 | My Rationale |
I always find it difficult to write a self profile, maybe because I am a teacher and it is not a usual practice of teachers to disclose their history to their students. However it is easier for me to start by talking about my teaching career.
When I was a university student, I was once a part-time lecturer of The Hong Kong Polytechnic Institution (now The Hong Kong Polytechnic University) teaching certain introductory courses. I started teaching HKAL Economics in a secondary school, PLK Vicwood K.T. Chong Sixth Form College from 1992. This is the school that I started my career as a secondary school Economics teacher and I am still working there.
Apart from teaching in the day school as a secondary school teacher, I also worked in the evening school during my first few years of teaching. When our school started the higher education program 3 years ago, I stopped teaching the evening school and changed to teaching in the higher education section of my school in the evening.
Although I teach in only one school since I started my teaching career in a secondary school, I have a lot of chances to contact students with varying abilities and who come from different schools with different backgrounds. I am so sorry to say that most of the students that I have met in my past 7 years of teaching are definitely not up to my and my colleagues' expectations. I am not talking about their ability, but their learning attitude. I know it is not totally their fault, and it seems that this is part of the costs of an affluent society. To be short, most of the students I meet nowadays are lacking motivation and direction. They have poor skills in self-learning and also lack self-initiation. Of course, I am not talking about ALL students in Hong Kong and some of my students are very good in learning and have very good results also, but they are the minority only. In the past, if you have the chance to get a place in the university, it generally means that you are partly guaranteed to success in the future, or at least, it is an indication of your ability. Nowadays, our youngsters going into the universities may NOT necessarily have good study skills, self-learning ability, analyzing power, manner, and have persistence. Hong Kong government only spend money on increasing the number of university places but it hasn’t spent money on raising the ability of the students!?
That is the reason why I wrote the revision exercise books, MICROECONOMICS, Review Questions And Applications, and MACROECONOMICS, Review Questions And Applications published by the Hong Kong Educational Publishing Co. in 1995. Three years later, 1998, I wrote the reference books, Exploring Macroeconomics and Exploring Microeconomics published by the Hong Kong Educational Publishing Co.. In 1999, I build this site. All of these works share my underlying principle of promoting self-studying and hard work. Self-studying is not an easy way to learn, but it is the BEST way because it trains you in the skills of self-learning and tackling problems and it also gives you the most satisfaction.
To write books or to build a web site is not an easy task for a secondary school teacher like me. I tried my best so that these tools can help my students and other young learners.
K.C. Chiu
November 1999
*Special thanks to Mrs Gina Caligiuri for proof-reading this article.