out their resources! what a deceiving move! :P

showed this MOTIVATIONAL video to my students to encourage them: note that the word "EVERYDAY" is repeated so many times! passion is not a once for a while kinda of thing! it's all about living it out passionately EVERYDAY! :)

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