Teaching

Happiness Journal 27/10/25

Was sharing with a parent’s group various mnemonics that I use to teach Science, including my painstakingly curated creation McDonald’s Really Shiok (Muscular Circulatory Digestive Respiratory Skeletal).

Directly after me, another parent shared not one, but several mnemonics, of which Pandas Fart Smell Gases (Pollination Fertilisation Seed dispersal Germination) really tickled my fancy. Just the kind of low-brow humour that 11-year-olds will love. I can already imagine their uproarious laughter!

Well, Sensei is gonna need all the help he can get because 7 out of 19 students failed their year-end exam today. My pride is on the line!

Happiness Journal 30/10/25

After getting 20+ students to finish an online lesson on the water cycle, I felt inspired to come up with my own comprehension cloze on the interesting aspects of air. Yup, the pivotal thing to our survival but is non-salient in our minds because it kinda fades in the background.

Gonna get my fifth graders to attempt my literary masterpiece the first thing tomorrow lesson. Quite looking forward to seeing if they have learnt anything from this year-end exam extravaganza.

In other news, I got so engrossed in watching Physical:Asia that I gave up my usual 15 mins of lie-in. Gonna pay for it dearly tonight because my depleted energy tank is gonna run even lower looking after two kids, but it is also strangely exhilarating finding a TV show that I liked so much that I threw caution to the wind!

Happiness Journal 3/11/25

Upon distributing the exam papers, a student became ecstatic. You might think that 27.5 out of 70 is a dismal score, but it was a score that warranted her a pass. She told me excitedly that she had passed Science for the first time.

I was glad to have contributed to her success. It was nice to witness her experience this formidable and historic success.

Happiness Journal 4/11/25

Upon picking my boy up from school, he eagerly rummaged through his bag to show me his Chinese magazine. He had learnt that clownfish change their gender to adapt to changing circumstances and wanted to let me know.

I also had something to tell him. The rhinoceros hornbill, said to have been extinct in Singapore, was recently spotted on our city-state. Maybe it had come over from Malaysia. Swapping one interesting fact for another.

I guess it’s nice to live through life having some people occupy prime territory in my mind.

Happiness Journal 5/11/25

One student who has been giving me grief aplenty asked me in all sincerity, “So, cher, when we perspire and it disappears, right, it’s evaporate?”

He had only internalised the concept of evaporation recently. after his final-year exams, in fact. I could almost see his mental cogs churning.

I beamed brightly at him and said enthusiastically, “Yes!”

I feel like I have unlocked something in him.