Creativity Study Case (Fuchun Secondary School)

School Background
Students in Fuchun Secondary School come from a variety of diverse backgrounds. This is exacerbated by the school's affiliation with its neighbouring Fuchun Primary School, which allows students with a low PSLE aggregate to find a place in the school. Thus, most students are already academically weak to begin with, though they may not necessarily be more fluent in their mother tongue languages. Students also face various problems in motivation, occasionally hampered by the school's focus on academic results, which sometimes makes for dry, dull lessons. Despite this, the school's staff are committed to producing engaging lessons in the hopes of allowing students to appreciate the subjects that they are taught, through the use of various programmes such as overseas trips, work attachments and learning journeys that take place during and out of school curriculum time. The bulk of the school's students make up the Normal(Academic) stream, though a cursory glance will tell any observer that there are just as many Normal (Academic) classes as Express classes. This is due to the smaller class sizes in the Express stream, and it shows that the school is willing to over-extend its resources to ensure that students stay engaged and motivated in the classroom.

The Teaching of Literature
Fuchun's Literature programme, I feel, suffers from an extreme lack of structure. This was apparent as I was planning my lessons, as I was, at times, blatantly oblivious to my end-of-year objectives. My lessons were mostly text-centred, and I covered portions of the text, based on what would be tested in the forthcoming tests. Therefore, I had a sketchy view, at best, of what technical devices my students would have been exposed to by the end of the year, and what they had to know in order to make the successful transition when they were promoted at the end of the year.

In the meantime, while students had the vaguest idea of devices, they did not know how to explain how these devices functioned, nor could they successfully utilize their knowledge of these devices in an academic essay. Students were also hampered by their limited vocabulary, and their lack of grammar sensitivity. There would be numerous errors in tenses, punctuation and sentence construction in their essays, which severely hampered the marker's ability to give them credit for points they were trying to make.

Definition of Creativity
The school adopts a more traditional view of creativity. The department, at the lower secondary levels, adopts simple creative lessons by getting students to write their own creative pieces as a means of engaging them in understanding the poetic devices that they have learnt. However, these creative pieces are rarely the centre of any assessment, but the means to an end. Time constraints, with the numerous class tests and examinations, present a real difficulty to weeding out periods for such exercises.

My Own Take on Creativity
I am more enamoured of Rachel Poh's (Ngee Ann Secondary) defining characteristic of creativity, that it should be a means to engage students in a text. As a result, I have tried by bringing props into class, or having group work where possible. I used props in the teaching of symbols by bringing in coins for students to reenact a scene from Ah Bah's Money, a short story in Catherine Lim's compendium of shorts, but it didn't pan out as students did not seem to perceive the importance of such an activity. The lesson was further hampered by class disruptions, which I had to address, thus working against the creative appeal of the lesson itself.

While the dramatic text that the Secondary Two students were studying provided ample room for re-enactment, I seldom had the time for such engagements.