Should I treat it as a joke? I’m seriously lost.
Over the past 3 days, I went for a camp and became an instructor. During the camp, although I’m the instructor of the kids, I learn a lot of stuffs from them too. The kids that we took are from Northlight school located somewhere near Good man road. It’s not a normal neighborhood school that you dealing with, they are kids who failed their PSLE, most of them came from broken/ poor families, slightly intellectually low and they are the bottom 5% of the whole of Singapore.

At first I thought it should be quite easy, the only thing is to get them to listen to you and do the things that you want them to do. But I’m totally wrong, the attention spent for these kids are very low. For example when you ask them to focus and look at you, the very next second they will be distracted by something else. I guess that’s their biggest problem that’s hindering them. Other than that they do not have any major problems.

It was tough at first to get hold of their attention and to get hold of them to listen to your instructions. But after a few hours and some activities, they began to open up and for the next moment they will be at your finger tips.

I discover that some of them have got some hidden talent within them which they themselves do not know. Even though they are not gifted academically but they are still as talented in other aspects. I’ve got this boy in my group that love to dance, and he is really good at it to the extent that their discipline master too agreed. Even without proper training he’s doing it so well, imagine if he have got this chance to further develop this talent, I’m sure he will defiantly excel in this area. Sadly, he can’t choose to do what he is good in but only to be gauge and despise by the society according to how well he perform academically. There’s another incident that surprise me too, during the second night, we were told to do a debrief with our kids and them to write something in the booklet that they were given to them. They are supposed to write anything they have to say about their school and basically what’s their opinion about their school. As usual, most of them you will expect some standard answer like I love my school because it’s fun, I’m proud of northlight and things like that. But there something that this boy (a very quiet boy who don’t usually speaks) wrote caught my attention and frankly I was pretty touched, don’t ask me why I don’t know. He wrote ‘’ I’m proud of northlight (first sentence) I want northlight to be proud of me.’’ Aw… I find that he is very sensible and truthful for a kid like him within that aptitude to write something like this.

During the camp, we have to motivate them and at the same time instill some values in them. Wow, instill values in them. Yes instill values. I feel very puzzled and confuse although I manage to change them successfully. After the camp, I kept asking myself I actually manage to instill some values in them but, I myself don’t even have some of the values. I don’t practice what I preach, isn’t ito funny? I’ve no idea, seriously no idea.
Anyway other than that, I really learnt quite a lot of stuffs during the camp. I hope I’ll have time to do more camp in future.