TIFO: how to appreciate a sundae

Whenever we go to Swensen's for ice-cream, the wife will invariably order her Coit Tower sans strawberry and hot fudge sauce toppings. I always assumed that she didn't like strawberry and hot fudge toppings. Today, she ordered the same thing, but the order got garbled in the kitchen. Both our sundaes arrived sans strawberry and hot fudge toppings. Small error, so I let it go. As I dug in, I realized what the wife had known for the last couple of decades of being married to me: ice-cream sundaes taste so much better without the intrusion of oversweet flavoured sauce toppings that are only added on as eye-candy, but overwhelm the subtler and more varied flavours of the ice-cream underneath. The brightness of plain vanilla blending with rich chocolate awoke in my mouth, and now I know what I've been missing all this time we've been going to our favourite San Francisco-themed dessert joint. From now on, it's going to be naked sundaes. Less is truly more.

Gaming strategy of the GCE H1 General Paper

This post is inspired by the GP Paper 2 timed exercise I gave today:

Here's the premise: An 'A' in GP translates to a band between 70-100 marks. So even if we lose 30% of the total mark, we still score an 'A'. And to pass, we can afford to lose 55% of the mark.

The paper comprises 1 section of short questions (17 marks total), 1 summary (8 marks), and 1 Application Question (AQ) or short essay (10 marks) based on a given set of 1 or 2 short texts about a topic of general interest. The marks from the questions total to 35 marks, with an additional 15 marks for language. Altogether, they add to a grand total of 50 marks. Assuming most students get 10 marks for language, losing 10 marks from the questions alone will still score an 'A'.

The short questions in the first section comprise a mix of questions that have to do with 1) vocabulary, 2) finding lists of linguistically-related things, and 3) finding lists of evidence supporting a claim. Higher-order questions involve 1) inferences, 2) or otherwise intuiting further meaning from the given text. Or we can break the short questions into translation and interpretation types, that is, those asking to extract meaning from what is written, and from what ISN'T written, respectively.

The current strategy employed by my students is that of a side-scrolling platformer: tackle every obstacle or every enemy sprite in sequence. Their threat-boards are lit up in red everywhere as they take on all-comers on the field one at a time. But this method slows them down significantly. There is a fixed time limit, and when they eventually clear their way to the boss monster of the AQ they run out of time, and the mission is incomplete, resulting in poor performance all round.

I'm proposing a different strategy now, that of an Action Role-Playing Game (ARPG). In these games, a few high-value targets are mixed in with a hoard of low-value targets. To survive, we prioritize our targets, even to the point where we decide to ignore a few. It's tempting to go after the high value targets first, but we underestimate how much damage low-value targets can cause en masse, so the smart thing to do is to avoid the Elites and clear the trash mobs first. When we have sufficiently thinned the herd, then we go after the Elites, ensuring we have time remaining to slay the Boss at the end. And if there's still time remaining, we circle back to mop up the remaining trash and Elites that have survived our onslaught.

In GP Paper 2 terms, the trash are the simpler questions involving vocabulary and lists, while the Elites are the inferential questions. The summary is nothing more than a long list of things. The Boss, that's the AQ. The game is to chalk up as many points as possible, as early as possible, even if we need to dodge the Elite questions at first, then going back to take them on, time permitting. Since there are 3 sections to the paper, each section maxes out at 30 minutes. On each 30th minute, regardless of how many questions are answered, port out to the next section. The AQ needs to be engaged on the 60th minute, latest. AQ done, cycle back until the full 90 minutes are up.

Spreading out the point acquisition reduces the risk of losing huge chunks of marks for a missed section, so knowing that some questions, or parts of questions, can be avoided or ignored until a more opportune time presents itself should improve performance moving forward.

My Prince Phillip story

It was '72.  I was 6. Their Majesties dropped in on our sunny isle to see how their old colony was doing. Mom was preggers but was nevertheless excited to have a chance to look at royalty up close and personal. They were scheduled to make an appearance at the then Singapore Turf Club (now Turf City). Somehow, Mom bundled me there and got close to the barricade bordering the red carpet on which the Royals would walk back to their motorcade. However, where we were standing, Mom may have been barely tall enough to see, but not me. All I saw were the legs of the union jack-waving throng lining the carpet. Determined not to miss a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see characters I've only read about come to life, I pushed forward and inched my way to the front. Perhaps I was too determined, but to everybody else's horror, I found myself ON the red carpet. Just then, a man patted me on the head and said, "Ho, ho, ho, look at this little boy!" and carried on walking along with a bunch of other people. Then nothing else happened. The royal party had walked past me, and I didn't get to see the Queen.

I was disappointed. All that effort, gone to waste. When Mom finally caught up with me, she revealed that the man I encountered was Prince Phillip himself! But my 6-year old mind could not comprehend that royalty did not dress in crown, gown, and scepter as they did in my picture books. They wore people clothes, and I didn't recognize them as what I saw did not match up to what I expected to see.

And maybe that, too, is the story of my life.

It's not an exam, it's an opportunity

There are no exams to take for learning to ride a bicycle, or any other skill we pick up in childhood. Either alone, or helped by friends, we play, fall, mess up, and play some more until we develop an appreciable facility that need not be validated by an external moderator. What keeps us going is how much fun we are having while we practice, and the sense of empowerment we get 'levelling up'.

What is left when we strip away the exam component from the H1 General Paper (GP)? For most of the fraternity, and practically all GP students, the paper and the exam are sadly indistinguishable. None would take the subject voluntarily, so it is compulsory for everyone to take. Since the exam IS the thing, no one looks beyond the exam, and every student is happy to drop it as soon as the final exam at the end of second year is taken and passed. No one forgets how to ride a bike, but GP is one and done.

If we forget the exam and stop worrying about the results, we could stop teaching 'skills' that are only relevant to the exam. Without things like 'question types', and the nit-picky 'close reading', and the excessive paraphrasing, and many other limiting, rule-bound redundancies, GP as a skill would be rather therapeutic, at the very least.

If learning skills is about fun and empowerment, then GP combines current affairs with language to the effect that our young students can grab humanity by the collar, give us a good shake, and show us how we've messed up the world for ourselves, for the planet, and for the future. The subject presents a unique opportunity for teenage angst, frustration, anxiety, and despair to have a legitimate, yet positive outlet. And when the students are done railing at humanity, they can say, 'Do you see what you've done? Do you understand what you've done? And now, you know what you need to do to make it right!'

Students are tired of being told what to do, so let's have a little fun with the exams. The questions on the exam are not for the students to answer, but rather for them to make humanity answerable for so much that has gone wrong in the world today, and to make restitution and amends thereafter. That's empowerment. And if the students can see the opportunity instead of the exam, the results will speak for themselves.

The difference between 'woke and 'cancel'

is that 'woke' engages an issue, whereas 'cancel' is an ad hominem attack on a person. How have we not figured that out yet?

Hurry up and wait

A pair of Karens behind me in line for COVID-19 shot. They are berating the poor employee who's just managing queue order about how they made the effort to "rush" down to their 9am appointment only to find that they'd have to wait in line with the rest of us plebes to get poked. They appear horrified that all of us seem to also have a 9am appointment. And now they are lamenting the inefficiencies of a system that cannot precisely tell them exactly when the doctor will see them. All this while, the employee is resignedly letting them rant in his face. And now, in a huff, they've cancelled their appointment saying they have other appointments to attend to today.

Has this precious duo never been to a clinic before? The appointment time indicates the time you are eligible to queue with everybody else. You queue to get a get a queue number, then queue some more while waiting for it to be called. When you hear your number, then it's your turn to see the medical professional for the jab. Then, as a precaution against adverse reactions to the vaccine, there's another wait for 30 mins in an observation area before being discharged. The whole process takes slightly more than an hour and a half.

So now we have a pair of loose Karens who have given up their shot at immunity from a global pandemic. There's always gotta be a few.