I am feeling incredible and infinite today. I leveraged my experience from teaching junior college kids and used the SPERM mnemonic to help my current students consolidate ideas about working in the retail sector. Only I could have come up with this because I taught General Paper before. This makes me uniquely qualified.

I then elicited suggestions in which my students could adapt to their stressful working environment.

Next the HOD of English came in to observe my lesson with another class and pointed out that I could have told the Secondary 2s about the schwa vowel that is found within ‘insensitive’ and ‘insecure’. I have limited knowledge of the schwa, so I dashed off a quick question to my ex-colleague.

Within minutes, she gave me an elaborate reply. Basically I got to get my students to blend the phonemes and sound out the word first. Only then can they rely on their receptive/listening vocabulary to determine that there is a schwa embedded within insens(i)tive and ins(e)cure. I’m already thinking how I can use my newfound knowledge to teach my children in the future!

And oh, we had lo hei (prosperity toss) after school. It’s still Chinese New Year, and it’s customary for us Chinese here to mix vegetables and abalone and toss them into the air to usher in good fortune!