Tinker, Tailor

I shall write more often. This would be my 2008 resolution, except that I don’t make resolutions.

Some people have told me that I write well, but my opinion differs. I may write well every now and then, but it hasn’t been consistent. I want to write well every time my pen slides along the dead tree. I want to write well every time my finger taps on the rubber-protected macbook pro keyboard.

Thus, I shall write more often, even though it may mostly be nonsense. One can write nonsense well, just as one can make garbage taste good. [Ed: use another analogy]

It must have been my sec 1 English teacher who first gave me some confidence in my own writing. Despite me consistently not doing my homework, despite me having to stand outside the classroom on countless occasions while she was teaching, despite having to deal with my smart-alecky comments during those times I wasn’t outside the classroom, she could look past my shortcomings to offer me that bit of encouragement:

“Have you ever thought of becoming a writer?”

“Nope,” was my reply, blunt as usual.

And that was after she had selected one of my 10-page compositions to be published in the school magazine.

(She was the same teacher I nicknamed Evil Tan* [surname changed]. Her name was Elizabeth Tan*, but because she gave so much homework, she became Evil Tan.)

I didn’t write 10-page compositions to begin with. It was my classmate Don who got me started.

One day, Evil Tan made as all pair up to write a composition. Everyone rushed to find their own partners, while I remained in my seat, thinking what a dumb idea it was to write pair compositions. At the end of it, there were only 2 boys without a partner - me and Don.

As I pulled my chair beside his, he started apologising to me.

“I must apologise to you first, because my compos are very long.”

“Oh that’s fine, mine are long too.” I was thinking about my long 4-page compositions.

After we discussed the plot that day, he set off to write the first draft.

He came days later with a 10-page composition. Your compos are indeed long! I thought, but didn’t say. Nor did I complain, since we got very good grades. And all I did were some minor edits.

But that was important for me - it broke this barrier in my mind that said that school compos couldn’t be too long.

And that was how I started writing 10-page compos as well. And ended up getting published in my school magazine.

Maybe Evil Tan wasn’t really that evil.

Maybe I’m a writer after all.

That’s if I keep writing.

I don’t know Alfian personally, but I’ve read some of his writings, and he’s helluva talented guy.

So I got pretty pissed when I read about his termination as a relief teacher.

Once I cool down, I’ll send an email to Mr Tharman, the minister of education, to ask for an explanation.

I encourage you to do the same - do your bit for our education and our future.

For your convenience,

tharman_shanmugaratnam[at]moe.gov.sg

(Via Tomorrow.sg: Alfian Sa’at’s Unexplained Termination)

Reading this article, Brain sensor allows mind-control, reminds me of an incident some years ago…

My boss sent me and a colleague to this rather low-profile education-related exhibition to show one of our products.

Because the exhibition was really part of a conference, after we set up our booths, we had a couple of hours to kill because the delegates were still stuck in the conference. So naturally, we abandoned our booths to visit the other booths.

The other booths were mostly from schools showing off some new technology they were using with their students, or from some company promoting their education-related product. Nothing really interesting.

Soon, we exhausted all the booths, and the delegates hadn’t appeared. We were quite bored.

When you have 2 bored jokers feeding off each other’s ideas, things happen.

My colleague created a powerpoint presentation there on our iBooks for our “new product”.
The slide went something like this:

BRAIN CHIP
Implant our new and revolutionary
brain chip into your child’s brain.
Your child will become smarter
and have photographic memory!

Of course, some of the other exhibitors stopped on their tracks when they saw our Powerpoint slide. A good number of them even asked us about it. People can be so gullible.

Soon, that too became boring, so we decided to try something else to have fun.

At a nearby booth were these primary 5 kids who were showing how they used PDAs for learning (PDAs were still somewhat of a novelty then). We asked them over to show them our brain chip presentation.

They were interested (who doesn’t want to be smarter and have better memory?), but the idea of getting a chip implanted in the head was a little discomforting, even for 11-year-olds.

“Any of you interested in the brain chip?” I asked.

Uncomfortable silence, as they looked at one another, waiting for someone to make the first move.

“He already has the chip in his brain,” said my colleague, pointing to me. “That’s why he’s very smart.”

“Yep you can ask me any difficult question, and I’ll know the answer, thanks to the brain chip.”

Silence.

“Why don’t you ask me a difficult question?” I prompted my colleague.

So my colleague asked me a general-knowledge question, and I answered immediately.

Of course, kids these days are smarter than that. Soon, one of them came up with a question I couldn’t answer.

“Hey,” I glared at my colleague accusingly, “you didn’t load in the answer to this question!”

Then I turned to the kids. “Having the brain chip doesn’t mean you’ll know everything,” I explained. “You’ll only know the things that have been loaded onto the chip. This means you won’t have trouble with spelling and biology any more!”

“Can I look at the chip?” one boy asked.

“Sure,” I replied, fishing out a brain chip from my pocket. It was the SD card from my PDA. At that time, most people had never seen an SD card before.

The eyes of the kids widened in wonder. So we were telling the truth all along. One of the boys even decided to let us implant the chip into his brain.

Thankfully, the delegates were released around that time, so we didn’t have to perform the procedure or tell more stories.

But I’m sure gonna miss that colleague in my new job. It’s been great working with him.

Wengu is a pretty awesome site on Chinese classics in English done by the French. According to the welcome page:

This site allows you to read some Chinese classic texts in original language and with some translations.

So now you can read 孫子兵法 (Sun Zi’s Art of War) in it’s original Chinese with great ease, even if your Chinese character recognition capabilities suck like a vacuum. Just put your mouse over the offending character, and the pinyin and definition will magically appear.

I wish I had this in school.

Check out the other classics as well.

(via languagehat.com)

I enjoy reading stories to kids. Probably because no one ever pays any attention when I talk, so seeing a kid sit there wide-eyed in rapt attention while I read does wonders for my self-esteem.

The only thing I don’t like is when the kid asks me to read the story again. Punishment for not reading well enough the first time? Actually, young children do need repetition, and they enjoy it. But I’d always ask to read another book - it’s hard for me to read with expression and enthusiasm if I’m reading the same stuff within 5 minutes.

Anyway, some years ago, this dad was showing me the Arthur’s adventure series of interactive stories he bought for his son. The dad was glowing with pride as his son clicked through the interactive features of the story, as if the son was on track to become a Nobel Prize laureate.

I wasn’t impressed, and I felt that the son wasn’t learning very much, but I kept my mouth shut since the dad wasn’t going to listen to me anyway.

What triggered me to write this post was this article - Interactive learning fails reading test (via Slashdot).

“Teachers and parents should be aware that an interactive story book may provide their children with more entertainment than education.”

I may be a geek and I may be in love with technology, but if I have kids of my own, they won’t be touching the computer very much. And none of these interactive story crap.

In fact, when parents come to me on advice for their kids, one of the first things I say is “read to your kid.” It’s not just educational, it’s emotionally bonding. (The other advice I give is “let them go out and play.”)

A related book to check out is The Flickering Mind: The False Promise of Technology in the Classroom and How Learning Can Be Saved. I borrowed it from the library once, but I didn’t get around reading it. I suspect that it’s worth a look.

Consider this from Shakespeare’s A Comedy of Errors, Act IV, Scene 3:

There’s not a man I meet but doth salute me
As if I were their well-acquainted friend

A lot of people would declare that his should be used instead of their, including some self-proclaimed grammar experts (I call them grammar terrorists).

I have been using the singular they occasionally, especially when I don’t want to specify the gender. For example, I might write:

Someone came up to me. I didn’t like the look on their face.

instead of:

Someone came up to me. I didn’t like the look on that person’s face.

In this case, there isn’t much difference. But if I continue on the narrative, the use of that person can become more cumbersome. Consider:

Someone came up to me. I didn’t like the look on that person’s face. Nor did I like the person’s smell, as I soon discovered.

which doesn’t read as smooth as:

Someone came up to me. I didn’t like the look on their face. Nor did I like their smell, as I soon discovered.

Don’t like it? Let me quote from Language Log (Shakespeare used they with singular antecedents so there):

By all means, avoid using they with singular antecedents in your own writing and speaking if you feel you cannot bear it. Language Log is not here to tell you how to write or speak. But don’t try to tell us that it’s grammatically incorrect. Because when a construction is clearly present several times in Shakespeare’s rightly admired plays and poems, and occurs in the carefully prepared published work of just about all major writers down the centuries, and is systematically present in the unreflecting conversational usage of just about everyone including Sean Lennon, then the claim that it is ungrammatical begins to look utterly unsustainable to us here at Language Log Plaza. This use of they isn’t ungrammatical, it isn’t a mistake, it’s a feature of ordinary English syntax that for some reason attracts the ire of particularly puristic pusillanimous pontificators, and we don’t buy what they’re selling.

I wish I knew this stuff when I was in secondary school - I definitely would have used the singular they in my next English composition, and hope that my English teacher would fall for my trap and put a bright red circle around my carefully-placed they, then we could have a heated argument where I would quote Shakespeare and the rest, and finally prove to them that I was indeed correct (as usual), and thus obnoxiously show my superiority over them.

Sometimes I wonder why so many of my teachers couldn’t stand me.

Squidoo is finally up (beta).

To me, Squidoo is a type of search engine, with the search results compiled by real people. And unlike the early search engines where the search results were compiled by employees of the search company, this one’s compiled by anyone who feels competent enough to do so. A simple but pretty revolutionary idea.

Students will lurve this - it’ll make research even easier now.

5 mins - greet students; take attendance
10 mins - introduce topic
20 mins - show slides 1-12
…

Someone who used to teach in a tertiary institution here was complaining that he was given and had to follow lesson plans like this - no restructuring of lessons.

A complete waste, for I happen to know that this guy is a brilliant teacher, if only he was allowed to do his own thing. No wonder he doesn’t teach there anymore.

With policies like this (this is not a universal phenomenon in Singapore, thankfully), look me in the eye and tell me you don’t know why our students aren’t creative.

Ok this is just a small area, but little things added together, and we have something called culture. And ours in an uncreative one.

I’m now going through a lesson on a particular software.

The instructor likes to move the mouse pointer around when she talks. Terribly distracting.

Tip when you’re teaching with a computer: don’t make unnecessary mouse movements.

Every now and then, someone would ask me which schools I went to, what courses I studied, and so on.

Building a mental model of my mentality?

I’m guilty of that too.

For instance, if a guy says he’s from ACS, then you half-expect him to be pretty fluent in English and not Chinese, and he might be slightly cocky or snobbish. No wonder so many people suspect that I was from that school.

But stereotyping is useful only to a certain extent.

I know that too well because people who attempt to figure me out using stereotypes often fail quite spectacularly.

Like this particular colleague of mine, who was sure that I was educated overseas. After I assured him that I didn’t study overseas, he could even ask “are you sure or not?”

Then a few months later, he’d ask “are you sure you didn’t study overseas?”

And the same question again, another few months on.

I’m often reluctant to talk about the schools I’ve been through, because it only paints the wrong picture, especially if I’m dealing with someone less sophisticated, meaning that I’ll have to spend even more time explaining why I’m not like your typical RGS girl (just kidding - I didn’t study there, although I sometimes wish I did - LOL).

Granted that there are a lot of things I learnt in school, but the values that define me and set me apart from others are there because I refused to learn what was taught, or managed to unlearn them.

I refused to learn that the teacher is always right. That grades are important. That certificates are the reason we go to school.

I had to unlearn the ‘fact’ that teachers are necessary for us to learn. That knowledge should be hoarded selfishly. That one can’t go far without a degree (quite true if you’re in the civil service).

I am not a product of any school.

I am what I am, not because I went to this or that school, but in spite of going there.

I am not a product of the education system here, but despite it.

I am not a product of Singapore.

Is technology in schools the future or just a fad?

Research results are mixed. But most studies conclude that for computers and other technology to have much effect on student performance, a number of conditions are necessary: Teachers have to be technologically adept; classroom assignments have to allow for exploration; and curricula have to abandon breadth for depth.

Although schools have made changes in some of those areas, particularly increasing teachers’ technical proficiency, the predominant uses of computers remain word processing, heavily filtered Internet searches and the occasional PowerPoint presentation. In addition, with pressure rising to improve test scores, more schools have embraced skill-drilling software that contributes little to long-term student learning, observers say.

This reminds me of Todd Oppenheimer’s the Flickering Mind which I never really got to read. Maybe I should.

Slashdot has a good discussion on the article.

If only more teachers and trainers read this.

I myself could learn something from this:

5) Do group exercises whenever possible, no matter what you’ve heard.

I’ve heard every excuse, “Adults don’t like to do group exercises.” or “Professional developers don’t like to do group exercises.” or “People don’t like to do group exercises when they’re paying big bucks to be here.” or “People from outside the US don’t like to do group exercises… “. They’re all bulls***. There is a huge social component to learning, regardless of how much we try to eliminate it in the classroom. There’s a way to do interactive group exercises that works surprisingly well, and is usually quite easy.

Was trying out this learning style questionnaire.

My results:

Style Scores

Visual 15
Aural 10
Verbal 17
Physical 13
Logical 14
Social 15
Solitary 18

The scores are out of 20 for each style. A score of 20 indicates you use that style often.

Hmmm… I get 15 for social, and 18 for solitary? Weird. I must have lied on some of the social questions, or the questions are flawed.