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One Community: Learning to Notice, Learning to Appreciate
Written By:
Ang Qi Zhi (4i4, 2026)
Tan Guan Yu Will (4P1, 2026)
When we first settled on “One Community” as the overarching theme for this year’s Appreciation Month, we thought we understood what it meant.
Hwa Chong is, after all, a community in the most literal sense: students, teachers, Executive and Administrative Staff (EAS), and non-teaching staff sharing the same spaces and contributing, in different ways, to the functioning of the school. Appreciation Month seemed to offer a natural opportunity to acknowledge those whose work often escapes our attention.
Yet, as the month unfolded, we began to realise that appreciation is not merely an act of saying thank you. Rather, it is an often overlooked act of intention.
To appreciate someone is to pause long enough to notice what we have become accustomed to overlooking; to learn the stories behind familiar faces, understand the routines behind familiar spaces, and recognise the work that allows our everyday experiences to appear effortless. In this sense, “One Community” is not simply about the fact that we inhabit and function within the same school. It is also about recognising that our experiences of Hwa Chong are inseparable from the contributions of the people around us.
One of the first things that changed our perspective was the series of interviews we conducted.
Through them, we were reminded of how easily familiarity can paradoxically lead to invisibility. The people we encounter most frequently can sometimes be the people we notice least.
We spoke to members of our EAS and non-teaching staff about their work, their experiences and their lives in Hwa Chong. Some of the questions we asked were deliberately ordinary. Yet, their answers often revealed dimensions of their experiences that we had never stopped to consider.
The truth is, there is something instinctively convenient about reducing a person to their role.
A cleaner becomes the person who sweeps the leaves and washes the toilets. A laboratory staff member becomes the person who deals with spillages and broken apparatus. A canteen vendor becomes the person who prepares our meals.
These descriptions are not necessarily inaccurate, but they are incomplete. They tell us what someone does without revealing who that person truly is.
Speaking to our staff made this distinction increasingly difficult to ignore. Behind every uniform and job title is an individual with their own experiences, relationships, memories, aspirations and reasons for doing what they do.
The interviews therefore became more than an exercise in introducing different departments to the student body. They encouraged us to move beyond appreciating the functions people perform and towards appreciating the people themselves, recognising them not merely for what they do, but for who they are.
This reminder to appreciate people, rather than simply the roles they perform, also brought to mind a meaningful experience that was never intended to be part of Appreciation Month.
We wanted our EAS and non-teaching staff to know that they were seen and valued. Yet relationships do not, and should not, have to be nurtured only through organised initiatives. Appreciation should also arise naturally through the ordinary interactions of school life.
Throughout the year, a group of us would regularly make our way to the drink stall after school to chat with the auntie there. Sometimes, our conversations were about schoolwork or her daily work. At other times, we simply talked and got to know one another. More often than not, however, there was no particular reason for us to be there at all. We had simply grown accustomed to one another’s company, sometimes working on setting up or taking down temporary displays while she prepared items for the next day nearby.
Over time, what began as casual conversations became a small but familiar part of our school days. We would stop by to catch up, until someone who might once have been just another familiar face in the canteen became someone we genuinely knew.
At one point, she made keychains for members of our organising team, each bearing their names and a detailed handmade tennis racket.
It was a small gift, entirely separate from Appreciation Month, but it grew out of genuine conversations that had seemed so simple and insignificant at the time. These keychains represented what Appreciation Month was attempting to encourage on a much larger scale: that repeated encounters and ordinary interactions can be enough for a stranger to become a friend; that community is often built through the accumulation of small moments; and that the community we were trying to strengthen had, in many ways, already existed, but had simply ceased to be noticed.
In hindsight, this was also the idea that informed our Spotlight and Canteen Appreciation Boards.
We featured different departments around the school, giving students an opportunity to learn about the people and work behind the smooth running of Hwa Chong. These boards may have seemed like a straightforward way of sharing information, but by placing these stories in spaces that students passed through every day, we were deliberately bringing often unseen work into view.
The same principle guided our Canteen Appreciation Boards. Students could stop by during recess or lunch to write notes for our canteen vendors, which we later presented to them.
There was something striking about watching students interrupt the rhythm of their usual school day to write a few words of gratitude. The act itself was simple, and there was no expectation that appreciation had to take the form of an elaborate gift or grand declaration.
Most significantly, the boards transformed appreciation from something private into something communal. Gratitude, which might otherwise have remained unspoken, became visible in the very spaces where these relationships had been formed. In that sense, the boards did more than simply celebrate our staff.
They invited students to reconsider the EAS and non-teaching staff whom they had encountered for so long, and to see them as individuals rather than simply as the roles they performed. Our Experiential Learning programme extended this idea beyond observation.
Instead of simply telling students about the work involved in maintaining our school grounds, we had the opportunity to experience a small part of it ourselves.
During one of our interviews, one of our school’s laboratory assistants, Xu, shared a Chinese phrase with us: 纸上得来终觉浅，绝知此事要躬行.
The phrase reminds us that knowledge acquired through words alone remains limited, and that deeper understanding comes through practice and experience. These words felt particularly relevant during our gardening session with Mr Ernest. By getting our hands involved in the process, we experienced, however briefly, the effort involved in maintaining the greenery around our school.
It is easy to appreciate a finished product without considering the process that produced it. We walk past plants every day, expect the logistics for our events to be ready when we need them, rely on functioning projectors in our classrooms, and move through a campus that is clean and safe. Because these things are consistently present, the work behind them can easily become almost invisible.
Experiencing this work firsthand allowed us to reconsider that apparent effortlessness. We learnt more about Mr Ernest, a volunteer gardener, while also coming to understand that what feels ordinary to us is often the product of someone else’s time and care.
Eventually, Appreciation Month reached its finale at the Teachers’ Day Concert.
We presented hampers to the different departments and screened our closing video, bringing the month to a close in a setting traditionally dedicated to celebrating our teachers. Yet, the setting seemed fitting.
Teachers’ Day reminds us of the people who stand at the front of our classrooms, those who teach and inspire us. Appreciation Month, however, asked us to widen our field of vision and recognise that a school is not sustained by those in the spotlight alone. What we see is only the visible portion of something much larger. An ordinary school day is supported by an intricate network of people whose contributions often go unseen.
By the end of the month, what stayed with us most was how our understanding of the theme “One Community” had changed.
Our closing video begins with the word “community”. A community is not simply a collection of people who happen to occupy the same physical space. It is a network of interdependence, a place where one person’s actions become part of another person’s experience, often without either person consciously recognising it.
While people may work in different corners of Hwa Chong, those corners do not exist independently of one another. The school we experience is the product of all their contributions. And perhaps that is why “One Community” matters.
To recognise someone is to acknowledge that they are not merely performing a function within an institution, but contributing to the lived experience of everyone within it. In a sense, the school we experience each day is a collective creation. We inherit the work of people we may never meet and benefit from efforts we may never see. We move through spaces maintained by hands that rarely receive recognition.
Appreciation Month therefore left us with a more difficult question than simply, “How do we say thank you?” Instead, it made us ask what it truly means to notice someone.
There is something ironic about the work of many of our EAS and non-teaching staff: the more effectively they perform their roles, the easier it becomes for us to forget that the work is being done at all. In many cases, their success is measured precisely by the absence of inconvenience. When everything works as it should, there is little reason for us to stop and ask why.
This is what makes their contributions so easy to overlook, and also why appreciation matters. For us, genuine appreciation begins with the willingness to see what familiarity has taught us to overlook. It asks us to look beyond outcomes and towards the people whose efforts make those outcomes possible.
Community is built in the spaces between tangible gestures, through the people we encounter, the relationships we cultivate and the contributions we choose not to take for granted. Appreciation Month may have given us a reason to act for a month, but the more meaningful question is what happens after the month ends.
“One Community” is not simply a declaration that we belong to the same school. It is an acknowledgement that our individual experiences are sustained by the contributions of countless others, whether visible or unseen, and by people whose presence we may only truly recognise once we learn to look more closely.
