A pile of croc

We must be in serious denial. Here, we're getting news to expect industry-wide pay cuts, and we're still spending money anyway. We got 50% storewide off Crocs through an "inside source" so although the chunky, rubbery footwear was never on our shopping list before, today we bought a couple of pairs each, and for the in-laws too.

While we had an exclusive discount source, the other shoppers were paying normal store prices and they just kept coming towards the cashier with their own selections. I guess recession or not, life and shopping must still go on.

A treat for the censors

The Board of Film Censors would have us know that it is no longer in the business of censorship. No. It now takes a 3-C approach: Classification, co-regulation and consultation by which the Board restricts access to the media according to age discrimination, rather than making a hatchet job on a roll of film with scissors and Scotch (TM) tape.

We know this because the BFC opened its screening room to us and talked us through the different processes and procedures our mainstream media undergo from submission for classification to final public release. I suppose it's a good approach because it seeks to please some people but not everybody, whereas the other more heavy-handed way pleases no one and pisses everyone off.

Kids did well discussing the sensitive issues in "Little Miss Sunshine" which they got to watch in its entirety, they had an animated Q&A session in which they showed off what they had learned in the session, and they grilled the staff there properly too. Quite a fun morning, actually.

Apologies to NBS whom we stood up for lunch even after making plans at the beginning of the week. We ended our BFC visit late and couldn't make our appointment after all. :(

Witch Mountain all over again

Disney's "Witch Mountain" movies of the 70s' were a major influence on my formative years. They were among the first movies I watched focused on paranormal themes. They fed me with fantasies of ESP abilities, aliens and spacecraft; but it was because of these fantasies that I began reading the newspapers, looking out for articles on such topics.

Somehow, Witch Mountain made a believer out of me and I suppose I was looking for corroborating evidence that such things were real. If they could be real for other people -- so my logic went -- they could turn out to be real for me too. After expending much effort on fruitless mental levitation, my teenage mind decided that if ESP wasn't my gift, then I had to be an alien. Perhaps that above all effectively ended my teenage social life, and turned me into the warped and twisted middle-ageing adult I am today.

Not surprisingly, I made a bee-line for the latest Witch Mountain tale to spin out of the Disney Studio... and realised how much I've grown up in 30-plus years. I mean the basic plot is the same: two young aliens wielding extraordinary powers get chased around for pretty much the whole movie by an evil, obsessive character, and are aided by some uncle-ly dude who promises to get them home, wherever home may be. But I've lost the magic of the first movie and I spent most of the time spotting plot loopholes big enough for a taxi, an RV and a flying saucer to transit through -- abreast.

"Race to Witch Mountain" is a pastiche of many sci-fi plots -- "Enemy of the State", "Terminator", and "Alien", for example -- woven together so loosely it's easy to slip into seen-it-all-before mode. There's a little humour, some action sequences, some big explosions, and the pursuers are by no means benign, but the thrills tend to be short-lived, never sustained.

Oh, well, jaded forty-something talking. I think the biggest thrill for me was to see Ike and Kim (who played the original alien kids) making cameo appearances as a sheriff and a diner waitress respectively. To me, they're old friends whom I haven't seen in decades, and it was a brief vicarious reunion that we shared in a greasy spoon in Stony Creek, small-town USA. It's assuring to see that even as I have grown up, they have too. Tony and Tia, it's good to see you again!

Momentum builds for Drama Night 09

I find it hard to reconcile the notation on my calendar that claims it's the March hols with my 9-hour work day today. I must say that it was a very productive day, and a not at all unenjoyable one 'cos most of the day I spent with the Drama Club, but still I wouldn't call this week a "vacation", like how the rest of the world might consider it. 

Interesting that our scripts this year have rather adult themes and rather, um... adult language, but the kids who are auditioning today seem a little young and naive to be playing such roles. And my intrepid crew of inexperienced student directors themselves haven't quite yet understood the nuances of their chosen scripts yet.

Which brings the club smack into the issue of censorship, or at least toning down of the more squeamish bits so as to play at a level our audience can accept. I realize I'm pushing the envelope here, but it's important that my charges experience the issues of real theater production and its role in the community so that they can see the bigger picture rather than just a romanticized "school-play" version of it.

I'm going to have my hands full with this year's Drama Night. It'll be interesting, but I can only say that I brought it upon myself. Thankfully, I have Tina's expertise and Sha's extra pair of hands to help out.

Ooo... cake!

Happy birthday, June! Hope I haven't hidden your gift too well. It's in a place I thought you'd look at, but so far, you haven't. Hee hee. Keep looking!

Focus, people, focus...

This morning's session with Prof Mo on critical thinking in GP would have been interesting and useful as he was supposed to help us figure out how we could use the subject to train our kids to enter uni more as thinking sceptics than as smart parrots. Unfortunately, our discourse was sidetracked and eventually derailed by a certain inquisitive student who was more interested in picking apart the examples rather than follow the main argument. Like trying to catch the Prof out on some technicality, or something. Typical.

As much as I prefer an interactive class, this one simply couldn't meet its objectives, proving once again that some teachers make the worst students. In times like these, it's best to let go of our previous expectations and just go with the flow. We may not have achieved our goal, but we did get a mildly interesting dialogue out of it anyway.

So the highlight of the day has to be the generous lunch Cynth and Mojo provided from Fassler. We feasted on mounds of sashimi and antipasto, with canapes from Delifrance. And The Daily Scoop ice-cream in assorted flavours for dessert. A big thank you to our bosses for feeding us so well!

Deja Vous

I feel like I've had several conversations like this one in my lifetime.

Lucky me!

Lucky me! Won this scanner-printer from a draw at the IT Show.

Edit 01:

Now, I wonder if my luck was in the drawing of the right coloured ball from the closed box, or in the choice of game. There weren't all that many balls -- I felt only about 10 at the most -- and10:1 odds aren't bad for this sort of game. I suspect Challenger was just giving them away.

The value of a college education

Yay! New entry, which means I have made a significant enough dent in my assessment pile to lift my silence. It was due to the all-nighter I pulled last night, accompanied by a cold pizza and my wife who ensured I stay awake and alert that my conscience is clear today.

One of the things I'm grading is an essay on the relevance of a university education today. I'm quite disturbed by the number of responses that say otherwise, and the reason (note the the singular) they give is that Bill Gates (he went to Havard!), Einstein (he got his PhD at 26 years of age!) and Thomas Edison (homeschooled) didn't have college degrees and still made a success of themselves.

That argument is wrong on at least three levels: 1) The facts are off base; 2) these three are outstanding individuals and hence non-representative of the general population; and 3) to consider the three as representative of 'today' requires some discussion on how they contributed to creating the world as we know it today, otherwise we have to consider two of the three as recent history and hence dismiss them as irrelevant to the discussion. Am I being too strict?

Only eight and a half months to throttle up their secondary school prattle to undergrad standard. I forsee a breathless run to the end of the year. But if there's one thing that'll keep me motivated, it's my own belief in the value of a university education, regardless of what the kids are saying.

I'm flipping through STI, and I'm thinking I was so close to being this guy. I don't want my kids to end up like him either.

Normal service will resume shortly

We apologise for the excruciating quality of the previous entry. Normal service will resume when the pile of papers awaiting grading on Xmac's desk has been significantly reduced...

What's inside the box?

I've got an article here that purports that secondary schools are an anathema to a child's creativity. It isn't the school's intention to do that, of course. We do want our kids to grow into thinking, creative adults, but our processes often send the wrong message.

I think there is a difference between (1) encouraging imagination and (2) nurturing creativity. Schools tend to focus on the latter at the expense of the former, which is what turns off most kids.

Imagination refers to wild flights of fancy, ideas that suggest "anything goes". These ideas are the most fun to play with, sometimes the most dangerous and scary too, but that's why imagination is so much fun, so outside of our mundane reality and existence. But when schools tell us to focus on the real and not on the imaginary, when they tell us to be practical, suddenly life becomes boring and our motivational engines sputter and die. All we want to do is sleep because we can't be our naturally wild and crazy selves any more.

But that's just imagination being curbed, which is not quite the same thing as creativity, though perhaps only one of creativity's more special ingredients. We define 'creativity' as 'out-of-the-box' thinking, but in order to achieve that level of intelligence, we need to know what's INSIDE the box first. That's what schools specialize in, putting students inside a package of social norms, rules, customs, expectations; wrapped in a common knowledge of science, math, languages, and occasionally humanities so that at whichever level we leave school at, we leave with a cohort of peers who know exactly what we know and so we all start out making lives for ourselves from the same, equal starting line. That's fair.

The assumption is that as long as we stay in the box, everything's nice, everything's safe and everything's fair. It's only a rare few who realise that it actually isn't, and they are the ones who start thinking 'outside-the-box', yes, the real creative ones.

Creativity (a.k.a. 'innovation') starts with dissatisfaction, and it seems that at JC level, only GP (and maybe elements of the Arts and Humanities) teaches that the world isn't perfect, that the world doesn't follow the rules that are supposed to work to keep society nice for everyone, that the world isn't fair in the way that math and the sciences with all their rules and formulae tell us it is. Just-follow-the-formula-and-everything-will-be-correct is nonsense in reality, but that's what's inside the box. It's a seductive message to be deluded by and take comfort in, but it's only the dissatisfied and unhappy who question the formulae and eventually become the creative ones.

Imagination, as I mentioned before, is a wild thing. Creativity is our ability to harness our imagination, tame it and make it go where we want it to go. We are creative when we can discipline our imagination, making it work for us. There's a riddle that goes, "what do you need to know before you can train a dog?" to which the answer is, "more than the dog!" That's where most of us are today, in the process of learning more than the dog, those of us who are looking to be creative in spite of our school experience.

Historic morning

College Sports Carnival was today. For the first time, our venue was ECP. Programme was simple; either sign up for a competitive 3 klik trot or a carefree 2 klik stroll on the beach.

As beings of remarkable foresight, June and I met Jojo and Derek for brekkie at McD's before our event. Inside, it was muffins, sausage, hot cakes and scrambled eggs. Outside, the rains swept over with sheets of wet. Just as we'd finished our meal, the word came round: Sports Carnival cancelled due to inclement weather.

Shortest Sports Carny in history. But it could also prove to have been an historic breakfast. The women have an idea which I think has lots of potential. More on that when things develop further.

Strange coincidence

WoW suddenly gets two mentions in the local news on the same day, being associated with the deaths of two promising young men in separate incidents. Both the army doctor and the undergrad were reported as accomplished WoW players, the former "one of the top 10 Warcraft players in Singapore and was among the top 100 in the world", the latter "suddenly threw himself into it with a vengeance, spending as much as six hours a day huddled in front of his PC."

Hope nobody gets too clever and attempts to assert a causual link between computer gaming and strange behaviour leading to deaths under mysterious circumstances. But it's just too convenient and tempting not to.

-----

On a separate note, congrats to the KIds, all of whom passed, ZH being our first ever 'Ace'! And it was great to be reunited with NBS, my partner in crime, again. We celebrated with a MOS and breathed a collective sigh of relief that we didn't let them down after all. Yay!

Who watched the Watchmen?

Me! Wow.

Yes, "Watchmen" the movie is based on a superhero graphic novel. Yes, there are odd-looking people in eyebrow-raising costumes walking among ordinary people in everyday dress. Yes, improbable gadgets are part of an arsenal of other impractical designs. They are there to remind us that this is a story about superheroes who live and struggle to co-exist in our imperfect world -- a world even their vaunted superpowers cannot help.

One feature that stands out in a movie of this genre is that there is no super-villain to fight. No arch-nemesis who plots world-domination that would give a team of superheroes a raison d'etre for their existence. The closest thing to one is a frail old man who has long given up his evil-suit and his evil ways, suffering from cancer and living off a meagre pension awaiting death.

The fact is, superheroes do not need a supervillain to trouble humankind. Superheroes themselves ARE sufficent trouble for us. They are us, flawed, psychologcally warped and twisted as we already are, but enhanced with superpowers. And really, the Watchmen individually don't have much by way of their powers to distinguish one hero from another. They are generally super strong, super fast, super tough, regardless of what name or costume they wear. When superpowers meet normal human strength, it is not a pretty sight. Bones break -- badly, blood spatters on contact. It's just a matter of degree.

In that sense, the Watchmen are a parallel of the Olympian gods and goddesses in Greek mythology, with their infighting and the spillover of that into the lives of mortal men. Some are amoral, like the Comedian who behaves much like the Joker would if he was on the side of law-enforcement, and whose murder begins the story. There are those who see the world in completely black-and-white terms, like the disturbed Rorschach, for whom good is good and evil must die a horrible death. And there are those whose powers far exceed those of human ken, like Dr Manhattan, confused about humanity's doings from his cosmic perspective. With heroes like these, who needs villains any more?

Nevertheless, they all feel responsible for the well-being of people, yet are hampered by their own human weaknesses and a sense of hopelessness that they can do nothing to stop human depravity from annihilating us all.

The world is on the brink of nuclear war, only hours away from The Button being pushed. With a supervillain, the solution is simple: beat up the bad guy, destroy his toys, save the world. But with superheroes vs (national) superpowers, the problem has become infinitely more complex; the solution perhaps more drastic than can be conscionable.

"Watchmen" does not promise brainless entertainment. The plot's throughline gets interrupted often with flashbacks adding little bits of exposition at a time. It's also disconcerting to watch the Watchmen not behave in the way we've come to expect from our heroes -- the mask only hides the face, but can't hide human nature lurking beneath the skin. And at the end, we, the audience are left to judge if in the use of power, even for the greater good, the end justifies the means.

Heavy stuff. Lots of dialogue; short, intense bursts of action; moral shocks and dilemmas to ponder over; nobility mixed in with a lot of nastiness; a movie that requires concentration and active reflection. Did I like it? Yes! But I felt quite drained after.

Sick? Leave!

If only our staff would follow the above advice, we might not be falling sick so often.

Today we had a lecture shared between Paul and Madam A. Coincidentally, both called in on medical leave, and we were stranded without a lecturer. It was a bit of a scramble, but Amy and I very quickly went through their notes and slides to cobble a lecture together on their behalf.

It's a bit strange going over other people's materials because there are often blanks and knowledge gaps that the speakers' would fill in on their own through a personal anecdote, aside, POV, or some visual material to present. Occasionally we stand-ins may not agree with a point here and there, or we feel that we have better material to illustrate it. So over brekkie we got me prepped to take the mike and pinch lecture for our absent colleagues.

When I got down to the LT, Madam A was already there, breaking her curfew. Somehow, she had got wind that we had no lecturer and so she made her way to campus -- croaky voice and all -- to take back the mike that was rightfully hers. One hour later, after having delivered her lecture and cleansing her conscience, we promptly chased her off campus.

There's something about our college that makes us want to pitch in and do whatever it takes to get our jobs done. There's a certain pride we take in doing a good piece of work. It's part ownership and part not letting the team down, and part because we have a strong belief in the rightness of what we are doing. And as Amy once pointed out, we aren't a calculating people either.

But we do need to take better  care of our health too.

New vocab: "Sidebarring"

I thought Professional Development (PD) was sort of exclusive to us? It seems we have copied from the Americans again, along with the problems that go with it... being that teachers make the worst students. Click here.

I will survive

Again, not much time other than to post a few links. CNN's got this series on people who are finding ways to survive this economic downturn and it seems like a good time to share some good news amidst the gloom so here goes:

http://money.cnn.com/galleries/2009/news/0902/gallery.optimism/index.html
http://edition.cnn.com/2009/LIVING/02/26/economy.survivor.farm/index.html

To survive the lousy economy occasionally means forgoing our squeamishness for a regular paycheck
http://edition.cnn.com/2009/US/02/27/topless.coffee.shop/index.html

And distributing what would otherwise be wasted to people who really need it, gratis
http://edition.cnn.com/2009/LIVING/wayoflife/03/01/ship.to.shelter/index.html

And a story from China!

http://edition.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/asiapcf/02/25/china.lifeonline/index.html

An enlightened 21st century robot employer

I am no technophobe. This is the 21st century and I own a robot. It keeps my floor clean, not perfectly but adequately.

I can't help anthropomorphosizing (omg, a 20-letter word!) it. When I push its activation button, it make a cheery beeping sound and backs out of its charging unit all busy and anxious to get to work. It bumps around blindly as it crosses and recrosses the floor picking up bits of debris as it goes.

It's a rudimentary trial-and-error function but it's persistent enough to get the job done. I'm even forgiving of the occasional missed spots -- considering that it works more like a child's toy than an actual intelligent machine, I'm surprised it can deliver the results that it does.

I even worry for it when it starts to lose its charge. When that happens, it will home in on a radio signal the charging base sends out to guide it back to safety and sustenance. But it becomes a game of "hot and cold" as the robot continues to bump around the room trying to locate the signal, sometimes getting close only to be bumped away when it hits a wall or some other obstacle in its path. Will it ever make it back in time before its batteries deplete completely? It's painful to watch, and I have to resist the urge to pick it up and carry it home myself when at times it looks so hopelessly lost.

But so far, the only times it has failed to find its way home was once when we accidentally switched off the charging base (duh) and another time when it jammed on a dishrag that had inadvertently fallen to the floor. But otherwise, it's always been at the last minute able to find the correct vector and go home on its own. As it docks, it chirps its relief, then settles down for a nice quiet nosh until we call it out for duty again, usually the next day.

That's my little robot, my almost fifth pet. So if that's how I'm like with robots as an enlightened 21st century robot employer, then why does the US Army's "Big Dog" send a shiver of fear down my spine?

How to make a class keep quiet

One guaranteed way to kill a debate is by participating in it. At least, that's what's happened to the "education" thread in my kids' blogs. Try to be too clever, and they don't know how to respond after that. So I'm holding my peace in the thread on Law and Society, quietly observing as more and more of them start contributing to the discussion. It's fun to watch them pitch their theories at each other as they work out among themselves whether the Law makes Society, or if it's Society that makes the Law. When they get sufficiently confused and ask for my input, then I'll throw in my two cents. I have no wish to end yet another promising webchat prematurely.

Take a break

With so much work backlog, I only have time to post a quick link, which under the circumstances I think is quite appropriate: kids -- even big 'uns like me -- need RECESS! Fortunately, I have colleagues who believe in it as much as I do too.