Swiss teacher shocked by low standard of Singapore Primary Schools |
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 A Swiss teacher who came to Singapore on a teaching internship with a local Primary School has posted a scathing review of the poor quality of Singapore schools in a vlog on YouTube. The vlog was available on YouTube until it was taken down at 11.30am (20 July 2017) this morning. The Caucasian female teacher, who goes by her YouTube moniker Daring Maddy, began her video by expressing how shocked she was with the poor standards of Singapore schools and teachers despite hearing only good things about the Singapore education system. She said that in the time that she was here, she witnessed so many incidents of poor teaching methods she became unsure of herself and why other countries view Singapore as a model of good education. She cited examples of children falling asleep or being inattentive in classes which were taught by boring teachers who were trying to cram too much into young children, and said she was outraged by the attitude of local teachers who she says were always making excuses for their poor teaching methods. "What did you learn in class today? Absolutely nothing! I learned more from other teachers walking past the class than from the lesson itself," She said of the quality of one of the lessons in her school. Describing an English lesson she attended: "The teacher in front talked so quietly that you can barely hear her in the back; I was sitting at the back row and there were some instances when I could make out what she was saying, and some when I couldn't. Virtually zero student engagement, I'm not even kidding." She was also shocked by the punishment meted out to children when they could not answer questions posed. "One student was called up and he could not answer the question, so she made him stand up in the middle of the classroom. Simply remain standing up until he could produce an answer. She moved on to the next student who said something so on and so forth, honestly so the lesson was boring as hell, can we fault students for not listening attentively? By the way, after perhaps a stretch of ten minutes she demanded the student still standing up to form a sentence and after he was able to, he was allowed to sit down once more." Not everything was bad however, she concluded, because she saw a teacher in another classroom who was engaged in a learning game with her students using Pokemon and fake Monopoly money. She said that she was more interested in the other teacher's lesson than her own assigned lesson. |
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