UNSW related article

This article looks interesting. It's a letter written by a reader regarding the inflexible education system of Singapore.

Source: http://www.straitstimes.com

I READ with dismay about UNSW pulling out, but I knew that this is something that could happen any time to many foreign organisations which test their toes in Singapore waters.
One of the major reasons is the unforgiving inflexibility of the system and the way we Singaporeans have been groomed to accept that trying is not good enough, a failure is a failure and that we have to take full brunt of the consequences of failure, no exceptions.

The many unknowns and possibilities these days are ironically coupled with technological achievements that can have indicated abilities to predict some certainties giving rise to set regulations, guidelines and norms, benchmarks and deliverables being foisted on every engagement and contract, particularly at governmental level.

The weakness in the system shows up most when, firstly, the predictions/calculated risks don't match up to benchmarks despite the utmost efforts of both parties, secondly when there are more variations, changes, scenarios that are covered by these initial guidelines and deliverables and, thirdly, when the party with clout - which is usually the governmental body or GLC - is in a position to flex its muscles which it inevitably does without conceding an inch.

I have encountered many instances and accepted them because deep down, I do take the view that guidelines and deliverables are what differentiate us from being a cowboy country and which are required to set minimum standards and achieve accountability.

However, the latest personal episode set me thinking about how flawed the system can be.

My son, who is seven, attended a premier kindergarten and now attends a premier primary school - none of the educationists in these institutions alerted me to his learning disabilities which could have been rectified at an earlier stage.

Being very apprehensive at their comments that he was not trying hard enough, I arranged for an assessment at the Dyslexia Association of Singapore.

They were an excellent team who carried out tests showing that while he was not dyslexic, he had visio spatial and motor issues that caused him to scrawl instead of write, and rendering him unable to cope with the galloping curriculum, including being expected to spell 'community service' and 'amenities' (among a list of 200 phonetically unrelated words).

I wrote to the Compulsory Education Unit to request an exemption as home schooling may be an option to help him catch up at this juncture in order that he could achieve mainstream acceptance at a later point.

I received an ultimatum to reply within 21 days with a long list of requirements which included full details of how I expected to find alternatives to fit within the national education curriculum and system failing which I would be exposed to the full penalties of the breach including a fine and jail term.

Currently, my family and I are in turmoil. It is obvious that the child needs help through occupational therapists, education specialists and also sports and music related activities. The reason why we wanted to take him out of the system is that after a full day of school, he is unable to fully reap the benefits of these specialists particularly as one-to-one support is recommended.

Instead of the system being supportive of what is a very challenging move, we get an implied threat.

In fact, it was the difficulties of challenging the system at the onset that may have exacerbated the current position.

Our request to delay his admission to Primary One as he was a premature child born in December had resulted in a whole array of requirements which so dumbfounded us that we decided to take the path of least resistance, that is, enrol him in Primary One within the requisite dates.

My elder son, who is now completing his Master's Degree in Canada, was luckier.

In the early primary years, he was also branded as being subnormal. We, as parents, knew that this was not the case. He was a great personality and very bright - but he did not always do what was demanded of him. Fortunately, intelligence tests proved that our instincts were correct. He was put in the gifted education system which did much for him.

In my case, as a child of a diplomat, I returned to Singapore in Secondary 3. I failed every subject including English despite being on the top honour roll in my high school.

I was also fortunate to have great friends and tuition teachers who pointed out that that the system then only required regurgitation - nothing more - and I became a top scorer and attained undergraduate and graduate degrees in NUS.

Perhaps the system has caused our educationists to be fully aware that their primary role is one of accountability - and there are set norms, rules and codes of behaviour and conduct which are cast in stone.

When there is any deviation to the set answers or mode, no matter how superior such deviations are - they have to be marked to be wrong.

Let me give you three instances.

Even when my son was in the gifted education programme, he was asked to give as many words for the letter Z as possible.

He included 'zeppelin' and 'zinnia' in his list. He was marked wrong. I questioned the teacher because a zeppelin is an airship and zinnia is a flower. She said they were proper nouns. I further challenged her for the differences between zinnia and rose - she dismissed me with a shrug and a frown - and my son tugged me and begged me to give in, in case he was reprimanded further.

Another instance was when he was asked to give an answer based on a graph - he put 75.2 per cent (trying to be as accurate as possible) but the teacher said the answer was 75 per cent - no negotiation.

The only reason why I wanted to raise these points was that I wanted my child to be able to look at situations from as many angles as possible - and when he is not supported for pushing boundaries, then there is something wrong because neither he nor I could find any real basis for such dismissal.

The third instance was composition-set words. One of my educationist friends in the international school system remarked how her student in the Singapore school system, whom she was helping, was thumbed down by his teacher for an essay which used more suitably nuanced words than the givens and was given a fail mark.

I myself looked at a 'model' composition which my young son was asked to follow and found not just grammatical errors, but also cliches that did not actually happen in real life - only standard Singapore textbooks and exam guides.

Relating all this to the UNSW scenario, I can see how all this harks to the inflexibility of our unforgiving system and our well-trained bureaucrats.

The guidelines are always clear and until the guidelines are changed top down, the bureaucrats must follow it to a T - that is the safest route and the route that ensures that benchmarks are met and the line is toed - so the bureaucrats have passed the test of accountability and there will be no possibility of any slap on the wrist or what my son calls 'chicken egg' - a big fat zero.

Jasmine Tan Chin Chwee (Ms)

Updates!! and end of semester

Sorry for the lack of updates. Even though I had taken only 4 modules this semester but had been super busy leh. Shall do some recap for the modules that I had taken this semester.

The Child Language module is non-examinable which makes it super intensive but still lots of fun and manageable. Why intensive, because there were 2 presentations of two readings, 3 tests(including the prerequisite test), class and IVLE forum participation and one big project which is 40% of the entire module. The project is fun because we got to choose and “play” with the child to gather linguistic data for analysis. Our project topic was on “Investigation into tone acquisition by a non-speaker of Mandarin”. Why the project topic is interesting because we wanted to find out how the child who had some prior exposure to Mandarin would acquire the new Mandarin tones we were going to teach her. We basically teach the child two minimal sets of Mandarin tones. From this project, we learnt that the gathering of linguistic data from a child is not easy at all and we have to offer an interpretation of the data we gathered. I would also like to thank my partner for providing the child for the project, for without the child, this project would never have been able to start at all.

What other things are interesting for this module? Basically there are some theories that are behind Child Language research which is applicable to human nature itself. These include the nativist theory which states that language is innate to our brains as well as the “social” theory which postulates that our environment shapes the language that we use.

The language and internet module is basically about corpus linguistics. This module is one of the modules that I had wanted to take all along. Why is it interesting is because of the analysis of blog language as well as other languages that are used on the internet by the various virtual communities. The linguistic data I gathered and analysed show how language is creatively appropriated and used by different people or virtual communities which help to make each community distinctive. For the individual essay, I had analysed and compared Singapore Teenage blog language with British Teenage blog language. The main weakness of the essay was that I had focused too much on the Singapore side which made the analysis skewed. For the group project, we had carried out a research on the language of game forums, comparing the language used in DOTA Allstars forum with World of Warcraft forums. The results are expected because we found quite a lot of similarities between the language used as DOTA is a subset of Warcraft series of games. However, there were some distinctive language used for each forum because of the different nature for each game. The exam questions were rather difficult. The first question basically asks about ethics in corpus research – how to carry out the gathering of data naturally but not be a skilled imposter. Hmm, spent quite a long time about 15 minutes before starting on this question. The next question is about Sinclair’s semantic prosody and semantic preference which is one of the simpler questions. Finally, I also attempted the question on how not to resort to cultural stereotyping when analyzing corpus data. Basically, I quoted the examples from the Thai chat reading combined with my own arguments.

Cinematic discourse module is basically about watching films. What I like most about this module is because it’s not very technical or linguistically inclined. Therefore I also highly recommend this module to be taken by non EL majors. I like the part where we learnt about the different camera techniques used in movies to create different kinds of effects. My essay was focused on the topic of camera techniques used in the film Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith. I had started the essay since Chinese New Year in February. Of course this sounds like kiasu but had to start the essay early so that can gather enough information to write a good essay mah. For the group project, our group did on Animatrix. Our group was deciding between doing a Muse MTV or Animatrix, and in the end the majority of votes go to Animatrix because many of our group members were anime fans. We did one of the short films inside the Animatrix: Program which was of course Japanese anime inspired and it was also entirely created by a Japanese anime creator.

Here's a link for the Animatrix short: Program:



For the exam, I did on question about characterization and difficulties involved with it, which also touched on the elusive issue of identity. However, I argued that identity even though it is elusive and complicated is nevertheless an important consideration for the analysis of characterization. For the second question we were shown a video clip for Citizen Kane and asked to answer how linguistics and discourse analysis are important in the study of cinematic narratives. I kinda expected that Citizen Kane would be used in the exam because it is such an important movie.

The last module is narrative structures. It’s not an easy module considering that the concepts taught to us were abstract and we had to do lots of self learning. Of course, for the essay I had talked about the use of camera techniques in the creation of cinematic space in Citizen Kane. This is one of the most interesting essays that I had written because I learnt a lot of new things in the process of writing. The group project that my group chose was on Shakespeare In Love. I was in charge of the cinematography portion for research and presentation. Incidentally, this movie won the best picture for the Academy Awards which is why the cinematography is important for this film. The exam for this module was the hardest as the questions were very vague and open ended. Just hope that the answers I gave were okie. Seems that the first question is similar to the question that was set for cinematic discourse about how important linguistics is in the study of narrative in general, including narratives that are not encoded linguistically. The second question I chose was on morality and whether it has structural consequence or only has occurrence in the contents of narrative. I argued that morality has structural consequence as I feel that morality can shape the plots of narrative. But I feel that my argument was not very strong on the whole.

That’s all for this semester’s work. Next, taking two more modules in the coming semester – GEK1500 and GEK1512

Recently I was trying out an email reading program called Emailcash Pro. Was wondering on the reliability of this program. But still trying it to see how it goes..