About four months into the LCCI Level 1 course and barely two weeks before the final exam, most of the students were struggling with some of the accounting topics. Understandably we were stressed. Then our teacher had good news for us – that a group of Accounting students from the Ngee Ann Polytechnic in Singapore would come and tutor us on the topics we were weak in.
On Friday, 7 September 2018, the Ngee Ann students arrived at our school. During the introduction, I came to know that they were of our age and felt a little embarrassed that one or two of them were even younger than some of us. They were all very friendly and lovely.
As part of their programme for us, the students had planned to give us peer tutoring on two different days. It was a disparate experience for our class because the peer tutors were teaching us individually. It certainly made sense because each of us had our own particular weaknesses and difficulties in the accounting subject. I must say their teaching skills were excellent. They gave us some acronyms that came in handy during our exam. During both tutoring sessions we had a few breaks in which we came to know each other more through some new games we played.
A special event called the Task Fun Fare was planned for the final day of the programme. We were glad to be involved in the preparations a day before the event. We helped to prepare for certain games which were part of the activities designed as a practical for us to apply what we have learnt from the textbook and to understand how accounting works in real life.
On the Fun Fare Day we started to set up our ‘business stalls’ at nine and around ten our ‘customers’ started to stream in. The customers were students from ERLC and EELC. To our great surprise, the place soon became crowded with happy and curious customers. However, it was not easy for stallholders to grab a customer’s attention to what their stalls had to offer.
Admittedly some of the boys were experts at it, but some of them even tried to steal customers by going to different stalls and convincing the customers to visit their stalls instead. This of course was a bit overboard, but I must say their idea worked.
At the end of the ‘business day’, we had to prepare our income statements and the stall that returned the highest profits would be the winner. The prize went to a stall manned by a team of boys. From this Fun Fare, I learnt plenty of new things among which was how to advertise.
After the very useful practical, there was a cultural exchange performance where our school presented a gorgeous song and a hilarious skit. The Ngee Ann students presented a dance and a song and both were beautiful. The entire programme concluded with a prize presentation and, of course, a photo session.
Two weeks later, our LCCI final test results were out and thankfully they turned out good. I think the two days of peer tutoring had contributed to the better results. We look forward to meeting the Ngee Ann students again so we can thank them.
