Wei Kiat's Blog

there concludes my life as a year one student in anderson junior college, which in my opinion, is the worst jc in existence. the way students mug brainlessly there, the way teachers lavish on good food during their yearly self-improvement workshop while students had to endure rusty and shaky retort stands that can't even work well enough for an accurate physics experiment that is so crucial for our learning and a totally run down and non-air conditioned gym (unlike other jcs) that i first thought was a storeroom for old gym equipments. For example, there are only 2 treadmills in the gym, and the last time i checked, one of it is spoilt.

also concluded is the year where i can slack to my heart's content without worrying too much about my academic performance, which i totally heck care about. This is rather unbecoming of someone who scored 269 for PSLE and went into The Chinese High School. But hate it or love it, this is the way i live. There is no point studying too much when only less than 5~10% of the knowledge gained through the educational system will ever be used in our adulthood. Yes, high educational wastage might be a problem, but without teaching students such a wide field of academic subjects, how will they discover their talents? So i don't really mind the wastage problem, and it shouldn't really be a problem. I just find it annoying to study so much physics and fmaths when i'm bound to forget what i learnt when i went into NS. So i just studied enough to get by. Since this year, 2006 is a more crucial year for all of us melancholic people, i suspect i'll just study abit harder.

I used to enjoy programming as a hobby, as it provides an overwhelming sense of satisfaction when i see that from a totally blank development workspace, i can create a feature packed application in just a few weeks. Although the debugging process was hell, the satisfaction from knowing that i've just fixed another bug is fascinating. Sadly, in this new year, programming seems more and more "inconvient" for me as i could no longer afford to spend much time on it. There is just too much work and too little time. Its an irony of education. Education is preventing myself from educating myself about things i really need to be educated about. Sigh.

With programming strictly reserved for school work and not for personal hobby, i just had to find a new hobby. And i found it through assembling gundam model kits. I had always wanted to buy some serious model assembly kits of stuffs like cars and ships ever since i played with Tamiya Mini 4-wheel when i was much younger. However, the hefty price always put me off. Yet for some reason, when poh wei's bro told me his friend was going to japan and he could get a gundam assembly kit for 30bucks less than what it cost in Singapore, i jumped at the chance. When it finally arrived, it will be my birthday present to myself.
2004 saw the purchase of my Creative MuVo Slim 256mb mp3 player, which i, along with many others who bought it, regretted totally. Within weeks after the purchase, its price dropped from 336bucks to 279, and then further to 219 when the founder of Creative declared a seemingly non-existence mp3 player war on Apple. How can it be a war, when Apple didn't even react?

The beginning of 2005 saw the purchase of a Hi-MD player, for a sky high 549bucks. People often show off their iPod because they are among those few who could afford it. Well, i bought a little known device that cost way more than a useless iPod which very few people know about, because of the charm of the MD format, the high sound quality it offers, and an escape from the vanity of the human race in buying a plain looking mp3 player that sounded more like a radio. True, at times i felt like i had made a wrong choice in purchasing the Hi-MD player, but its sound quality never ceased to amaze me everytime i plug it in. I also bought a sony in-ear phone for 80 bucks, which sounded more like a 2.1 subwoofer system rather than just a earphone. Its bass is so nice that i thought i am listening to those big tower speakers. It is that good. The only problem with it was a build issue which caused the rubber cable to sort of melt after a few months of usage. Although i'm sure i won't be buying this earphone again, it sound quality is still the best i've heard so far. I also own an Audio Technica Clip-on phone. Audio Technica was a manufacturer for professional audio devices, but had recently invaded the consumer market with its family of extremely clear earphones with weak bass. Even the design of Creative's current earphone is copied from Audio Technica. Better still, do a search for Creative's and Audio-Technica's logo on the net. You will discover that the letter "A" in Creative's logo looks extremely similar to Audio-Technica's logo. Creative is indeed anything but creative. Although my audio technica phone does not sound as "dynamic" as that of sony's, the clarity of the music makes me feel an audio equivant of looking through a perfectly flawless glass. The only setback with this is that i have to use extremely high quality music, or it will sound sucky on my earphone. ha. I've seen some guy using an audio phile headphone (those extremely big type which is suppose to produce very accurate sound) on a lowy mp3 player. I was laughing secretly in my heart, wondering how much artifacts (distortion in the music brought about by compression) he was hearing. Artifacts exists as long as you are not listening to your Audio CD. Formats like mp3, ogg, wma and atrac3plus contains lots of artifacts and i've train my ear to hear them. While most people are happy with a bitrate of 128kbps, i need at least 256kbps or 352kbps before i'll stop noticing the artifacts and start enjoying the audio. Yes, my ears are that sensitive. Of course, that is only true when using sensitive equipments. Using an iPod and its signature white earbuds, artifacts won't really be heard. This is because the earbuds and iPod are unable to produce sound accurately. Is this a good thing? No. Not being able to produce sound accurately means you are listening to more junk than how the song really sound like. Much as i hated creative, creative players sounds alot better than any model of iPod.
I also got my first real girlfriend this year, and hope that this relationship not only lasted into the 2006, but also last till the day when I've fulfilled my purpose in life and gladfully accept the return to mother nature, with molecules on my body recycled by nature's working to be put into much better use.

Poh wei gave me an idea yesterday. Perhaps i should write down a set of new year resolution which i would stick to for the rest of this year? On a second thought, no. Partly because i was too lazy to do so, and partly because i've yet to experience a year which i going to be drastically different from the previous (no more senseless studying, gigantic workload and stuffs) and hence i really don't consider 2006 a new year. It's just a slight change in the seris of number i write in the top right hand corner of my worksheets. Since its not a new year, why is there a need for a new year's resolution?

A lack of new year resolution may leave me without a guide on how to surive this nasty year, but i've always have had a something that i've always followed in my life.

Be happy. Enjoy life. While it last.

With that large chunk of text, I welcomed the whole new year, the year 2006 to come.

And it came at me with so much force and irregularities that I found myself choking under pressure.

And the first sign of things to come came quite simply. It was in a form of a badly planned timetable.

Poor time table planning has always plagued the entire AJC student population. With long days and irregularly spaced out breaks, one has to have a strong stomach in order to survive. You can enjoy a day with breaks scattered equally throughout the day, or a day with your break and lunch with only 1hr in between. Of course, nothing beats having a break at 8.45am and having nothing to eat till school dismisses at 2.30pm. Recently, in order to cater for the interest for the students, the school shorten all periods to half an hour, instead of 45minutes. This is a great news, if not for the fact that all lessons now occupies at least 2period slots, making lessons to be one hour. In fact, students cheering over the shorten time table will be interested to discover that our breaks has shortened from 45min to half an hour, the only single period "lesson" we have in a day.

You, my reader, should find it unbelievable than when the "shortening" of each period to 30 minutes was announced, enormous cheer and applause actually spread through the AJ Square when this change was first made known. Lessons now occupies 2 periods (1hour) while breaks remain at 1 period (30minutes). Lessons were lengthened and breaks were shortened. Are AJCians so mug-minded that they simply love having more and more lessons? Or are the students so dumb and the school so smart at deceiving students? I have no freaking idea, except for the fact that such an evil move that threatened my ability to slack was greeted with great enthusiasm from the school population.

A new principal came to AJC, and I looked up upon her with great respect, hoping for great changes and improvements to the school. But, guess her opening words? "Challenge yourself as students of AJC." Damn, I felt very challenged having survived for one year already. So there's another year of challenges ahead? Damn, damn, damn! Those were the thoughts that echoed in my head when the sound wave carrying her very words tapped against my ear gently.

The CCA carnival looms ahead and every details of planning went smoothly behind schedule due to the lack of leadership shown by our leader, Vinoth. There were so many problems and me and Darren worked very hard inorder to savage the situation. The following was an email by Darren sent to everyone after the carnival was over. Try reading in between the lines.

Dear All,
Many thanks to the dedicated people who ran the show and the efforts must be commended despite the unfavorable review. After reading through what was in the report, I must say that improvements must be made especially the issue about gaming policy, though that may be a bold statement for one who was not present at the carnival. The issue of gaming has always been a thorn in our side given strict yet poorly defined school guidelines on the subject, so perhaps we can get much more clarification for this matter. Other than that i guess the other glitches aren't really that serious and can be corrected with sufficient and effective planning. It is in fact a beneficial thing for us that things have gone bad even if that might sound twisted. We have ample lessons to draw from this carnival and there is enough time to rectify them. Perhaps for subsequent club meetings, we can stay behind for a little while to spend constructive time (30 effective minutes) in planning our publicity strategy and drafting of manpower. The alleged part of the council screwing up some of our plans, well, i guess we have to work around it. Take heart everyone, for this is but the first intake when not much is yet set in stone, so let us work together for the second intake and produce better results for our club. Once again, kudos to the club members who put in great effort for the carnival.
Darren

And just one day after Darren sent that email, I received a notification from AJC that I'm among the top 20% of the college. I'm in the Alpha List of AJC. Alpha List in AJC is a kind of group that does nothing but boast your ego and allows teachers to volunteer you for stuffs. This is unlike Alpha List in the top 5 JCs (AJC is ranked 6th) where the students in the Alpha List were regularly bombarded by letters of invitations for scholarships and interviews so much that some actually modified their mail boxes to automatically dump every mails they get into the thrash bin near-by. No. I was kidding on that one.

Anyway, what amazed me was that I slacked for an entire year of 2005, and scored a pathetic score of A for Computing, B for Physics, and O (fail) for both my maths. Strangely, this qualified me as top 20% in AJC. This led me to seriously wonder what those self-proclaimed muggers are doing. Is doing each tutorial twice not enough for them? (Just for the record I don't do tutorials.)

An interesting aspect of AJC also showed itself during about that time, and that was SDL (Self Directed Learning).

 

In line with the "Teach less, learn more" slogan that MOE has recently adapted in place of the long forgotten and silently abandoned "Thinking schools, learning nation" that had disappeared into the dark abyss over the years, ABC Junior College has embraced the idea of SDL with so much enthusiasm that everything the teachers refused to teach was classified as SDL. My previous experiences with the concept of SDL were good ones, but ABC Junior College just has to come along and screw that novel idea up completely. SDL were conducted in CHS, but teachers would still go through homework of SDL topics and clarify any of your doubts, schools like RGS allocated one whole week where student stay at home and do their own learning at home through online resources given by the school. ABC Junior College has none of this. When asked anything about "Power Series", our latest SDL topic, teachers would say that this is SDL and we are suppose to find out the answer to the question we post to the teacher ourselves. Teacher's didn't even go through the tutorial, and tutorial for the next topic was due on the eve of the Power Series test. Is this just an innocent SDL being conducted, or irresponsibility on the teachers' part? What a wonderful way to mess up the students, and turning holistic education into holy shit education, directly destroying MOE's attempt to help and nuture students.

While schools like RJC have time table that ends early everyday so that students can go home and study at their own pace, we were forced to do SDL with practically no time to do so. The GP department asks us to read newspapers everyday, but properly reading a newspaper would take around an hour, and that lenght of time is a luxury we couldn't afford. Basically the school just took up most of day and the amount of rubbish we had to do will take us well into the night. Everyday we have to attend school until in the evening, leaving us with only 2~5 hours to do work before we sleep a miserable 5~7 hours and wake up to go to school again the next day. 2~5 hours is highly insufficient properly read newspaper, do homework for 3 subjects and study for a test in the next day if any. Our new prinicpal had stressed that education is about the student, the school and teachers exist because of students, but the welfare of students, in my opinion, is rather neglected. Especially in ABC Junior College where virtually anyone i asked regretted coming to.

In the above, ABC Junior College refers to Anderson Junior College.

I find it strange that AJC's teaching model mainly teaching students the fact that they can teach themselves. Also, lectures and tutorials sessions were so badly conducted in AJC. At the beginning of each topic, lecturers would often take their own sweet time going through simple retarded stuffs (Guys, if you want to know what is 5 times 5, you can press 5, then X, then 5, then = on your calculator) about that topic. And when it was time to go on to harder stuffs about those topics, lecturers ran out of time and just rush through (you see this? Once you see this do this and this. Don't ask me why! I no time to explain. Later ask your own classmate or borrow the textbook from library to read) the rest of the more complex stuffs with perfect disregard as to whether anyone learnt anything or not.

It was just only the first month of the year, but I was already so disillusioned with the monotony and bad learning environment, coupled with the society's blind pursue of academic excellence, that I wrote the following prose.

The train left a station specially designed for it and continued on its never ending cycle of wearing out its wheels by running at high speed. It sped past sceneries without bothering to give its occupants so much as a look at it, making its crystal clear windows redundant and something not to peer out off. Any attempt to peer out of it will only make anyone stupid enough to do it even more dizzy.

Instead, be wiser. The same scenery rush past you twice everyday, once towards you and once away from you. There is no point watching it as it pant and wheeze past, while you sit there comfortably listening to your iPod, which you have recently purchase due to its popularity by being the most wanted product in the market and also its easy availability in the second hand market. In fact everything is so peaceful around you that you hardly notice that you are the one moving, not the trees and the buildings. Of course, the pretty girl sitting opposite you is worth a look, but it won't be much help if you are also a girl. Anyway, you started to get uninterested in anything, and you yawned.

A particular effect happened. Since yawning is contagious, the person sitting or standing next to you yawn as well, causing the person sitting or standing next to the person sitting or standing next to you yawn as well. Congratulations! You have successfully triggered a "yawning" wave down the length of the mrt train. Feeling a pang of guilt in triggering this chain effect, you begin to take a closer look at those around you. Most have thick eye bags, many with eyes that are living tributes to the bamboo eating animals that World Wildlife Foundation is trying very hard to save. Most of those people around you also appear to be sleeping, unless they are standing. Closed eyes, shaggy eyes, red eyes, sad eyes, depressed eyes, all kinds of eyes around you. Certainly much more than the variety of fish in a supermarket. You begin to wonder if a nation where everyone on an MRT train look overworked and sleepy is a healthy one. Then your brain wonder off into dreamland where you connect up with those on the same train as you, exploring fantasy worlds and whispering unknown secrets in your sleep.

You awoke with a jolt. Not again. That irritating lady over the speakers had just woke you. Time to alight and get on to school, where fun and enjoyment which are strictly reserved for everyone other than the students starts. Any thought about the ills of the society and how to improve it got buried under a list of maths homework to be done and physics test to study for. Your life is rendered completely meaningless. But fret not. As you look around you, you discovered that you have something in common with the sleepy heads and muggers around you. You slowly become one of them.

Then, 1 week later, I wrote a blog entry that practically exposed the scandalest nature of AJC, and Sexuality Workshops conducted in schools all over Singapore. It was regarding a 4 hour Sexuality Talk Workshop conducted in AJC that was obvious religious in nature, preaching students with different religious background with 1 set of catholic believes and teaching, while AJC tries its best to cover up. Read about it here.

My blog was quoted without my knowledge in the newspaper, and it caused some negative backlash towards the ProLife group which conducted the workshop, and also AJC which in an earlier interview with Channel News Asia actually said that sex talk in AJC was about "touching the values of students".

In an email exchange between me and the Vice Principal of AJC, she said:

 The public will still focus on the
college and question  the college why was this vendor chosen as if we are
not able to make a good decision and have done something wrong to our
students (because you all don't benefit from the programme) .  They did not
question other JCs but unfortunately AJC became the centre of focus.

and also

 Remember the Sexuality Education issues , even if more than
90% of our students found the session useful and they have no issues, but
because of the complaints that was posted on the blog (I believe you have
contributed to the blog), it has aroused so much publicity on the presss
with the public giving their comments and questioning the college.  It was
also mentioned by the MOE officials during meetings etc.  It has created
quite a negative impact on the college and the school leaders.  Ms Leong
has already shared with you all so please don't under-estimate the negative
impact your blog could create.  We can focus our energy and spend time on
more meaningful things than to answer to the press.

I've bolded 3 lines above. The first line seemed to imply that her opinion of the matter was that AJC "suay suay" kana this problem, while other colleges were able to "get away" with it.

I also suspect that the feedback they gathered was so because the non-secular nature of the talk was never mentioned, and many AJCians walked away thinking that the workshop is "right" and that is how things are, without knowing that what they had attended was actually preaching of catholic believes. (Catholic students would have notice it no doubt, but this session is of course useful to them!) I myself also notice that the talk was religious only with hindsight (realize it on my way home on the MRT), while the feedback form was given right after the talk. How many AJCians will notice something wrong with that talk? The talk was very well conducted and neatly packaged. The problem is with the religious content. The real question that should be asked is the reliability of the talk, not the usefulness of it.

Finally, the last bolded statement was very interesting. This is because AJC had previously talked to the press about how good their Sexuality education programmes are, and now the skeleton in the closet surfaced, VP Tay wanted to just hide from the press and focus the energy somewhere else.

I think this entry must be one of the longest I've written so far. Shall stop now. Stay tuned for part 2. So far this entry only talked about the first month in 2006. And so much had happened.

Also, grammar and spelling had been dutiful ignored in this blog entry (the same also applies for all my blog entries actually) to allow me to blog faster and think more.