"Nurturing Students to Excel"

Melissa De Silva is a former journalist. She holds a B.A. (honours) degree in English Literature from the National University of Singapore. She has been teaching students privately in the capacity of a part-time English, General Paper and Literature tutor for seven years. Her students came from schools including Raffles Girls, St. Joseph’s Institution, ACS International and Anderson Junior College. Her scope of teaching for English has included strategies and critical thinking skills for essays, comprehension and summaries. When teaching General Paper her focus is on nurturing critical thinking skills for essays and application questions as well as techniques for close reading and analysing the comprehension texts and questions. For Literature, texts she has taught include Romeo and Juliet, Julius Caesar, The Giver, Holes and Lord of the Flies. She also excels in teaching Unseen Poetry and Prose, having coached students from C grades to an A grade for their O-Levels. In August 2016, she was invited to conduct a creative writing workshop for the Ministry of Education Literature Seminar, organised by MOE’s Gifted Education Programme department for Secondary One to Secondary Four students from Raffles Institution, Raffles Girls' School and Cedar Girls. She is a published writer. Her fiction and nonfiction has been published in literary journals in the US, Hong Kong and Singapore. Presently, she is writing a historical novel, for which she has been awarded a Creation Grant from the National Arts Council of Singapore.