I'm in a very unique position in the education career. Most colleagues will either get to teach in a secondary school or a junior college at any point of time but I managed to do both at the same time now. This places me in a good position to experience both types of teaching styles, lecture - tutorial and classroom teaching. I must say that in the past I always wanted to teach in JC, especially H3 Physics where I could put my university physics knowledge to good use. Where the students taking H3 will be in a better mental position to work with geek level physics problems. To solve kinematics questions using Hamiltonian's or Lagrangian's rather than Newton's (Nay... maybe not)

But after 1 term of JC physics, I find lecture - tutorial style to be a much more boring style. Partly because the pace of JC physics is so much faster and we have so many topics to cover within 2 years. In lectures, we just talk and demo and in tutorial, we can't spend time doing interesting stuff because tutorials are always behind lectures and we need to complete all the problems set to prepare students for the BIG A levels. Laboratory work is obsessed with SPA, of which assessment starts next term so there is no time for fun stuff at all. No time for cool laser demonstrations or (supposedly) fun activities that I could do with year 3 and year 4 physics.

I missed the close interactions that I used to have with my year 5 batch when I just teach them year 4 physics. This year is not that bad with about 50 students in the LT, subsequently we expect more than 100 or more students and it will be impossible to know everyone by name. A full JC may even have over 500 students offering Physics each year. And I may not even get to teach H3 physics if the school decides to outsource the course to NUS or NTU!

If I become a full-fledged JC teacher, I know I will miss the close bonds that I can form with my year 3 and 4 students. Plus, I can't just give up on my GE training because GE is irrelevant in JC education. I just hope that I can straddle both junior high and senior high wings and torture ahem, educate my students in Physics for 4 years. In fact, this could be the selling point of the school's IP system if they could integrate and merge junior high and senior high wings together so students don't have to adjust their learning styles after 4 years. Then again, that will involve many administrative and professional work to do so.

I'm just glad that I'm in this unique position now.