Industry: Pedagogy/Physics

Name of Company: Advanced Pedagogy.

Contact Person: Benson Soong. (benson@catnab.net)

1.

I think that I’ve said this many many times while working here, but I honestly expected to do data logging in excel or some other boring job for 3 weeks. I found myself brushing up my Microsoft excel skills before the internship, planning out my most professional outfit, ready to be ordered around in the office all the night before. Afterall, the only things I had heard about offices in the real world were my dad’s experiences and they were about how stressful it was and how you need to be aware of people’s true intentions because not everybody wants the best for you. I was schooled the night before, on how to hold myself, how I was to be respectful, how I needed to represent my school properly and lastly how my attitude would make or break my experience. I paid hardly any head to their advice, as it was some that I had heard all my life. I just came into this building (with my dad!) with no idea what to expect. I was nervous and jittery, as I should have been– this has been my first internship– but was ready to face the harsh world I had heard so much about. Until I met my first colleague, Zhi Yuan. My dad seemed quite comfortable with her, as he allowed her to guide me into the office and so I relaxed. I was then introduced to Zong Yang, who would turn out to be my RO. Both of them were extremely sweet to me and spoke to me for an hour or so to help me feel more comfortable. Soon enough I decided that this workplace nothing like what I had imagined…in a good way obviously! Still, I was cautious as it was my first day. Then the boss, Benson, came in. He seemed, at first, to be the typical overachiever in his later years. The way and tone in which he spoke, spoke volumes about his education and his experiences with people and his job.

After I was assigned my job, I settled quite comfortably into the work environment. Reflecting upon this now, I find it quite astonishing how easily I settled into the working environment. I thought that it would take me ages to start working comfortably in the office but it didn’t and I think that this is due to how warmly I was treated in the office. I can say for a fact that I genuinely enjoyed coming into the office every single day. And I have given a lot of thought to why I felt this way. And I have come to the conclusion that it is because every day was different, some days were quiet while others were loud and eventful. I learnt a whole lot about the work environment and how startups work through working at this company. I got to experience Benson’s wrath, I got to experience his nice days. I realised that not everyone will speak in euphemisms in the real world, and the best people will give it to me bluntly. I know that I am spoilt, in terms of this being my first work experience, and I know that if I had gotten an internship at a corporate company or a larger company, my experience would have been vastly different, and maybe I wouldn’t have enjoyed it as much. The work that I did here, made me feel like I was making a difference. I enjoyed it because obviously, I was doing something that I loved, but also because my ideas were met with consideration and not rejection. I hope that you guys continue to work together like they do because I know, however inexperienced I am, that this sort of work environment and the relationship is quite rare. I wish you all the best for the future and hope that you become that multi-billion dollar company because goodness knows you all have worked for it!

2.

Being a 16-year-old, a lot of my life revolves around grades. Actually, I’d like to think that most of my life revolves around acquiring good grades while simultaneously balancing my extracurricular activities and my social life. I think that most people would agree that grades are a major part of a teenager’s life and they should do whatever they can to obtain the best possible grades. And it is extremely frustrating, to any student, when they can’t understand a teacher’s method of teaching or just can’t understand what a teacher is saying. Take me as an example. I consider myself to be a conscientious student and will try my absolute hardest to understand a certain concept taught by a teacher. But by the end of it, if I don’t understand the concept, I will just end up teaching it to myself at home, silently cursing the teacher for not teaching it to me properly. And I know for a fact that teachers face similar frustrations when dealing with students who don’t seem to understand what they are trying to teach…it is as good as them speaking in two different languages! Now we have a very familiar dilemma before us: one party that is willing to learn and one that is willing to teach but without the connection.

The learning platform developed by Advanced Pedagogy, aims to reestablish this connection between the students and teachers so as to ensure that the student’s learning is as smooth as possible. As a student who sat the IGCSE exams last summer and has had to deal with her fair share of miscommunications, I love this platform. I genuinely wish I had had a tool like this. I wish that instead of harbouring resentment towards my teachers who were unable to express the concepts in a way that was understandable for me, I had this learning platform to help me and my teachers understand what I misconceptions I had and how to fix it.

This brings me on to another positive aspect of this learning platform, the student specific diagnostics. While working as an intern for this company, one of my jobs was to go through the questions that they came up with. All the wrong answers corresponded a diagnostic letter which would point to a misconception a student might have had or just the fact that the student isn’t paying much attention. So every time I would get a question wrong, my diagnostic report would successfully point to why I got a question wrong and what misconceptions I had. And even though I have finished my IGCSEs, my diagnostic reports pointed out many areas in which I had misconceptions and how they affected my knowledge of certain concepts. It was baffling to know that I was having trouble with some basic conceptual ideas such as vectors having magnitude and direction, what acceleration is, and many more. This affected my understanding of gravity and Newton’s second law of motion which in turn, will affect my understanding of harder concepts. Such accurate diagnostics can be really beneficial for students that are my age and younger than me, as they can identify their misconceptions at an early stage and correct them, thus saving them the effort and the costs of correcting basic mistakes in the future, when the stakes are much much higher.

Due to this learning platform’s effectiveness in teaching students the IGCSE physics and business studies courses, expensive evils such as private tuition become completely unnecessary.

The end

Some photos from my time at Advanced Pedagogy!