SHE had wanted to be a social worker, but was offered a teaching scholarship instead. As Ms Leah Aw considered the option, she thought about why she wanted to do social work in the first place.

"I wanted to help people. And I think teaching is a very important part of that," she says. By playing a role in shaping immature minds, she could see herself helping to set young people on the straight and narrow, keeping them from trouble later in life.

So she accepted the scholarship - a Public Service Commission Overseas Merit Scholarship (Teaching) - and went on to receive a first class honours degree in geography from the University of Cambridge and a master's in education from Harvard.

After returning to Singapore in 2006, she spent nine months at the National Institute of Education to get a post-graduate diploma in education. Even though some portions of the programme duplicated what she learnt during her master's, she felt it was a necessary part of her training to become a teacher.

"The practicum was really useful," she says. "I had very good co-operating teachers who observed me teaching and gave feedback."

The practicum is three months of teaching practice that trainee teachers here have to undergo. She had her practicum at Dunman High School, her alma mater, and enjoyed it so much that she said yes when the school asked if she wanted to stay.

The 24-year-old is now teaching geography, project work and active citizenry education at Dunman High.

Dunman High is offering the Integrated Programme, a scheme which allows students to skip the O levels. It will see its first batch of A-level graduates at the end of this year.

"It's a very exciting time," she says. "A lot of what we teach is not set in stone. It's very much shaped by the teachers."

While they still have a syllabus to cover, there is no scheme of work to specify what is taught each week. Having so much freedom could have been intimidating for a teacher as new as she is, but it is not because she has senior teachers to guide her.

Being handed a blank slate also means teachers have to come up with their own teaching resources. But the workload is made manageable because it is shared - for example, different teachers will take charge of different chapters.

"Preparation time is cut; I can just adapt what they've prepared. It frees up time for me to think of new things to try with the students," says Ms Aw.

And there are plenty of new things to try. School now is quite a different kettle of fish from when she was a student. For one, teachers toting laptops loaded with presentations and videos are now de rigueur.

Students also go on a lot more field trips, including excursions overseas. Plus, there are a host of exchange opportunities.

As teachers, there is work involved with these trips. "You want to make sure they don't just go there and sight-see," she says.

Through her day-to-day interactions with students, she is learning how to better relate with and engage them. She remembers one particular group that used to frustrate her because they were rowdy in her class but quiet in other teachers' classes.

Then she found out from another teacher that those students actually liked her classes her lot. And it dawned on her that quiet students do not necessarily equate to interested students.

Having been a teacher a while, does she feel that she has been able to fulfil her goal of helping people?
"I do feel that what I'm doing is making a social impact ... in modelling to them how I live and how I relate to other people,"she says. "These kids ... it sometimes astounds me how malleable they are. Their minds are really in the process of being shaped. So what we do as teachers is very important."

This article was first published in The Straits Times on Jan 19, 2008