Francis
Neo
STUDENT TEACHER
of
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Literature in English &
English Language
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Postgraduate Diploma in Education (Secondary)
National Institute of Education, Singapore
About me:
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My teaching experience includes short internships and relief teaching stints with:
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Xinmin Secondary School (2017)
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MOE's Communications and Engagement Group, Planning Office (2018)
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Poi Ching School (2019)
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Contract teaching at CHIJ St. Nicholas Girls' School (2020).
I have taught texts such as The Joy Luck Club, To Kill a Mockingbird and Daljit Nagra's "In a White Town".
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My literary interests run the range of:
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Modern / Modernist writing
(T.S. Eliot, Hart Crane, Wallace Stevens;
Walt Whitman)
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Postcolonial writing
(Toni Morrison, Arundhati Roy, Salman Rushdie,
Ken Saro-Wiwa, Seamus Heaney)
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Shakespeare and Chaucer
I've also begun venturing into contemporary creative non-fiction (Rebecca Solnit, Olivia Laing, Anna Tsing) and literary magazines (Granta). I'm currently reading Solnit's Wanderlust: A History of Walking.
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My interest in literary research began when I wrote a H3 essay on the unreliable narrators in the works of James Hogg, Vladimir Nabokov and Jean Rhys. I was also awarded a travel grant from the Maxwell and Meyerstein fund (Oxford) to pursue archival research for a book history essay on the relationship between Singaporean writers (Catherine Lim and Robert Yeo) and the state.
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Prior to the PGDE, I read English at the universities of Durham (BA in English Literature) and Oxford (MSt in World Literatures in English) in the United Kingdom.
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Outside of school, I have a keen interest in sport and fitness. I enjoy the challenge that sport presents and the lessons in perseverance and dedication it imparts.
I rowed with my college boat club from 2016 - 2019 and represented Singapore at the 2018 Asian Rowing Cup in the Lightweight Men's Single Sculls category.
Some of my favourite sporting endeavours to date include the OSIM Sundown Marathon (2016) and the Ironman 70.3 Bintan (2016). Today, I do CrossFit and aerial silks classes.
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I also have budding interests in independent film and art history. I hope to become an art museum docent to make cultural knowledge more accessible for a broader audience.
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I possess organisational and leadership skills built during my days in the executive committee of the 29th Students' Council in Victoria Junior College. I was heavily involved in coordinating the many moving parts of a school culture initiative, including painting the college grandstand, designing and printing a college t-shirt (still in use today) and match support.
At NIE, I lead a Group Endeavours in Service Learning (GESL) project that documents the experiences of migrant workers during Covid-19.
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I produce issues of The Birthday Workbook: a free educational newsletter that serves as an accompanying resource for the commentaries, opinion and think-pieces in the Birthday Book.
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My educational goals include bringing Literature to a diverse range of student profiles and making culture (broadly speaking) an authentic, integral part of my students' lives. Literature has brought me, not only from a 3-room HDB flat in Bedok South to Oxford's dreaming spires, but has indelibly changed the way I think, love and live.
