Journeying with Ms Ng

Ms Dorothy Ng specialises in mental health nursing. She has worked with adolescents and disturbed teenagers and is familiar with the psyche of teenagers. She is a warm and open-hearted lecturer with so much intuition that she can even sense students’ fears and anxiety. 

It is no wonder this caring and affable School of Health Sciences (SHS) lecturer is well loved by her students.

Ms Ng makes her tutorials fun, telling her students to “rock the whole place,” and sit on the floor, and celebrates birthdays and socialises with her students, allowing them to confide in her.

Little do we know she is actually an avid believer of Blooms Taxonomy, a classification of learning domains, and she believes avidly in stimulating the affective, cognitive and psychomotor domains.

Some of Ms Ng’s teaching methods include making her students experience situations instead learning theory. “I make them teach me things, to build up their self-esteem,” she said. “So they feel like I acknowledge their efforts and strength.”

When students are inattentive during her lecturers, she uses reverse psychology and says “No one seems to be listening to me”.  This works as an effective catalyst and her students look up and tell her they are listening immediately. To motivate students who are late for lessons, she gets the class to clap their hands and cheer them whenever they arrive punctually.

Her students care for her as they do for their family, and ask after her well-being when she falls sick.

There was one particular incident in which Ms Ng recounted, where she was involved in a mishap, and was rushed to the hospital.  

Her previous students were working nurses in that very hospital and accompanied her through her ordeal, reassuring her with the words: “Don’t worry teacher, we will take care of you.”

“I was embarrassed when I knew they had to assist me,” she said. “They used to be playful in school but they were so different when nursing me. My students really took care of me as if I was their loved one, very professional and I was so proud of them. They never let NYP down.”

It is incidents like this that make Ms Ng feel proud and motivated to teach. She describes her students as “awesome” and “uniquely different.” We are sure her students, and future students to come, will feel no less different about her.

Ms Dorothy Ng teaches Year 2 nursing students Nursing Skills & Mental Health Nursing.