How a Singapore teacher won over her class

In the weeks leading to Chinese New Year, social media was ablaze with a story about a teacher’s online rant about the lack of parental involvement in their children’s education.

While she was widely panned for her post, including drawing the ire of the Ministry of Education, what she said resonated with me as a fellow-educator because it spoke to the deep frustrations that teachers face. (Needless to say, she has since resigned as an adjunct teacher.)

This story was very much in my mind during a Chinese New Year visit, when I happened to sit down to chat with someone connected to me in the most tenuous of ways. Serendipitously, I found out that she had been a teacher, among the many things she had done.

Now, conversations during Chinese New Year visits are rarely deep, much less scintillating. This is especially so when you are seated with folks you rarely see as a matter of course. Intrigued, I pressed her to share anecdotes from her teaching days.

This occurred about three to four years ago. After making a mid-career switch to teaching, she was first sent to a neighbourhood secondary school.

The kind of school where you, the newbie (especially female) teacher, are told on your first day when you set foot in class that you will probably be crying by dismissal. Told by the class, that is. Because all the others did.

Nonplussed and hard-nosed,  she retorted: “Let's see who cries first, ok?”

Nothing in teacher training really prepares you for this. Before you get to showcase your mastery of pedagogy and content, you have to make a connection.

But how do you reach out to kids who are cynical, suspicious, disengaged, and who think they have been given up on already?

Absenteeism and discipline issues are par for the course. Quite a few are from dysfunctional families. Some are mixed up with gangs.

At this point, you realise that you have to put aside all books, and just get to know them.

Easier said than done. You do so by yourself first coming from generosity and vulnerability, and baring something of yourself.

You share your own failures and mistakes, for example. But you have to take care that it is not condescending and contrived. Many of these kids have come to develop a highly-refined ability to detect insincerity.

You reach out your hand, get it bitten, and reach it out again anyway. You get past the sneers and the scowls, the cursing and swearing, the posturing and the swagger, and you learn to read their lives.

You see who wears his or her hair down one day to hide a black eye. You notice who never ever eats anything during recess, so you can bring sandwiches and snacks from home.

You find out quickly who has a change of clothes in their bags because they've got jobs they need to be at after school.

Bit by bit, the ice thaws and the masks crack.

And the little, hard-won victories come, if they come: those habitually absent start showing up, chronic latecomers show up a little less late, a hint of a smile, a glimmer of understanding. A human connection.

This reminded me of the work of Father Greg Boyle, founder and director of Homeboy Industries, a social enterprise right in the heart of the greatest concentration of gangs in Los Angeles.

Homeboy Industries provides rehabilitation, counselling, training, jobs and tattoo removals for the most hardened gang members.

It then struck me that the heart of teaching, as Father Boyle says, consists of telling our students — all our students — that they are much more than the worst thing they have ever done.

And some kids desperately need to hear it. But we need to say it, no matter how tough a slog it might be to get to the point where we can say it authentically.

One time, my friend fell badly ill and was absent from school for weeks. She was completely homebound.

One day when she finally felt well enough to take a walk in her neighbourhood, she saw her students skulking around her estate, furtively darting around the void decks, furiously going around the different carparks.

“’Cher, ’cher, we came to look for you. You so long never come school, we all worried. Are you ok? When are you coming back?”

The school office would not tell her students her address. But they knew roughly where she lived, knew her car registration number, and so spent days tracking her down.

For a teacher, this is validation, no matter if you seek it or not.

For the lives that are touched, this is world changing. Not “the” world, but their world. Now how’s that for a KPI?

There is no public policy lesson here, at least not any I intended. Nor any deep philosophical point.

Here’s just a story I was privileged to hear, one which I think is important to share.

I’m sure it is just one of the many stories about our teachers out there.

But as the poet Alvin Pang is fond of saying, the small picture is the big picture.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Adrian W J Kuah is Director of the Futures Office, National University of Singapore. He is concurrently Senior Research Fellow at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy.