By Huang Han Cheng (26S05B) and Lerraine Neo (26A01A)

At the start of the year, several ex-students made the perilous decision to return to RI as teachers. At first glance, it seems the choice has been nothing but beneficial — newfound freedoms, no more pressure, endless time to bask in nostalgia (read more about this in Part 1). 

But being at school can never be a pain-free experience, and the teachers have run into plenty of obstacles in their journey as teaching staff. Read on to find out more about their struggles, how they coped, and their final words of advice. 

Part Three: Perils and Pitfalls

At the end of the day, RI is still RI, and no school experience is complete without its fair share of challenges. 

1. The grind never stops 

When you stay up late to finish an assignment and your teacher takes more than a week to return it, it’s easy to start grumbling about slow marking speeds and wondering about their efficiency. After all, they only teach one subject. How long can marking take? 

“I have four classes. That’s about a hundred students,” Xin Xiang shares. “There’s an assignment after every unit, which means about every week I have to mark a hundred scripts.” 

Some weeks, he spends more time marking than teaching, a struggle shared by Sijia. 

“I have seven classes, so eighty-one students.  For example, they each write about six pages per essay, some maybe eight pages. That’s about four hundred and eighty pages to mark.” When all the marking is done, there’s always lessons to prepare for. Sijia takes about three hours to record a lecture, while Ken spends upwards of nine hours on a single lesson’s slides. 

And that’s only the beginning of the series of challenges our interviewees faced. 

As you walk into a classroom populated with students barely younger than you, anticipating your instruction and expert guidance, it becomes clear the huge responsibility placed on your shoulders. But you’ve never taught before! The last time you sat in a classroom, all you needed was to sit and listen. The looming feeling of inadequacy and disarray would be such a natural response. “We’re all still figuring things out,” Ken told us. 

A teacher is much more than a bearer of information; they must also be an excellent communicator, facilitator and empathizer. “Different people get things in different ways,” Xin Xiang explains. “Some concepts are really difficult to explain, and teachers have to think of creative ways to get different groups of people to understand a concept.”

2. Maintaining boundaries

Being so similar in age to their students has been a double-edged sword. On one hand, the teachers have found it easier to connect with their students. But it’s also blurred the line between friend and teacher. 

“It’s quite easy to connect with my students because the common interests and cultural values are there,” Ken says. “But at the same time, that does make boundary setting a lot harder. As someone who’s not that far off in age, I’m quite primed to talk to them as if they’re my friends, but I can’t do that.” 

Haotian, who knows some of her students from her time in RGS Debate, shares her perspective. 

“I don’t think it’s been awkward. I’m not so close to them that it blurs the lines of professionalism. But even if you know your juniors very well, there are things you can do to stay professional. Like – I have my junior’s numbers, but I haven’t texted them since I started teaching.” 

3. Overworked and underappreciated

In a moment of emotion-filled expression, Haotian emphatically described how we “take our teachers for granted a lot”. Witnessing their routines, including meticulously going through volumes of scripts and other CCA/event commitments, was a very sobering experience. 

Even seemingly small things create huge workloads for teachers. One of Xin Xiang’s greatest frustrations as a teacher is having to mark work with messy handwriting, because deciphering them takes much more time. Multiply that by the sheer student-teacher ratio, and you end up wasting hours. Yet so many of us think little of practicing good penmanship, 

Haotian continues, “We often don’t think of teachers having their own families. But they have so many more responsibilities outside school.” We cannot always expect them to dedicate their time to us, every day of the week. So the next time you face an unreturned assignment or late email reply, perhaps consider a more compassionate response.

Part Four: Helplines and Evacuation Routes 

1. Support from teachers 

“When we entered this job, we never approached them, they approached us first,” Haotian confesses about her ex-teachers (now colleagues). For somebody completely unacquainted with teaching, everything from learning formal pedagogy to adjusting to the new environment necessitates an active mentor. Only through the support of her colleagues, did Sijia and Haotian manage to “make the transition easily”.

“Ms Kwok gave me a lot of feedback and helped vet through my content,” Ken explained, and that helped him feel much more confident after his first few lessons. 

“There are teachers in the staffroom now, who used to be my students. And there are teachers in the staffroom now, who I used to be their students,” Ms Lye, an English Literature teacher who taught all three of the returning Y7s, shares. 

“In some ways, you still want to guide them,” she comments. “There’s still some sense of wanting to give them advice. I think they’re quite confident in terms of their subject matter, and how to engage their students. But when they’re thinking of how to deal with other colleagues, or some of the things that are pressing them now – like university, scholarships – you still relate to them as a teacher, rather than purely as a colleague.”

2. Dream of better days

We all want to change things in school, those we complain and rant about. But throughout the interviews, we realised the one-sidedness of these opinions. Students are clueless about the realities of teaching and the school administration, while teachers can still be distant from them. Maybe it takes somebody who has walked in the shoes of both, to tell what’s truly helpful. 

“Ideally, we’d slow down the pace a bit,” said Xin Xiang, “The information taught in a short time is quite a lot and it is difficult, even for teachers who have to constantly prepare material.” 

“Give teachers a priority queue in the canteen!” Ken said resolutely, to no one’s agreement. “We have to work so much and mark so much, we need easy access to food.”

3. Run while you still can (or… don’t?)

When all else fails, running away from your problems is always an option. We asked our interviewees if they see themselves pursuing teaching in the future, and were mostly met with a resounding no.

“I don’t have the heart to discipline students,” Xin Xiang says, laughing. “So I don’t think I’m suited to be a teacher.” 

He intends to spend the next few months “funemployed”, going on a trip with some of his JC friends, and just generally relaxing until his university term starts. 

“It’s fun to do, but eventually as an adult, I’ll need a change of pace,” Haotian reasons. “I think now we’re at the age where familiarity is still fun, but I’m excited to try something new.” 

“I think there’s a difference between our position now, and if we were actually hired as full-time teachers,” Sijia comments. “And I’m not sure if that’s the most suitable path for me, but not everything has to convert into something permanent for it to be enjoyable. This has been amazing just on its own.”

However, not everyone is eager to leave teaching behind. 

“I’m doing a major that typically isn’t associated with very obvious employment prospects,” Ken reflects. “I do think that I will look at teaching as a major option – for the most part because of my classes, and I feel like this is a really meaningful and fun thing that I would want to do for the rest of my life. But I also do feel that I haven’t opened enough doors, or seen enough things yet. But teaching is definitely something that I will look back at, and something that I may consider.” 

Part Five: Final Words of Advice

As their time as teachers draws to a close, our interviewees have a few final things to say to their students. 

Haotian 

A lot of people think JC is the end of something, when in reality, it’s the beginning. 

The thing most people regret about JC is “oh, I could have done this but I didn’t. I should have done that but I didn’t.” If you want to do something, do it; and if it tires you out, then you can stop and adjust. But a lot of people hold themselves back from things they want. Even if the thing you want is just to hang out with your friends – go do it. 

A lot of people (myself included) – instead of experiencing the two years as a whole – are living from assignment to assignment, and their self-worth fluctuates from milestone to milestone. 

I think the truth is that you could choose to let your assignments be an indication of some larger failing, but that’s a conscious choice, not an unyielding law. People perform unsatisfactorily in assignments and go on to do well in life all the time, and even now I can barely remember what my exact marks were. Instead of pegging your self worth to little things, stop living milestone to milestone. 

Live your two years as one big journey, knowing that you’ll come out the other end okay. It’s difficult, but you should try.

Sijia 

There are definitely organisations or student clubs that I now wish I had started, but I didn’t, because I didn’t think it was possible in JC. 

Take the time to explore, and do what you want to do. This ties in with the point on how I see it as not worth it to force yourself to take on commitments you don’t want to, especially if it’s just for the sake of your CV (portfolio). If you don’t actually like it, you’ll just feel more drained. You only get to live through these two years once, so why not try to enjoy it as much as possible?

It’s true that if you don’t hit every single milestone, you might not get into that one specific school you’re perhaps gunning for – but do you need that? You can still get into a very good school, and get a very good scholarship without needing to cover all of the areas like leadership, volunteering, sports, and entrepreneurship simultaneously. If something resonates with you, then by all means go ahead, but I hope that you’re doing it because you find meaning in it, rather than treating it as another checkbox to tick. 

Ken 

I think one of the most in-your-face things you learn from KI, and pretty much from life at some point, is that we live in a messy universe with constant uncertainty. 

We will always be uncertain about many, many things. “Do I want this? Do I actually like my passion or am I just telling myself I do because it’s the one thing I can do decently? Do I know myself or do I just think I know myself? Who am I? Why do I exist? Why am I asking these questions, give me back my illusion of self-knowledge…” 

Anyway, I digress. The point is, life is often a surreal, abstract mess painted on a violently shaking canvas – we are bombarded with overwhelming sensations, thoughts both kind and unkind, desires that often contradict (I needa LOCK IN but hey let me doomscroll for 3 hours tonight), and the occasional instance of the universe taking a potshot at you, or in this case firing a high speed paintball that ruins what could, or should, have been a pretty orderly, nice little painting of a “good” life – an ideal painting of your life. 

One of the things we do know though, is that we can never get rid of this uncertainty – what happens if I don’t score good enough grades? Will I drop out? Be jobless? Be a failure? What if I could have chosen otherwise? Every brush stroke you put onto that canvas seems irreversibly impactful – some of them will excite gratitude and joy in you, but some of them may cause you to lose sleep at night. 

But hey, in the 13.8 billion years of this universe’s existence, and with trillions to come, you made it here, still persisting today through the horrors and joys of life, and that alone should make you so proud. To quote one of my favourite games,

The universe can throw potshots, but you can still grip your brush tightly and paint your own portrait in spite of it. You are condemned, yet blessed to be free. The uncertainty of life is haunting but also hopeful. Uncertainty is freedom in some ways. 

Sorry, this got a little abstract but my point is, JC will be riddled with uncertainty and it will haunt you, but know that you are bigger than it, that your canvas extends far beyond your school life, your grades or your portfolio. You are all so much more than that, and there will be many additions to your portrait to come (and potshots). You are all miracles that cannot be contained, you will continue to be irrepressible, and the universe will be in awe of the portraits you paint.

Xin Xiang

Whenever you are feeling overwhelmed with work in JC, take a moment to appreciate the little joys around you. When I was studying at the Windy Benches before Prelims, everyone would stop what they were doing at around 7.15pm to soak in the vivid red sky during sunset.

It’s equally important to take breaks. When revising at home before the A Levels, I would take a walk and go window shopping at the nearby mall after dinner to clear my mind (and also because I cannot focus with a food coma).

Also, go and make memories with your friends. You will be surprised at how special seemingly ordinary events become. I still look back fondly at the day my friend brought rotisserie chicken and sushi to eat for lunch after school, proudly calling it Surf and Turf. Or when someone’s ten-dollar note flew onto the roof at A block, prompting a rescue operation involving brooms and hockey sticks to an amused audience of three classes.

JC is the last place where you can meet your closest friends almost every day, so don’t take the days you have with them for granted. While it may seem like you will have plenty of time after A Levels, life quickly gets busy. So strengthen your friendships and enjoy the experiences that JC has for you, before you step out of the comfort and structure of school.