LETTER | Teaching in the 'new normal'

LETTER | I am a teacher at an international school based in Ampang.

When the lockdown was announced in Mid-March and we were ordered to do emergency remote teaching, I was totally taken by surprise and shock. Secretly, I hoped the school closure would not last more than two weeks. Then back to school. It was not to be.

When I found that the Chromebook which I borrowed from the school was not receiving Internet and wi-fi signals, I realised I had no option but to depend on my laptop which hadn’t been used for more than two years.

Would it even function? Was it "sleeping" for too long? I had thought of giving it away at some point earlier. I had been working from my I-phone, except when at school.

My first thought was to request our neighbour to have a look at the device.

Houcin, my colleague and neighbour, came over to my house to set up my workstation. He made my contact groups for all three classes and then showed me how to log on to Hangouts.

He also demonstrated the use of Google Platform‘s new site which I could use for marking attendance, typing learning objectives and lessons content.

Having first begun my teaching career in the 1960s, never did I expect to be adapting to new technology for the classroom in 2020!

Thus I began my first lesson on Monday of the second week. I had more help from students who hosted the Zoom meetings and gave me the site for accessing IGCSE past papers.

One other thing I did was to go to my classroom at the school (which fortunately is just a few minutes drive from my home) and bring back a pile of resources, textbooks and printed worksheets that I had on my desk, as well as my external disc.

Now I was able to connect, hear and speak with my students. At this point I began lesson preparations, disseminating resources, worksheets and receiving answer scripts.

Some frustrations occurred such as students not having microphones or sharing laptops with other siblings, or getting the time-table wrong, or that their Internet was breaking up. Others struggled with too much homework given by every teacher.

On the other hand, I found many students responding very well to flipped classrooms. Their resources and tasks were given to them a week ahead of the lesson so that they could construct answers at home and present them to the rest of the class for comment and peer/teacher assessment.

Furthermore, students enjoyed sharing maps, photos, documents and images on the shared screen upon my request.

However, after five weeks into remote teaching, I received a call from my wi-fi service provider that my Internet was on backup service and that it needed repair and maintenance. Telekom Malaysia diagnosed the problem to be a broken cable; something which I witnessed had been caused by monkeys prancing on the wires!

So, new cables were urgently fixed by TM Net technicians and yet the Internet connection was still unstable. This time around it was the work of ants nesting in the service box on the pylon so TM technicians came back a second time to spray insecticide to kill off the ants. The Internet was restored. The Maxis wi-fi technician coordinated the visits between him and the TM Net people. Their roles are clearly defined and they would not want to intrude into each other’s responsibility.

I was really touched when the technicians told me, "This is a priority job, cikgu needs it for teaching”.

I was also relieved that my connection with the students was re-established. It has been a teaching year like no other I have experienced. And I'm glad that I, too, am still learning on the job, more than 50 years after I began.

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