Somethinng in school

Today, I had the first RSP lesson of the year. RSP stands for regional studies programme, where pupils from my class study about the region around us, such as Indonesia and Brunei. We learn about the culture of the people there, how they live their lives and how it differs from ours. It is an interesting programme and I have greatly benefitted from it in terms of general knowledge and about the world around us.

This was my first lesson today as they previous ones were either cancelled, or missed because of half days and teacher meetings. So today, we were introduced to the new secondary 1 student, or our juniors, who were to take the same programme as us. Firstly, we were told that we had to prepare a "tour" for our juniors to show them what they would be studying about in the programme. This is a tradition that is carried on every year, and it happened that this was our turn.

We had to show our juniors examples of some spices that could be found in Brunei and Indonesia, as well as the musical instruments that people in the urban areas of these countries are using. They were also to be given a hands-on experience on how these instruments were to be used, and where their origin was. We, as their seniors, were to teach and educate our juniors on all of the above. It was similar to a test to see if we had been paying attention the classes conducted the year before. My classmates and I split into groups of 5 and were each given a specific area to prepare for. We would have two weeks to prepare a station or stall in the school where our juniors would visit and we were supposed to share information we had learned about the topic we were given.

For my group, we were given the topic on general knowledge of South-East Asia and my group members were Adam, Isaac, Cheng Geng and Yuan Wen, who are some of my best friends. Tze Yong, one of the members in my group represented us by volunteering himself as a guide for our juniors, to usher them from station to station. This is a very laborious job as the secondary 1 pupil were said to be extremely noisy and difficult to control. I am grateful to Tze Yong for doing this for the group.

Our proposal for the tour was to show our juniors PowerPoint slides on parts of South-East Asia. The slides would be brief and short, just enough to give them a rough idea of the countries that they would be learning about. Each of the five group members were given a country to research about, and I got Indonesia. I was very fortunate to get this as my teachers had covered a lot about Indonesia and it was probably, apart from Singapore, the easiest country to talk about.

Also, after the presentation, we would hold a mini competition to see which group of the secondary 1 student had absorbed the most of what we had presented to them about. The members of the winning group would each get a prize, just to congratulate them for paying attention to us. We only have 15 minutes to do all these, so we have to plan our time accordingly and ensure that everything goes smoothly on the day itself.

Overall, I think that this experience will be a great one for my classmates and me. This is not only a chance for us to train ourselves to become better leaders, but also boosts our ability for time management and to know our juniors, who we will be spending an entire year studying together with.