Wei Kiat's Blog

I apologise for grammarical and spelling errors, as well as various unintended typos which may hinder your understanding of this article. As my regular readers would no doubt be aware, I don't give a damn about such things as it hinders my flow of thought when writing. However, this piece of writing should be coherent enough to be understood. Enjoy.

Today's experience in AJC was effectively kick start by marking our uniform with those cute little rain drops that commited suicide from their respective clouds as soon as the morning assembly finishes. Although the weather was looking overcast and there were signs that a rain was coming, AJC authorities in their respective air-con rooms simply could not observe and predict the weather, resulting in students rushing for shelther immediately when the flag raising ended, much like teenagers chasing after their favourite but apparently worthless idols. Many students even got wet. Compare this to The Chinese High School, where the PE teachers and DM will patrol the flag raising area every morning before it starts to look at the weather and determine if a rain is going to happen. Of course, no rain occurs during or immediately after a flag raising, and nobody got wet. Of course, it can be save to assume that with AJC's mission of "To challenge our students to develop to their full potential and become responsible citizens, ready to face the changing world.", all our bodies should be challenged and able to face the changing weather, which is part and parcel of the world around us.

First lesson was physics, and I was glad because I respect my physics teacher. However, a funny thing happened. Mr Lim went to pick up his water bottle when we were busy doing group discussion, and VP Tay dropped in to make some observations. She of course gave everyone the smile that she had practise for 20 years, much like the practised smile of PM Lee, warming the students' heart and making feel loved. There can be only two Mrs Tay in my life (My mother and my future wife), so I don't want to handle warmth from another Mrs Tay and therefore turn my head away as soon as she started smiling.

General Paper lecture today was a blast. It was kick started by a general paper with a queer way of speech, and ended by another teacher who articlate every single world just like Microsoft Sam, Micrsoft's Text to Speech Engine. We were shown various mistakes made my our seniors in 2005, which seems to cover up for the fact that marking for a paper held two weeks ago has not yet completed. Since mistakes made my our seniors is certainly mistakes made by us, I listened attentively. Also worthly to take note was this male GP teacher whom I do not know his name. When he saw that not a lot of students had setttled down and took out their pencil case, he yelled, "HAVE YOU HEARD OF THE INVENTION CALLED A PEN?" I thought this remark was exceptionally funny, although the tone implied that he was more of a lion than a clown. Someone obviously felt tickled enough to laugh out loud, and the teacher immediately snapped back, "Who did that?" Of course, nobody dared to admit, and that poor soul was saved. I find the teachers' reaction to the laughter totally strange and rude. If you are tickled by a comedian and laughed, will be snap right back at you? There is a lesson to be learnt. Think twice before laughing at teachers' joke. They are lions, not clowns or comedians. They can crack jokes but can't stand the laughter that follows. It is therefore important to master the skill of secret laughing and not laugh out loud.

Finally, back to more serious stuffs, another teacher showed us some mistakes in quotations and phrasing made by students. Those students are mad! Their brain's logic and their pretendious command of the English Language is even worst than my sister. At least my sister will not throw in any quotations she know as long as the quotation contains one word that occurs in the essay topic title. And my secondary school sister would certainly not invent phrases such as "become a darker cycle of an even darker night." How such a phrase make sense to the creator, I have no idea. But I do have an advise for GP wannabe's whose command of the language involves randomly generating, memorising, and using all the wrong phrases in the wrong context: Fuck off.

I've never memorised any popular quotation, I don't read the newspaper everyday, and I don't use difficult english words. All I have on my hands are varied sentence structure, being concious of making my sentences and paragraphs flow right and easily, and therefore making things easy to read. Of course my grammar and vocabulary can be improve upon, but just writing simple and logical sentence won me a top 7% in GP during the common test. I'm sure that if AJCians drop all the booklets or lists of quotations they are memorising and practise writing more, they will sooner or later find their own unique writing stuff which they are comfortable with, and henceforth making writing a coherent and logical essay that can be easily understood as simple as drinking water.

During today's GP lesson, I did find some error being made by the teachers. Although being just a lowly student, I'm in no position to point out those mistakes least I'm wrong, but I felt that it would be nice to express my opinions here. My English standard sucks, but I feel is adequate enough for me to be aware of some very obvious errors. The first is regarding the topic I had chosen for my Prelim, "Is competition a catalyst to innovation." It is obvious that this question requires the candidate to touch upon how competition can speed up or increase the number of innovation. However, how the screen, the teacher wrote "The issue is whether competition is causes innovation and not about other cause." I quoted this sentence word by word. Not only did he made a wrong interpretation of the question which seems to be set by him, he also had grammar more terrible than mine.

Another mistake was when one of the teacher mentioned that it is important to make your essay as clear as possible, and she wants the students to achieve that by using short sentences. That is wrong. Short sentence is not enough. It disrupts the flow of an essay. It leaves the reader panting for air. It makes it hard to convey ideas. I mean ideas that are complex. It also reduces the need to use proper connectives. It makes the essay sounds as if it was written by a three-year-old. Am I right?

After school, I went to eat sushi with my girlfriend to celebrate the end of Prelims. On the mrt, she told me about her physics teacher, who managed to finish going through the 30 MCQ questions within one hour. Contrast this with Mr Lim who went through only around 10 questions in an hour. Any authority of AJC may conclude that my gf's physics teacher is a better one because of his ability to teach fast. Here is how he taught his class:

1) Flashes solution to question 1.
2) If donno, ask him.
3) Flashes solution to next question.
4) Repeat step 2.

He did not went through every single question, and rather rushes through everything. In the end, his inapproiate explaination also made my girlfriend so blurred that she learnt nothing in that 1 hour. Talk about efficency of the teachers. 1 hour go through 30 questions sounds good on paper but serves nothing but to waste students' time. There is no quality here. As a result I had to re-teach many of the mistakes my gf made using knowledge I learnt during Mr Lim's fruitful lesson. Worst, when my girlfriend tried to show me how her physics teachers teaches how to solve those questions, it is obvious that he is merely working backwards from the answer, and not teaching students how to approach such questions.

And on a lighter note, when my classmate went to the school's library to borrow a book, he was shocked to disover a sign that read "JC2s cannot borrow books after 25 Sept". How fitting it is to feel disowned by your own school when you just came back to it after the prelims.

Going back to school is indeed fun. Especially a school as fantastic and as exciting as AJC, with such efficent teachers.

And remember, Anderson Junior College is among the approximately 2/3 of Singapore Schools that won the School Distinction Award.

And according to an ex-ajcian who left after the first 3 months, reasons for AJC winning that award includes:
1)principal knows how to put up good show
2)MOE is blind

These two points seems to be mutually inclusive, and please be aware I am not responsible for the above two points because I just copied and paste it from the MSN chat window.

The above was censored because it was too mean.