Finished finalizing the new batch of J1 KIds. We set the bar high this time (no offense, Taily & co.) and selected 6, about 50% of our applicant list. It's tough making such a painful decision, but we think in many cases we're being cruel to be kind. The demands of taking 4 H2 subjects are not to be underestimated, so having learned from last year's experience, we're choosing to be more conservative this year.

I admit the selection process isn't 100% infallible. But we had to make the best decision we could under the circumstances. We turned away kids who took KI in other colleges and I'm sure they're gonna be sore about that for a while to come. They need to understand that we lined everyone up at the same starting line again. We tried not to let any preconceived notions bias our decision, even if they had prior experience in the subject (and had a recommendation letter from their previous instructor).

There are no guarantees in a situation like this, but we'll have to live with our decision and make the best of it now that the die is cast.

Today's taping session turned out not to be a straight interview as I expected. I walked onto a makeshift set of a talkshow. Me, Mel and Linc on one side representing the Arts; KW, Pio and Mich on the other representing the Sciences. I certainly wasn't prepared to debate the merits of one over the other, considering my position on the value of both. Thankfully, although our hosts began the show by trying to drive a wedge between our faculties, cooler heads prevailed and both sides steered the argument towards affirming that both the arts and sciences need each other.

Glad we could use the opportunity to clear up some misconceptions people have about our respective faculties. We ended up advising our mostly year 2 audience not to get locked into their labels, to follow their hearts and their passions, and not rely on textbooks as the only guide to life. Pio offered a nice analogy: textbooks are like travel guides, useful for acquiring a rough idea of the place you are about to visit; but having read the guide alone, you can't say you've been there if you never actually went.

Does it matter if a person is educated in either the arts or science faculties? Campus TV news wants to interview me on this topic... not that I'm any authority on the matter. I just agreed to it out of professional courtesy to a fellow campus news organization. Indulge me while I think aloud in preparation for tomorrow's taping.

As a general overview, both disciplines are essential to a person's educational development. The sciences help us understand our environment thereby allowing us to harness natural phenomena and employ them for our benefit. The arts help us to understand ourselves as human beings, and give us the ability to express ourselves and organize our relationships with each other and the world around us. So in a sense, the sciences look at us from the outside in, while the arts look at us from the inside out.

Both disciplines are important because they function best in partnership with each other. The arts power the imagination from which science draws the inspiration to seek new knowledge. But the arts also remind us of our humanity, which puts a brake on science, preventing us from going too far too quickly for our own good.

It's unfortunate that Education has split the arts and the sciences into diverging learning paths. The impression on us is that the two are pretty much mutually exclusive. The arts appear to us as idealistic and impractical, while the sciences seem rigidly pragmatic and insanely boring. Who in their right minds would want to be educated if these were the only two possible choices?

Usually, the deciding factor for students (or their parents) is in determining which course of study will lead to the more lucrative outcome. So rather than acquiring knowledge for its own sake, these poor kids chase an elusive price tag that exists only as a promise somewhere in the distant future.

For some reason, there's the impression that there's more money to be made in the practical sciences than in the airy-fairy arts. Hence the gross imbalance in the numbers of science vs arts students. And this imbalance fuels its own myth: more people are lining up for science than arts, therefore science must be better. It's the bandwagon fallacy operating on a societal scale.

Going solely on the which-makes-more-money premise, I would say that the most successful (I mean wealthiest) self-made capitalist pig-dogs (self-made to eliminate inherited money) are usually those who have integrated their appreciation for both the arts and sciences. They are 'artsy' in that they know how to work relationships with other people and sell them on story-like promises, but they are also 'scientific' in that they've been able to develop products to sell. It helps when their products work well too.

Gates. Jobs. Spielberg. Beckham. Branson. Trump. Or look at any world-famous brand-name. Arts or science? Smart money will say arts AND science.

Sadly, at JC level, students are already segregated according to their faculty of study. But that doesn't mean that they're set for life as "arts" or "science" people. As long as they don't rely on their textbooks to tell them how to live life, but rather learn to live life by living, I think they'll do just fine.

Just as I was saying NYconneX needs a bit more recognition, campus comms has decided to explore the possibility of helping increase our print run to double what we were producing last year. It's reassuring that people are starting to take notice and see the potential in us. In that, my journos have been instrumental. Without them, I really wouldn't have the confidence to believe in what we're doing, and continue finding new ways for us to grow. 'nuff said about that for now.

Last night's clan outing took us to a $15 per head buffet at the All or Nothing Cafe in Geylang. I think it was more for curiosity that we chose the location. We wanted to see where my bro was working at, and what he actually did there. So 3 generations of family descended upon him, at his invitation, of course.

The cafe is mostly a front for an outreach programme catering to the lost and wayward in Geylang. It aims to befriend the people on the street and offer a beacon of hope in one of the darker areas in our city. The locals have already checked the place out, and have deemed it harmless. Some have even offered business advice and friendly intel about the neighbourhood.

The organization employs ex-cons, a la the Yellow Ribbon project. The cooking staff are also walk-ins, and before last night's dinner the night chef walked out, leaving a crisis in the kitchen that had to be resolved one way or another.

There's so much potential for clash and conflict in this real-life scenario that if they had a good scriptwriter observing their operations for a week, a new local sit-com will be making its way to prime-time TV very soon.

Not an ex-con himself, my bro takes his job there as a full-time CIP. His job-scope is to do whatever's necessary. Waiter, receptionist, dishwasher, cashier, stage-actor, whatever. He was also prepared to take over the kitchen in place of the departed night chef, but thankfully the day chef was persuaded to take the night duty as well.

Dinner isn't usually buffet style. The cafe is more used to a la carte zi-cha, but last night was a celebration in honour of Purim. During dinner, the staff dramatized the biblical story of Esther to explain how this Jewish festival came about. Let's just say they have very little experience with theatre, and leave it at that.

It's nice that the family could get together again so quickly after the chili crab incident. Gatherings of the paternal clan are always fun.

How significant is a teacher's contribution to a student's success? The following represents the equation I referred to in the last entry:

Let x be the effort of the student.
Let y be the effort of the teacher.
x(y) = Z, where Z = the result of the course of study.

So for increasing values of x and y > 0, Z increases exponentially.

No tricks, no secret techniques, no shortcuts. Teachers can only value-add to the effort students put into their studies. No value multiplied by 0 can increase the value of 0. Both have to work together to achieve a desirable Z.

I daresay success breeds success. The shock and awe of the 2006 results showed us that great results can be achievable. That should give 2007 the confidence that working our collective arses off will indeed bring considerable returns in the end.

College is celebrating 'cos our 2006 batch has done amazingly well in the As, pulling in one of the best results in our history. While we are all pleasantly surprised and are speculating about what we actually did right last year, I would say that the biggest contributor to our success was that the kids got serious and studied. It's such a simple equation, there's no other way to explain it.

Guess I should be happy with my students' results, though for them I really do subscribe to the idea that they worked hard for their own acheivements. Congrats to you all!

Of course, despite the success, there will always be casualties and I can't help thinking about and empathizing with them. The Career Guidance team organized a briefing session immediately after the release of the results for these students, but perhaps 'immediate' was a bit premature. Only a handful of students showed up, while the others couldn't bring themselves to attend it.

Usually, a period of self-reflection would be what the students need the most first, and once the initital emotional baggage has been dealt with, then they can start thinking about what their next step could possibly be. With a clear head, new options become easier to see.

A level results out tomorrow. As always, it's tense even for us teaching staff 'cos we hope and pray for the best results for our students too. Regardless of whether they were monkeys or angels last year, we do want them to be happy and move on in life. So, A6 and S6A, I'm holding my breath in anticipation for y'all!

To keep our spirits up today, Staff Welfare arranged for a mass lo-hei lunch. No raw fish (to avoid mass food poisoning), but the salad and condiments were piled high ready for tossing. Cynth catered a rather non-traditional variety of buffet food items including pizza, quiche, hotdog wieners and Swedish meatballs, but I doubt anyone will complain 'cos it was quite delish. The mini-eclairs were heavenly, if limited in supply.

But I must hand it to Management which really knows how to make staff happy. Many of us have been labouring with laptops that were getting slower and slower with each new upgrade to the campus network. Our laptops had actually passed their use-by dates in January this year, and, lo, the Israelites lamented and wailed, decrying the horrendous lag that was the curse of system obsolescence. But today, only after a mere month of expectant resignation, we who had the oldest laptops got issued spanking new ones that promise all sorts of droolsome bells and whistles begging to be played with and explored. There's no unhappiness that can't be solved with the right technology. Yes.

My new lappy.

I've taken charge of the Debate squad over and above the journos this year, in case people don't know it yet. These 2 aspects of my now consolidated CCA are a world of difference from each other. Even I, Master of Compromise, am somewhat at a loss as to how the 2 could possibly work together without me suffering some kind of schizophrenic damage to my psyche.

For the moment, I've got more journos than debaters, though the CCA is generally referred to as 'Debate'. The journos have been putting out more visible, tangible impact on campus due to our weekly updates of campus news in NYconneX, though I don't really know how wide the reach actually is among our student body. NYconneX isn't likely to win any awards 'cos there aren't any awards out there to be won for our product (are there?). God knows, we need some recognition.

On the other hand, Debate takes the lion's share of my annual budget because debate coaches don't come cheap. The coach we've taken on can't come on Wednesday, so a concurrent CCA day is not possible for both segments. We've taken on the coach by faith as currently we don't actually have a debate team yet, while the existing JC1s are in 1st term transition. I don't know what the appeal of Debate is for the new batch, so I have no guarantee that I will recruit a team once term 2 begins.

So, yeah, huge worries for my consolidated yet fractured CCA that I sometimes wonder if anyone else besides myself cares about.

Still, in attending Debate training sessions for the remnants of our JC2 debaters, I've found the debaters to be committed, self-reliant, motivated and organized. And they haven't given up yet. Without a coach today, they trained themselves, and I learned enough to see that debate training can actually be quite good even for the weaker GP students. Debating is systematic, logical and structured, mature and critical (in the critical thinking sense), everything we hope our GP kids to be. Could there be some way to turn this observation into something practical and useful...?

We finally got to watch Ghost Rider after a couple of aborted attempts in the last week. Marvel's supernatural heroes have a niche audience, and GR is no exception. This movie, however, isn't going to turn him mainstream anytime soon.

The dour Day-Walker, Blade, made quite a credible transition to the movies by focusing the trilogy on lots of hard-hitting, tightly choreographed fight sequences, giving the audience at least a visual treat even if we didn't buy the plot. Sadly, GR is one Marvel character that can't make the transition without the use of CGI, and even CGI can't help a character whose head is a skull and is therefore virtually expressionless regardless of his circumstance.

So what to do? Call in Nick Cage to play Johnny Blaze, GR's human side. But though Cage plays tortured souls quite well, his skeletal other-half behaves with too much kiddish glee that the 2 sides don't mesh believably. While Blaze has to live with the consequences of his choices, "forsak[ing] friends, family and love," the stuff of human drama, GR is so invincible, so powerful that there is little that can threaten him and keep us on the edge of our seats.

It's even less thrilling when GR's nemeses, Blackheart and gang, fall so easily as GR takes them out one by one. That Blackheart himself falls due to his own stupidity makes this plot more worthy of a Saturday morning cartoon than it has potential for. Of course, dealing with the ultimate baddie, Mephistopheles, is another story. Literally.

A safe, kid-friendly rendition of a classic conflicted hero. The image of a demon on the side of the angels, a flaming skeleton in black leather-and-chains astride his All-American chopper looks cool but, like GR himself, this movie needs more meat on its bones.

Sometimes I wonder if I'm being fair to the people who write in to the ST forum pages, in the way I select easy targets to pour my bile over. But some people's peeves are so badly argued, they really get my goat. Case in point:

Heng Cho Choon, who took the trouble to write in today in response to Roni Roberts, another forum writer from last week. This is truly a case of a knee-jerk reaction to a misreading of a phrase in Roberts' letter without any comprehension as to what Roberts was talking about in the first place:

I REFER to the letter, 'Important to take the time to understand a culture before making judgments' by Mr Roni Roberts (ST, Feb 16) in which he commented on whether HDB flat dwellers should or should not keep pets as 'an integral part of the family unit'.
If you read Roberts' letter, Roberts was simply relating survey data collected from HDB dwellers themselves about how they view their pets. He was not advocating anything of that nature either way.

Some people keep pets because they truly love them and care for them with utter devotion. They do not mind spending a fortune to take their pet to see the vet whenever it is sick. Some keep pets because they are childless and want to drive out the silence and monotony of the home.
Sounds supportive of pet owners at first, but attempts to be clever with sly digs at how pets are a waste of money and are no real substitute for children.

I once visited a friend who lives on the second level of a block of HDB flats. On the ground floor is a pet shop which sells birds and hamsters. Residents nearby have to put up with the noise, smell and mess 365 days of the year. With the spread of bird flu, I wonder if it is safe to live in such an environment.
Wow. He has a friend who actually lives in HDB housing, whom he took the trouble to visit once. I guess with the noise and smell and mess of the pet shop, he's never visited his poor friend again. This kind of prejudice has caused more animal deaths than bird flu has caused human deaths, if you think about it.

He goes on to talk about how people can be cruel to animals, and how we should have an animal cruelty police force to show that he is actually quite the humanitarian.

He then suggests that if we want our kids to have contact with animals, we should take them (the kids, not the animals) to the zoo or to the farms in Choa Chu Kang, anywhere as long as it's not in his own back yard....

How far off on a tangent can this guy get? If this was an Application Question response to Roberts' letter, it shows very poor comprehension skills, a high level of bias and prejudice, hijacking the question and running his own agenda, and little coherence in how his ideas flow from para to para. Fail, lor. And embarrass himself in public some more.

I'm worried for our GP kids because they constantly exhibit the same errors in their AQs. If we don't fix the problem quickly, the long-term effects could be devastating. The local papers might soon be filled with half-baked arguments like this one.

Just to be fair, Heng's letter is here.

ST's "Mind Your Body" section has a story on how a bed-ridden Mr Lu, who's suffering from ALS, is being helped through his ailment by the 6 cats who live in the house with the family. The cats keep his mind off his worries, and their tendency to snuggle up to whomever they like and trust also give him some relief from his physical pain as well.

The same cats have helped the younger Lu through an episode of depression, and cope with his O levels.

Despite there being 6 cats, there is no mess. They just require food and water, and a clean sandbox. Not bad for low cost, low maintenance family healthcare.

Only 1 thing I can say about this story: I bet they don't live in an HDB flat.

Had a reunion of sorts with Anthony and Vince at the CSC lanes. As a team, we're out of practice though it didn't take too long for us to find our rhythm again.

I had an unusual starting game, hitting a turkey and a 4x4 for a total personal high of 227. Guess I had quite a bit of aggression to get off my chest first. Satiated after taking it out on the pins, I settled back into my usual scoring bracket for the rest of the game.

It was quite a fair match in that out of the 5 games we played, each of us won at least 1 game apiece.

Nice to catch up with the Boyz again. We're all struggling to clear our respective marking backlogs, so knowing that everyone is equal in our workload is quite comforting.

Day 2 of CNY means dim sum breakfast with the Wongs. We wanted somewhere other than our usual this year, so we made a reservation at Spring Court in Chinatown. No problem getting a table, we could even pick and choose which one we wanted since we were early.

We did, however, forget one crucial detail: no dim sum on the menu today, just a selection of CNY set meals at rather unappetizing prices. No thanks.

So the Wongs and I upped and dashed back across the street to Yan Palace, but because we hadn't made any reservation there, the place was already packed, no room for us. For the first time since I married into the family, we had to set our sights a little lower this year, and have our family brekkie at... McD's. Quite a break from tradition, and perhaps the start of a new one.

Still, we made up for our disappointing breakfast by having a late lunch at the Marche in Vivo. OK, also not particularly traditional, but at least they were open, and they could manage a table for 9. And their shopping.

The pix shows (L-R) M-i-l, s-i-l and wife pigging out on seafood paella, minestrone and deep-fried calamari. Not bad, though the variety at this Marche is limited, compared with the one that used to be at the Heeren.

Last night's reunion dinner was slightly different from the traditional 10-course. The clan met at the Chinese seafood place on Casuarina Road (the staff wear red Ts with"SWIFT" printed in front) for our annual feast. Apart from the now-mandatory new year lo hei, the other dishes were house specialties.

One thing about reunions is that occasionally we discover that our family tree extends further than we think. I found myself sitting next to Vince's CT/GP kid from a couple of years back, name of Rudy. He called my cousin "auntie", which makes me his uncle, sort of, twice removed, by marriage, that sort of thing. His mom said that it was fortunate I didn't teach him, else I'd have lots of stories to tell about how naughty he was. I was thinking, vice versa.

In my usual fashion, I blessed our newfound family togetherness by showering him with crab shell and gravy from an ineptly applied nutcracker to a large, tasty pincer. From the corner of my eye, I could see his mom discreetly picking stuff out of his hair. Oops.

Oh well, happy year of the pig, people!

Had a bit of an identity crisis with NYconneX about the latest update this week. I had assigned a reporter to cover the story about the band and choir CCAs leading the college in the flag-raising ceremony on Wednesdays. The report that came back was that a few students were critical of the new ritual and wanted it cut back.

The article drove me ballistic because -- freedom of the press and anti-censorship sentiments aside -- firstly, that wasn't the story I had asked to be covered; and secondly, the story was unrepresentative, biased and lazy in the way that it laid out a critique without trying to understand the situation first.

NYconneX plays a delicate balance between showcasing our students and their CCAs, while simultaneously drawing feedback from the students about the goings-on on campus. Our job isn't to be partisan either way (sound familiar?) but to just report things as they are, to provide a behind-the-scenes view that is not usually obvious to the student body. That means we have to be fair to all parties and give everyone a hearing in our stories.

If anyone's going to be critical about anything we write, that's what we have Haloscan and our tagboard for. We don't provoke, but we do lay down a platform for students to discuss issues among themselves, using our stories as a stimulus. Or they can email us and suggest story ideas to cover.

So what did I do about the offending story? I took some time to interview the staff in charge of the band and the choir to get their perspective of the matter and used that info to balance out the story. By right, the reporter should have talked to the student leaders of the CCAs who are actually in a position to offer knowledgeable commentary from the students' perspective, rather than just some random student-in-the-parade-square with some uninformed off-the-cuff quip.

We don't want to be shut down by the powers-that-be, but neither do we want to lose our credibility as a student 'paper. It's a bind that ST is often criticized for, and I'm starting to appreciate that unenviable position.

Anyway, the Officially Ammended, Politically Sanitized article is now up for public consumption. Click here to see a conflicted press in action.

Valentine's Day is exchanging gifts with me getting caught forgetting to remove the el cheapo price tag from mine (how did I miss that?). We make plans over dinner to finish off the last of our spring cleaning before the CNY weekend, and to polish off the last of the chocolate-banana cake before it goes bad. Plans go seriously awry when the both of us spend the rest of the evening passed out on the living room floor in front of the TV.

If that isn't love, what is?

June's back from KL again. It's become routine now, like taking an overnight bus trip up north and then back the next night. Guess this will be her last trip up for this company, which probably explains why she lugged back 48 cans of premium cat food and 3 slices of chocolate-banana cake from Secret Recipe. The cats and I are grateful!

It's true that KI is a damned demanding subject, especially considering that it's a compulsory 4th H2 which adds on the workload. Most normal people take only 3 H2s, which makes for a saner timetable and an overall easier life.

ST interviewed a KI kid who's struggling with his readings and coming to grips with 'alien concepts', which makes me wonder if collectively we've run amok with the content of the subject and forgotten the spirit and purpose to which it was conceived in the first place?

In terms of content, we examine the history of ideas, how knowledge is built up block by block, how knowledge diverges according to the different branches people have taken to discover how things work and how we can use our knowledge to our best advantage. We discuss the rightness and wrongness of the acquisition and application of knowledge, and determine what methods are most reliable for ascertaining The Truth, giving recognition to such a thing as a Universal Truth but at the same time discerning that truth is also a shifting conglomeration of conclusions drawn from imperfect and subjective interpretations of observations and other stimuli.

All that is already quite a headache, though fortunately we've got a considerable number of eminent thinkers in our history who've already written about their thoughts about human thinking and so, voila, people to read up like Plato, Hegel, Heidegger, Newton, Freud and other scarily-named personages whose brains we make our business to pick.

But if that's all there was to KI -- learning who said what about which obscure aspect of some esoteric theory about human thought -- then we've missed the point... again. We can never get enough content -- our brains are voracious, bottomless pits of information storage -- but to overemphasize content without purpose makes smart kids dumb.

KI students need to know the history of their subject because in their turn they will also be adding on to that illustrious history by being thinkers after their academic predecessors. So just reading the manuals is really only for background information -- to see how they did it in the past. But like a gongfu practitioner only becomes skilled through practicing the Master's moves, likewise the KI student also needs to practice thinking, and sparring through debate and discussion with fellow students.

We don't need KI students who hide in the library all day, we need KI students who treat the library only as a pit-stop for food for thought then, having prepared themselves, come back out into the sunlight with a just and worthy cause to pursue.

In a sense, all we want is for our KIds, like Newton, to "[see] further... by standing on the shoulders of Giants." But if the KIds have to name every bush, tree and rock along the way, they'll never reach the summit in time for their exam. And they won't appreciate the view once they arrive either.

Ban pets from eating places

I AM concerned that some pet lovers take their pets along to eating places.

These people love their pets but are not concerned about their fellow diners.

Can the authorities comment on whether it is all right for people to carry their pets and occupy seats in eating places?

Recently, I saw a sign at a Toa Payoh hawker centre stating prominently: 'No smoking, no touting and no dogs'.

Why not extend this ban to all eating places?

I hope dogs lovers are aware that many people would be inconvenienced by their pets.

Ng Soon Hwee

Dog in a manger Human in a seat

Dear Mr Ng

You want to ban us from all eating places? As it is, already there are so few places that we are welcome at because most eating establishments value your almighty dollar more than they care for our happiness at keeping our owners company.

We don't see that you have any real grounds for requesting to ban us, other than somehow you are "inconvenienced" by our taking up a seat. Let's consider that claim for a moment: how likely are you to want to share a table with our owner, even if we were not in the picture? Given you appear slightly xenophobic by your request, you'd probably want a table all to yourself, so you'd leave the seat we'd be occupying vacant anyway.

If you are worried about our hygiene, please remember that we are house pets, kept clean and groomed by our owners. We travel in carriers among you humans, so we sit in our carriers without any direct contact with the chairs you seem to be indignantly protecting. Furthermore, we are at least as clean, and perhaps only as noisy as your children; though through proper training, often better behaved in public.

In any case, cutting off contact with beings other than yourselves has become extremely unhealthy for our planet. You have become selfish and insensitive to the flora and fauna of the earth in the way you toxify our environment and encroach on our habitats to expand your so-called "civilization", and now you won't even let us -- a tiny proportion of what has survived your onslaught -- have a seat at your eating place in this concrete nightmare that you've built around us?

So before you open your mouth, think and get a little perspective. Who has "inconvenienced" whom? It's fine if you all want to kill yourselves with all the environmental havoc you've caused, but it isn't our choice to do likewise. But for the sake of your own health, it's good to be reminded that you humans don't -- and can't -- exist alone on earth. Even if it's just a brief encounter with us at an eating place.

Q-tip and Mimi