Friday, July 18, 2008

Compuslory Study Time!


Yesterday, was my turn to be the Duty Teacher Mentor for the Hostel.
In Victoria Hall, 8-10pm is scheduled as compulsory night study time for all Secondary boarders.

Yesterday, I took the opportunity to go through some fundamentals of essay writing with the ASEAN/A*star Scholars. It was a good session as 2 of the scholars (Kai and Brian) volunteered to let me used their essays for teaching.

The topic we covered yesterday was
"Young people have more problems than adults. Do you agree?"

This was a challenging topic to write about.
In the blogs that both Brian and Kai originally posted their essays, we can see that a common mistake is that students make the logically fallacy of assuming that if I have MANY problems, then I MUST HAVE MORE problems than you. MANY does not equal MORE.

What students need to do in this essay is to:
1) identify the key areas of life in which young people and adults have problems.(i.e. relationship, finance, stress, etc)
2) In this areas of life, what are the different problems that affect young people and adults; and how severe is this effect (i.e. the 'quantity' and 'quality' of the problems)
3) From then you can state your stand and provide evidence to support it; as well as presenting other considerations.

Here are the links to Kai's and Brian's Blog. (Thanks to both of them for sharing)
You will also see my corrections listed under the comments section

Kai's Blog: http://returnofkai.blogspot.com/
Brian's Blog: http://roneworube.wordpress.com/

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Thanks for the beautiful posting!
I Look Forward To Your Returning to your Blog and learning more from you!

Aaron Tung Wei Jie said...

I hope that the next time this lessons comes about, Mr. Siow would use other people's essay besides Kai and Brian. This way we can learn from others as well.

Anonymous said...

The lesson was fruitful :) thank you Mr.Siow for such an interesting CST period. I personally really like the video about changing the color of the cards. I really looking forward for more lessons from you.

Just like Aaron said, I think we could use more essays from others. One more suggestion is that, after awhile, we can have a small debate between two groups to make it more interesting :)

tAnk.