Tuesday, March 22, 2005

Labeled as a "Bond-breaker"?

Peiling was quite excited and showed me an interesting article in The New Paper about an 'automatic' mahjong table that can shuffle and stack tiles for players, wooow!! We even set up a mahjong session for this weekend, going to meet up with the mahjong king and queen of my class soon! Hahaha..

What was even more exciting, I surfed around the links and came across another article in yesterday's online version of The New Paper that can be found here with these headlines:

Bond-breaker: Can i pay $200 a month for 40 years?
O-level holder fails trainee teacher exam twice. Her 4-year bond of $77,000 is deemed broken

It's quite a morbid set of news to read in the midst of practicum (don't blame me if you already clicked on the link) and I was quite dejected yesterday when reading it, just a day before my supervisor was coming to observe my lesson.

Recently, there's quite a few such 'bond-breakers' who wrote in to newspapers and MOE also gave an response earlier. Quotations below:

MOE: Those who fail get more chances to pass

TRAINEE teachers who do not pass the practice teaching module are counselled on the areas for improvement, says MOE.

They are then given another opportunity to repeat the module at a different school with different supervisors.

Those who fail this repeat attempt are refused re-admission by NIE.


What's debatable is the kind of chances given to people who are not cut out to be a teacher. Counselling? Opportunity? Is it really enough to make pple possess qualities like patience, management skills, correct attitude?? It's kind of strange that the selection procedure for teachers only involves one interview, and the panel can decide whether you can/ cannot teach just based on that ONE interview. And if they had make the wrong choice? Sorry, you pay for their mistakes.

Paying back this kind of loan for 40 years is simply a burden for someone who is out of job, and personally I feel that it's really unfair.

Phew, hopefully I don't sound like I'm going to fail practicum. In fact, I've just got over and done with half of my observations (4 by CTs and 1 by supervisor).. 5 more to go! Yeah.. =P

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