Silver Er,Temasek Junior College

Dear Mr Phay,
I had joined Learners’ Lodge during the preparatory course in June 2021 for H1 Econs tuition. Initially, I had not thought much of the centre; I had assumed that it was just like any other tuition centre that I’ve been to in the past.

But I was wrong.

Due to the Covid-19 safety measures, I had spent my course lessons staring at a computer screen with black squares staring back at me. However, the lessons were not boring at all, far from it. Mr Phay had an ingenious way of teaching, in which he would utilise our names while lecturing to make it seem like he was interacting with all of us in a room. He used to mention it as a part of his ‘performance’, which was what he considered his lessons to be.

I was captivated by his ability to keep an entire room of students focused on him and his teachings. He managed to take difficult economic concepts and condense them down to a whiteboard of words, and sticky notes in my brain. Whatever he had taught in a lesson, he would repeat it in the first few minutes of the next lesson. This would help me remember the economic concepts very clearly, up to a point when I was not only able to recite them fluently, I was also able to understand exactly how each economic agent worked with one another and the reasoning behind each concept.

Being a student from the Arts stream who had short timetables on Fridays, I would turn up at the centre really early (like almost 30 minutes before class starts, which is insane, yes) and Mr Phay would take the time to help me with my queries and address my misconceptions. I had mentioned earlier that Learners’ Lodge was not an ordinary tuition centre, and one reason was that Mr Phay would collect our exam papers, analyse it on his own, before returning it to us with his comments on how we can improve. He was also not afraid to speak his mind about the misconceptions that other schools had about the syllabus et cetera and I am very grateful for that because I could avoid learning about the wrong things. This was certainly not a normal thing for tuition centres to do, and I always wished that I had signed up earlier for his classes. Entertaining as they were, with his witty sense of humour, they were also full of teachings; both economic and about life.

I am forever grateful to my mother for pushing me to sign up for a class, and forever grateful for knowing Mr Phay and learning tons under him. My A in H1 Econs in the A-Levels was not just due to my hard work; it was the end result of my teachers working tirelessly behind the scenes, and Mr Phay is a forerunner there.

Thank you Learners’ Lodge, and thank you to Mr Phay for helping me achieve my A in H1 Econs. The leap from an E to an A is certainly not small and for that, I will always remember Mr Phay and Learners’ Lodge.