This hectic term flew past in a blink of an eye. I only had six weeks to prepare them for the myriad components of their English paper. This was a tall feat, considering that some of them hadn’t even mastered punctuation yet. I kid you not.

And I got to prepare them to write a 100-word personal recount for their final year exam. I fought the hard battle, trying out all sort of ways, ranging from getting them to rearrange scrambled sentences to force-feeding vocabulary words to giving them a mental template they could use to write their conclusion. I was thorough, if nothing else!

Squeezing writing out of some weak progress students was more challenging than I had anticipated. Initially, I had designed the scrambled sentences activity because I expected my students to gush out everything within one paragraph and not structure their ideas properly according to the Intro-Body-Conclusion template.

My consideration was deemed sound for the already able writers because I modelled how they could organise their ideas. However, for the weaker students, I failed to realise that I needed not have taught them the three-paragraph format because they only could come out with enough content for one paragraph. They could write perfunctory paragraphs as they addressed all the guiding questions on the question paper, but they nonetheless failed to excel because their story development was as flimsy as one ply of toilet paper. I should have spent some time on expanding the plot first.

The drilling of vocabulary words was a more effective strategy. I had pockets of students using words like unique, thrilled, and excited to enliven their writing. I put a smiley face on top of each vocabulary word to show my appreciation to them for bothering to remember how to use it. And then, this conscientious student came along and blew me away:

He stood out from other students because he not only managed to use words like supportive, profusely, cherish and memorable - words that had completely slipped out of his peers’ brains like running water through a sieve - but also used it in ways that were different from my example sentences. This meant that he internalised the meaning of the new vocabulary and could sprinkle them throughout his ideas naturally. Surely, that was no better validation than this. Someone taking to heart all that I have tried to teach!¹