Being a Tuition Teacher

     Everyone has some special experiences in their life. Yet it's quite unbelievable that i actually have the experience of being a tuition teacher for a few months while waiting for my STPM result. Well, those kids are the children of my sister's friends. They are cousins. Both of them were only in standard one.

     Kids nowadays are burdened with heavy load of homework and tuition. They are only 'available' during the weekends. Hence, the tuition class was usually on Saturday since Sunday is the family day. I went to their house on every Saturday. It was actually a one-to-one tuition class. The mothers preferred this because they knew their children would not be concentrating if there is other people around.

     To teach the seven-year-old kids, the very first thing to do is to know well the way to attract their attention to what you are going to teach them. I found it difficult at the beginning because I had not known their characters very well. But as time went on, i got the chance to understand them more and hence everything went on quite smoothly. Two of them are almost equally intelligent, but in different aspects they have different strengths and weaknesses.

     One of them is very good in Chinese and Maths but she did hate Malay and English. She would find it hard to read in English. So most of the time I would be teaching her those two subjects. But kids are kids, they are very easy to get bored and lost their attention very quickly. Even I hate to do the same thing for a very long duration of time when I was small. So, i would have to switch to her favourite subjects or else she would start showing some attitudes. Since the duration of teaching her was not long, I couldn't really see the improvement in those two subjects. But what really relieved me was that she started to show some interest in Malay and English.

     Meanwhile, the other girl, who likes Malay and English very much, is quite weak in Chinese and Science. She likes to ask questions especially when she is learning science. Sometimes she came out with many logic but confusing questions. To be truth, I always worried that i might give her the inappropriate answers! But e of her strength is obvious. She can grab things very fast although sometimes she is quite careless in counting.

     Besides getting the opportunity to know these cute kids more, I found that they turned me into a patient and understanding person. They did bring some laughters to me because sometimes their attitudes were just too funny. In fact, we have become friends after that. During the last class, I brought them some presents to encourage them to do well in heir studies and to my surprise, they even presented me some souvenirs which they bought during their holiday trip.