I have been a student of Mr Kok for four years, beginning my first lesson in secondary 1. Like many fellow Singaporean students, I had an immense disdain for learning the Chinese language as well as the Chinese culture as a whole. This loss of interest led to a great reluctance to learn or even pay attention in chinese lessons. However after spending a duration of four years learning under Mr Kok, not only did he help to pull up my grades, but also inculcated a love for Chinese as a whole.He does this by using a plethora of various methods to teach the chinese language such as showing news report segments or using various multimedia as a platform to spice up the lesson. This helped to spark interest in the language as it was brought out of the mundane pages of the textbook into real life scenarios showing just how applicable it was in life.
Mr Kok is a very dedicated and devoted teacher, be it spending countless of hours helping me grasp certain concepts or answering techniques or offering to guide or help me via multimedia platforms like Skype even outside class hours. Despite my slow pace of learning, he was very patient with me, never getting mad or agitated, but simply reiterated to me again the topic until I had clarified all my doubts.
He is also an easy going, encouraging and motivating teacher, spurring me on before every examination with words of encouragement as well as consoling me whenever I did not do well in a test and helped me to analyze the segments of the test that I did not do well in and showed me how to improve those areas. His constant encouragement and reassurance helped to boost my morale and helped me to perform better in examinations.
Under his guidance and tutorage ,my grades have steadily improved for throughout the years, from a relatively low grade in sec 1 to an A1 in the GCE O level examination.
I would highly recommend Mr Kok as a chinese tutor simply because he is a dedicated and devoted teacher who shows care and concern for the well beings of his students and would never give up on them. I am proud to call him to your attention.
His testimonial from 2011:
Jun De from Fairfield Methodist Sec Sch has outdone himself and achieved outstanding result. He scored 82 percent overall for his Chinese making him the best and most improved student i have among the rest. Even Jun De was apalled by his results this time round as it was his first time getting so high during his years of schooling. His paper 1 component was his forte this time round with 17/20 for situational(公函）and 32/40 for composition. I feel that the main factor for his success is due to of his diligience. During the holidays, he did alot of Chinese related assignments which consist of books"非常阅读" that the teachers personally written for the syllabus. Every page consists of interesting passages and innovative questions specially catered for their age to catch their interest and attention. These painstakingly written worksheets are aimed to polish their comprehension skills. Those who may want to purchase the book for your children, it is not for sale anywhere at all unfortunately. The school is very strict about their publications. I would like to applaud Fairfield Methodist dedicated team of teachers for this first-of-its-kind education material which no other school elsewhere has done it.
On the other hand, i got another student, Zhen Wei who has not reached Jun De's pinnacle in Chinese. He does not have interest towards Chinese. Due to little exposure to the language, he has tremendous difficulty in writing especially. But much to my delight he made improvement and for the first time passed his paper 1. Although with the increased demand put upon by the school to restrict the situational writing to formal"gong han" but he still managed to pull it off with the news article review as his preferred composition question. It is heartening that he put what i thought him about the organisation techniques of writing article review into the exam. I hope that this little result will serve as a stepping stone for him to do better.
Recommendation from his Dad:
Dear Vincent,
I like to express my sincere thanks for your dedication in teaching my son, Andrew Ng, in his preparing for his June 2013 Chinese “O” level, and helping him to gain the confidence to do well in the June paper, achieving a “A”. I have witnessed very often, you have gone out of your way to research and introduce new and refreshing materials, such as radio recordings, news articles etc.. so as to keep my son interest in the subject. -
