As I conducted the goal setting program with my students, I noticed the vast amount of potential in all of them. It has led me to believe that with the appropriate guidance regarding our student's future, they can achieve a lot more with the massive amount of motivation that they are capable of generating within themselves.

Lets take a Secondary 2 Zhong Hua Secondary student of mine as an example. I was surprised when he told me that he wanted to be a dentist. I went "wow, thats a good ambition". I thought he genuinely enjoyed operating on people's mouth, but luckily it turned out that he was in for the money. "Just pluck one tooth can get $50", he said. As much as he wanted to be a dentist, he basically had no clue as to how to get into that profession.

I mapped the picture out to him, that the dentistry course in university is extremely competitive. In order to get into that course he'll have to do very well in JC, and probably come for a top5 JC as well. I told him how university administrators separate the piles of applications between top5 JCs and "the rest".

This got him really interested, and he started asking me for the list of JC rankings in Singapore, which I did. He was a bit skeptical about his ability in getting into a top5 JC. I assured him that since he is already in a top20 secondary school, to enter a top5 JC is definitely no problem for him.

I rounded up the discussion by asking him what should he do with his maths (its a maths tuition) in order to enter a good JC. He was determined to improve his C5 grade to an A1.

In the class tests a month later, he managed to score an A2 on his Maths. Will update on how he does for CA1