My first term at NIE: a brief course review (Part I)

With my first term at NIE coming to an end soon (thank god), it seems as good a time as any to review the courses I've taken this term. These are the ones that I've completed so far. I'll talk about the others after next Wednesday.

Educational Psychology I

This class, which started very early and ended earlier than others, consisted largely of uninspiring weekly lectures on theories of educational psychology. The instructor, a trained child psychologist and school counsellor, was a sweet lady who plied us with sweets to keep us awake and whose counselling stories were frequently amusing. But her lectures would only have been useful to people interested in educational psychology as an academic discipline -- that is to say, no one in the class. And getting a bunch of adults to use scissors, glue, and trashy magazines to construct a "self-concept" of themselves was just infantilising (a word that I'll be using quite a lot to describe various activities and classes).

Grade: C+

Aims and Approaches to Teaching English Literature

The grammatical incorrectness of the course's title (there should be an "of" after "Aims") tells you more than you need to know about this awful class, whose instructor I have already blogged about here. Since that previous post, my opinion of her as a person has improved (she's harmless, well-meaning, and eccentric), but my judgement of her as a teacher of literature and literature pedagogy hasn't. The class hit a nadir a few weeks back when we were made to form a circle and participate in activities more suited to a kid's birthday party than a literature classroom. For instance, we were given a mineral water bottle and told to perform an action with it; every person in the circle was to perform all the actions of those before them. I decided to perform something, er, provocative -- just because I was bored and annoyed. This was supposed to be a class on teaching drama, by the way.

The course was also structurally flawed. We completed five assignments: two individual essays (1,000 words each; 60%), a group poetry package (12%), a group narrative package (12%), and a 10-minute micro-teaching session (16%). Given that we aren't going to be writing papers on how to teach literature while actually teaching literature, making those two essays worth 60% of the grade is just stupid. We worked so much harder on the two genre packages: I spent 15, yes, 15 hours one Sunday just compiling the poetry package; this doesn't take into account the hours and hours of planning that went into writing the stuff I compiled. Oh, and you should have seen the laundry list of instructions for the second essay. Fulfilling them in 1,000 words was just impossible.

Grade: C

Information and Communication Technology (ICT) for Engaged Learning

How to use PowerPoint to jazz up your lessons, and why working individually is a crime against humanity. Utterly, utterly pointless. No one learned how to use ICT tools that he or she didn't know previously. The assignment required us to put together a "self-learning package" -- that is to say, a set of PowerPoint slides that groups of students could use to learn a particular topic, with minimal intervention by the teacher. My partner and I decided to teach Rhythm and Meter in Poetry for JC1 students using self-made audio clips, while other pairs attempted topics from the History and Geography syllabi. The problem was that our instructor taught Physics. She was absolutely unqualified to judge what we had produced. The idea that you can separate content and form and focus solely on the latter while being completely ignorant of the former is just ridiculous. It didn't help that she was about as enthusiastic in class as a talking robot.

Grade: D+
Posted by kungfuzi at 11:36 pm |