Nan Hua visit report...

Dearest health team,

This is a short report about today’s short meeting with Nan Hua High School. This school did cyber wellness with the last group. The teacher was impressed by the results and enquired if we would be interested to take over and make things happen again.

Objectives:

Ascertain if previous batch + new batch of students could keep their pledges made before that they are able to resist / reduce gaming + Internet addiction / long PC usage hours.

Finding participants:

These students are from the school’s Infocom club. There are 39-40 of them. this batch volunteer for the club since sec 1, as this club emphasizes e-learning for all teaching subjects. Miss Liew wanted us to consider this school as it has that “ICT and Communications” element, so we can study indepth the impact of ICTs (PC tablets) on students, and then propose a social change.


Some areas of concern:

Timeline: Year-end exams from Sept 28 to Oct 8. (Our weeks 5-6). This is very early, and I am unsure if this is the standard in SG for sec schools. There will be post-exams activities for 2 weeks after that. (Our weeks 10 – 11). In short, one has 6-7 weeks from planning, research to execution starting from week 4.

Students: We were told to ask for students to volunteer if we took Nan Hua. Well, we reckon most would rather study than do this seeing “disruptive” activity.

Learning points:

Concerning both timeline and student participants, I am afraid that we also have a short span of time to execute this. Not to mention we already lost one week to the upcoming September holidays. If we are free, they may be occupied with revision and exams and vice-versa. Perhaps, a group doing this module from Jan to Apr-May would stand better in terms of time and student commitment.

Miss Liew had a chat with me and she brought up this already discussed point that for any continual research and events to take place in a school with tight schedules, both students AND teachers may be resistant to this change and find this “disruptive”. Some would just wan to be left alone, even if this module would allow them to gain. Hence, Miss Liew said that because of this, we must endeavor to pitch and sell our ideas that we are assisting and guiding the school for their own health benefit, and not present ourselves as “free labour” crashing in. We have to be tactful.

Miss Liew also asked us how come and why did we not contact the schools from the previous teams. I cited the Northlight example that the school is planning to sustain their own health activities, and would run the show themselves. This goes to show that while some schools may not even sustain the programmes from the pioneer batch. Others may want to sustain by themselves. This could easily translates to” Hey, you have done us some work already. Now we will take over and call the shots. Don’t bother to call us.”

This also shows that even if a school wanted to sustain a health program, circumstances may take another turn. In this case, we may not want to take their offer.

On another note, we could focus a bit more on present student leaders and counsellers as more solid form of control and sustainability when we “depart” in the end. This is from feedback from Nan Hua that initially 10 student leaders were trained to practice / sustain / pass down cyberwellness to new Infocom students. Only 5 remained in the club as active leaders there. Even so, these 5 were very dedicated.

End of short report…

Alvin