RESL Journey thus far

Our RESL journey thus far cannot be considered to be successful. Firstly, we have kept procrastinating in terms of work and often submit our work late. Furthermore, the work is not even up to standard. One such example is the report which was poorly collated due to a lack of team effort and even occasional pushing of work to single members.

Up till now, we have already gone for quite a number of lessons at Little Wings, fulfilling the service part of our project. However, we have not really learnt anything and are not exactly truly grateful towards the fact that we have this opportunity to help others and will do it out of our own good will. To put it bluntly, we simply do not care too much about this project and only do it for the sake of doing it. If we were asked to do this again and given an option to reject the offer, chances are that we would probably not want to.

Due to this, it can be said that we still have to catch up in terms of our commitment to this project. Furthermore, we did not put in alot of effort in learning how to communicate with the children and this led to huge problems in terms of us communicating with the children in the first 2 or so lessons. We only learnt from experience and that alone was still not enough. However, the problem also lies in the fact that we should not have split up into groups of 2 and 3 to teach two separate classes, but instead just take one level (K1 or K2) as a whole group. Since we are split up, we simply do not share the same opinion or thoughts about our experience in general throughout the journey. The members who were in charge of the rowdier class might recount the experience negatively as it was very difficult to control the class. However, the members in charge of the quieter K1 class might remember the lessons as being relatively boring and quiet, with the exception of one or two children actively commenting. This results in different opinions of our definition of our service.

The lack of manpower was also extremely evident as there were only 3/2 of us in each class who could walk around and help the children if they had any problems. However, if there are other children who require help, we are unable to assist them as we are already busy explaining to another child. This might cause us to come across to the children as being insincere and thereafter they might dislike you and not listen to you. However, as a group of 5 we would be able to handle this problem with relative ease as well as opening up options for introductions such as games which would need more people.

As a whole this RE journey has been relatively interesting as we have never done this type of project before. However, we have definitely not put in enough effort not only in doing the paperwork, but also understanding and reaching out to the kids and in so doing learning from them while in the process teaching them.

-Edison