From Student to Teacher: How Our New Teachers Are Applying Their Classroom Experiences

What are things you experienced as a student that you want to bring over as a teacher?

Angie: As a student I found science challenging due to the marker expectations never addressed by school teachers. Thus, in addition to covering the content, I aim to teach my students how to translate their knowledge and understanding into writing.

From your high school experiences, what piece of advice would you give Atlas students?

Time will pass anyway, so you may as well use it in a way you see as meaningful. You are given the freedom to choose how you use it - regardless of whether you stress, or work, or do anything else, the final exam will be at your doorstep, as time doesn't stop. Don't see this as threatening, see it as comforting, because this hectic year must eventually come to an end. 

Judy: As a student I realised that people learn better by engaging with one form of stimulus at a time. Teachers often have slides of text, and then verbally paraphrase it. With this, I plan to integrate physical/video demonstrations and try to apply new concepts to real life observations and analogies.

Why do you think people should study Physics and Chemistry?

Are you curious about how literally everything around you works?

The scale of both subjects are huge. In physics you study interactions between tiny subatomic particles all the way to giant stars millions of light years away. Meanwhile, everything we see and touch around us is made of chemicals. With this, it’s extremely fascinating to understand what chemicals are and how they interact with one another. Even though scientific concepts are simplified in the high school syllabus, what you learn can still be directly linked to real world phenomena. For example: learning photoelectric effect in Physics helps you understand how light can be converted to electricity.  

Raymond: As a student who advocated for a rigorous approach to learning, I’ve helped introduce new supplementary notes for the 2024 cohort. These serve to drive the focus back to main ideas required for school exams and clearly frame syllabus dot points such that students gain a metacognitive understanding.