Early in my career as an educator, I was placed as an assistant trainer to a senior trainer in the company I was working at.
The school we were running the programme in had a reputation.
A good one.
When we entered the school, something felt off. I couldn't quite pinpoint it until we commenced class.
Despite the best efforts of the senior trainer, the students refused to settle down and fights nearly broke out at least twice (among the students).
Even the form teacher of the class, who was sitting in, couldn't exert any control. And we had 4 or 5 lessons with them in total.
Later, I heard similar stories from another trainer (from the same company) who was teaching another class in another location in the school.
For obvious reasons, I cannot disclose the identity of the school. It was, to put it mildly, my worst-ever experience of disciplinary problems in a school.
I've heard since then that the situation in the school had improved over the years, but, as I've never been back there, I cannot confirm or deny the truth of this.
The upshot of this is that every other school seems, in comparison, so much better.
Because I always compare potentially bad experiences to this one, I end up being always thankful even when things go slightly awry.
Framing. Such an important thing.
My First Experience in a Part-Time Job Wasn't Great, But it Helped Me Discover What I Wanted and Didn't Want
Having always been a bit different (some say VERY), I naturally gravitated towards the self-employed/freelance/entrepreneur world.
Once I found it, of course.
My first foray into the working world was as a part-time admin assistant in the F&B department of a local country club. It was a holiday job, just before I started studying in Temasek Polytechnic (Biotechnology!)
The job came through an introduction, so I got it pretty easily. And because there were 6 months between getting my O level results and the start of my polytechnic course, I had plenty of time.
I found soon that I likely wasn't entirely needed, because most of the tasks were straightforward and I finished them in short order, thus ending up with a lot of downtime.
One of the tasks was supposed to take over a week, but I got it done in 2 days.
Unfortunately, being in an office environment at a low ranking job, and partly because I was introduced into it, I couldn't look like I had nothing to do even though I really had nothing to do.
This was extraordinarily hard.
I couldn't sit around reading, and there were no modern mobile phones with ready Internet access. The computers here weren't exactly very fast and there just wasn't that much on the Internet in those days anyway.
Within a couple weeks, I was completely bored. I didn't have the autonomy to spend downtime the way I wanted to, and I didn't have anything challenging or interesting to do.
I left after 2 months to preserve my sanity.
I am thankful to the person who got me the job, because I did learn a number of things, and it gave me a number of stories to tell since then.
It also taught me that I needed to find work that I could pour myself into and that I really couldn't stand tedium.
Also, I'm thankful to the person because I earned enough to go LAN gaming every day for the next 4 months (If you remember when this was a huge thing, you're likely of a similar age to me. :p ) before my poly course started.
Yes, I was a gamer. And through gaming, I learned a lot of very useful principles for designing learning programmes (again, a post for another time).
If I could go back in time, I don't think I would have changed this bit of my past, boring though it was. I feel that it had great formative value.
Have You Been In My Classroom? You May Have Been the Subject of an Experiment.
Despite having been an educator for such a long time, I still test out new methods and information whenever I get the opportunity.
Which means that, if you've ever been in my classroom, lecture theatre, webinar, or similar setting, there's a very high probability that I conducted some kind of experiment on you.
Don't worry, you weren't being bombarded with gamma rays or breathing in odourless chemicals I infused into the air.
It was more likely a test to see how you would react to a certain way of delivery, a new activity, or a new way of conducting an established activity.
I approach it the way a stand-up comedian approaches new material that he/she has written - basically, test it until you know whether to keep it or dump it.
And I've dumped a whole lot more material than I've kept.
So, this is to say thank you for allowing me to test them out on you, and for participating (albeit mostly unknowingly - oops!) in my experiments. ;)
Do Expertise and Experience Sometimes Make You Slow to Change?
The more expertise you have in a subject, the more likely you are to try and ride out a drastic change caused by new contrary / negative information.
It's a good thing to trust your experience and wisdom. It makes you more confident and can greatly improve your competence.
The trouble is, it can also make you very attached to the way you've been doing things.
And when the world changes as fast as it does today, this can lead to problems.
I'm certainly guilty of relying more on my experience than listening to the "signs" around me.
When the pandemic hit, I was reluctant to transit my teaching online because:
a) I had spent months prior to the pandemic, producing my programmes.
These were science-based and centered around a lot of guided experiments and activities.
Not that much "lecturing", as they were aimed at students who were less inclined to sit and listen. So, how was I going to let them do the activities while I'm not present to moderate the flow and give guidance?
If this was a "soft skills" programme, I can modify it easily. But a science-based one?
That would take a lot of work and be nowhere nearly as effective or engaging.
My education partners agreed with my assessment.
b) I had spent 15 years as a trainer, all of it face-to-face.
To have to start messing around with lights and cameras and being unable to read my learners' body language properly (because webcams were, and still are, terrible at their job) seemed so much trouble.
I had spent so much time honing my live presentations that I never spent any time learning to do it virtually, and the notion of doing it scared me.
If I'm honest, point (b) was more of a barrier to me than (a). I could choose to invest another few months changing the curriculum (and I kind of did eventually), but the fear of change was so strong, it paralysed my thinking and, consequently, my actions.
And, as the pandemic raged on, the income loss added to the paralysis. Not just for me, but for a lot of trainers I knew and for a lot of education companies as well.
It's a lesson well-learned.
Trying to get to a point where I'm comfortable running online programmes took me time (partly due also to the fact that I'm a bit of laggard when it comes to technology - certainly not an early adopter).
It also took some useful gadgets and apps, which I'll be glad to share information on in a future post.
I'm still nowhere as proficient in online teaching as I am face-to-face, but I'm trying to get there.