Untweakable

Just rehearsed with the footage we shot on Wednesday. I now realize why we try to avoid such multimedia effects. The projection is fixed. I can't tell it to do anything else apart from being what it is, whereas with 'live' performers I can still say, "try this" or "try that..." It's the ability to continue tweaking scenes and characters that keeps the eventual quality on the upswing. Now I just have to work around what I have. Not that it's bad, or anything, it's just untweakable.

Now, why don't I just trash the footage idea and just bring everybody back onstage? Because Mags and her crew, who helped me shoot the video and are currently doing post-production on it, will kill me for wasting her time and effort, especially on a public holiday morning. She is apt to drown me in a flood of tears -- she was already about to go there when I suggested that a scene might have to be re-shot.

Next time I want to shoot, it'll be a short film format or something. No more mixing media.

It's a conspiracy!

Spent the morning shooting footage for Drama Night. It'll be the first time we'll be featuring video for our stage productions and I'm quite excited about that, though it also creates a heap of new staging problems I have yet to wrap my mind around. Balance and scale, mostly. Onstage, 'live' action and sound will pale in comparison to the video projection and soundtrack amplification. So how...?

Also, just returned from Jen's dad's wake. That's like six wakes now in four months. If I were a conspiracy theorist, I'd be very suspicious of the common thread linking our recently departed: all but one were in their 80s and all succumbed to lung cancer. None, as far as I know, were smokers, but they did live through a time when second-hand smoke was more common than first-hand air.

I'd like to request the-powers-that-be to put a temporary moratorium on more people I know dying. I'm particularly unsociable and wakes are terribly difficult places to have to show a social face in. And I'm exhausted. So, please, nobody else die for a while, 'k?

The "like/don't like" game

I played the "I like X, but I don't like Y" game in tutorial with x34. The idea is for the kids to take a turn each to guess the combination X and Y. By listening to the combinations randomly guessed at and my responses of "correct" and "wrong", the kids will eventually figure out the combination and get to torment those who have yet to cotton on.

But the guess of one smart Alec went, "I like to spoon, but I don't like to fork". So correct, but also sounds so wrong.

Bad idea #41

It is our job to train kids to think for themselves.
It is not our job to train kids to pass exams.
If they can think for themselves, they can pass their exams themselves.
If we train kids to pass exams, they won't learn to think for themselves.
Then we would have failed our jobs.

Wild games

One of the rare instances when Tasha looks like she's smiling. Otherwise she's mostly got a furrowed brow, perplexed at the world and all its myriad wonders... and her bi-polar owners who alternately drive her to a frenzy with wild games of 'fetch' and then ignore her 'cos they're passed out on the ground with fatigue.

Getting into the flow with education

The current challenge for schools in staying relevant to our changing times is that instead of locking down information, they should free it up. It seems the memorization by rote thing isn't endemic to the Asian approach to education but a common malady, judging by the rising problems of student engagement and dropout rates everywhere in the world.

Old school functioned by parcelling information out in dribs and drabs according to a prescribed dosage based on the age of the recipient. It categorized information into subjects and topics and kept the disciplines apart from one another, each developing a unique jargon and "accepted" approach so as to discourage cross-contamination between their disparate spheres. It designed exams that rewarded those who accumulated and hoarded information, keeping it to themselves, while declaring those that didn't incompetent and unworthy. Has there ever been a more unnatural environment in which we expected learning to flourish?

Until today, school still generally functions along those lines with the packaging of pre-digested information in textbooks, reading kits, handouts and notes. We teach answers to questions, then test them on the same questions, and award As to those who best reproduce those same answers back to us. The kids themselves can't answer questions they don't already feel they know the answers to, so it's a vicious cycle. And because we spend most of our time 'spotting' questions that are 'most likely' to come out in the finals and teaching the kids to answer only from a specific range of 'safe' questions, we are bored, the kids are bored, and it sucks to be us.

What we have forgotten, or perhaps failed to observe, is that information is more like a stream or river than a block of ice. Schools freeze information and expect the kids to hold on to it. At the next level, the school rewards the kid with another ice cube and so on up the chain. But the kids' hands are hot and ice melts. It's such a frustration to hold on to melting ice with liquid water dripping all over the place, or it's just so cold, hands turn blue and freeze over themselves. Neither is a good outcome for a learning experience, but that's how we still do it.

But information is a stream or a river, constantly flowing, always bringing something interesting and new along with its current. A fish, a leaf, a branch, an insect... every one of us immersed in the river sees different things at different times, approaches and interprets the experience differently, and is enriched by just being where they are, in their spot in the river. And as we learn from our own immediate circle of reach, we're sharing our own experience with others, just as they are sharing theirs with us. So instead of trying to hoard the same frozen piece of water (which is physically impossible, anyway) in the hope of keeping it from others in order to just enrich ourselves, what we learn from sharing is a myriad different perspectives from different aspects of the same river we have immersed ourselves in. And that's a lot more learning than we ever can get from a lump of ice in our hands.

If we want more of our kids to aim for better (and more meaningful) grades, telling them to cut themselves off from the river and just focus on their set texts will be, as usual, counterproductive. They have to get comfortable navigating the currents in the river at this stage, because when they complete their undergraduate studies, that river would have turned into the ocean... and if they have been well-prepared before, they will marvel at the transition. Else, they'll just drown like so many others before them.

A day with no car

M2's in the shop diagnosed with a faulty brake switch. I'm not sure what that means, exactly, other than that it's put me out of a car for a day, thus having to rely on public transport for a change.

Which is to say I took the MRT to work in the morning. Left at the same time as I would have if I were driving -- and arrived earlier too! Not just a little bit earlier, but I-can-eat-breakfast earlier. Impressive.

Because I left home early, the crowd situation at the station was not too bad and the trains arrived well within five minutes of wait time. And it was pretty much the same when I finally decided to come home at the end of the day.

Of course, if this keeps up and eventually deprives me of my own wheels, it is not as inconceivable to take public transport as I had imagined. I get a brief workout walking to and from the stations. The journey is quite fast and not unpleasant. At least, it would be until people start taking advantage of the harebrained free MRT ride before 0745 hrs scheme. (Note that it's 'harebrained' because if I were an early commuter, at some point the idea is bound to inconvenience me somehow).

Regardless, I'll be glad to collect M2 from the shop in the morning.

Abandon car

Had to abandon M2 on campus. It's nothing, really... I hope. Just being paranoid. The 'Check Engine' dashboard warning light lit up and refused to go away like it usually does.

I was imagining horrid scenarios of my engine block falling out onto the street, or exploding in a shower of impressive pyrotechnics, or worse.

As it was already dark, I couldn't perform the routine checks on the engine to see what was wrong. I'll be back to check on him in the morning -- in bright sunlight. If I still can't see the problem, it's back to the workshop with him.

I may be paranoid, but going by how expensive even tiny little cars like M2 are these days, I'd rather be careful than sorry.

Thank God for Monday

All I ever wanted from my weekend was to catch GI Joe: Retaliation and a great deal more than a mere 40 winks. And maybe some time to memorize my script for Drama Night.

What I got was shopping for flowers for the parentals' wedding anniversary, dropping off said flowers at the ancestral abode, dropping in at the hospice to look in on Jen's dad (who's seriously ill) and attempting to comfort him with our mutual akwardness, shopping for discounted unmentionables at Northpoint, taking Tasha to class and having a fantastic dinner to close off Saturday.

Today, took Tasha for her first grooming (paid for by voucher), shopped for more discounted unmentionables at AMK Hub, joined Jen in a celebratory tea to celebrate her dad's 80th at the hospice, joined the parentals for their anniversary dinner along with the sibs, et. al, and made Tasha do her homework -- somehow, the trainer made it look a lot easier in class yesterday.

No G.I. Joe: Retaliation and I'll be lucky to catch even 10 winks in total over the weekend. Since when did I ever become such a social animal?

Training and some good eats

Tasha's Saturday classes are more for us to learn how to behave like Alpha dog so that she will follow our lead with no hesitation. Through today's exercises, we learned to walk like we knew where we were going, vocalize commands with authority, and perform 'corrective' actions in a way that brooked no argument. Big dog or small, all behave in the same way when such intent is made clear.

What we expect of a trained dog does not come naturally to either dog or handler. There are signals that we habituate our dog to respond to even without the verbal command. The dog doesn't understand language, anyway, so movement is what cues the dog as to what's next.

While Tasha followed me just fine, I was worried she wouldn't 'sit' as we didn't train her for that in our daily practices. I shouldn't have worried. None of her classmates could either. It turns out that there is a Vulcan neck-pinch that you apply to the dog's waist. The initial pressure from the pinch and the quick release somehow makes the dog sit. Do it often enough (c.f., next week's training schedule) and it will become a habit... eventually.

So while we face more of the same boring daily exercises this week, we also stumbled upon the Sun Ray Cafe. A pet-friendly joint, it's been just under our noses and we hadn't known it. Look:

My striploin, ordered rare and served just so on a thick slab of potato gratin in a mushroom sauce. That's a gorgeous hunk of meat that's bursting with juice; tender but every mouthful serving up a delicious chew that we'd expect from a decent chunk of cow.

The pork rack was another substantial slab of meat, though given a choice, I'd still go with the steak, anyway. Likewise tender and flavourful, and served on a bed of mashed sweet potato, this has to count as one of the best pork chops I've ever had.

And Tasha would agree that her baked lamb balls were awesome, but she's not allowed to talk with her mouth full. Anyway, she polished off the plate and then very nearly polished the plate if it hadn't been removed by a very attentive and polite wait staff.

With a 10% UOB credit card discount, just under $75 covered our three dinners, and a side of soup, salad and drink for the two sets and Tashs's own dish of goodness.

Working with distractors

It's Day 4 of Tasha's daily dog obedience training. It's actually more like obedience training for US and conditioning for her. As we obey the routine we're committed to, she gets used to our new strange habits and learns to respond accordingly.

Starting today, we are introducing distractors to her usual walk-rest-walk regime. Now at every checkpoint, we set up something to catch her attention and make her wander away from us. As soon as she moves over to investigate, we wheel and walk in the opposite direction, forcing her to pay attention to us and follow our lead.

Today, we brought her favourite toy: a little, hollow, purple ball with a bell in it which we could shake and bounce in front of her. But at the same time, the one playing with the ball must not gesture or otherwise invite her to play along. If she accepts an invitation, it would not be fair of us to drag her away.

It turned out that she was already distracted enough with so many other void-deck stimuli, from litter and debris to the occasional passer-by that we didn't need the ball at all. Every time she got ahead of us, we turned and walked the other way.

This exercise is certainly more tiring than the previous one as rest stops are dictated, not by us, but by the reluctant trainee. If she didn't decide to stop and sit behind us, we just had to keep going.

Tomorrow, we'll try with the ball again as she finally seems to understand the rules of this new boring game: don't get ahead of your handler. And on Friday, maybe some food as well, just to be evil.

Stagestruck

Got a kick out of our favourite playwright's email to me telling NYeDC that he is using one of our Drama Night pix from last year as his profile photo for his Facebook fan page. ZX and his angry bird companion look sufficiently goofy to warrant such a distinction.

In the meantime, I said 'yes' to Sirius who offered me a role in one of this year's Drama Night plays. She later also offered me the Director's role and gave me the freedom to choose my own cast. Um... thanks. I think I've been had.

Exercise for a small dog

Tasha is doing her homework. Her recommended schedule is one 40-minute block or two 20-minute blocks per day for 10 weeks.

She's wearing her choke collar and we've attached a 15-foot leash to it. That's a lot of slack, if you ask me. The idea is for us to set up three or four checkpoints about 50 ft from each other to mark out our training route. Q: Where in S'pore can we find a 50 ft square space? A: Nowhere. We are walking an L-shaped route back and forth in a vacant void deck, and that'll have to do.

So the exercise: Starting at the first checkpoint, walk to the next without looking at your dog, or inviting her along. If she's good, she'll follow you, else at the end of the 15-ft leash, she'll get a tug and she'll come trotting up to you when you arrive at your destination. Hold for 30 seconds, then move off to the next checkpoint, again without inviting her, calling her or even looking at her. Repeat checkpoint to checkpoint in sequence for the duration of the exercise period.

The idea is to set a routine. When you walk, dog should automatically follow. When you stop, dog stops. This should happen with or without a leash, as yesterday's demonstrator dog so competently showed us. After a day, Tasha learned to follow, though she has no idea what to do with herself when we stop. Ideally, she should just sit and wait... but that's probably going to be another exercise for another time.

Lesson for us: let her poop before commencing training. When we were purposely not looking at her, well, let's just say that there was an unnecessary interruption to her lesson as I rushed around with baggie and tissue paper, picking up after her before any human traffic -- and her trailing leash -- could contact a landmine.

Here we have an emo shot of a dog in training

And this is Ginger George, the high-class freeloader who will only accept a canned Friskies from us. He's causing a premature distraction to Tasha, who should be exercising with distractions only from Day 4-6.

1st day of school

It's time for little Tasha to go to school and learn some basic obedience. Not that she's been particularly naughty, or anything, but if she's going to live in a human world and interact with other people and their dogs, it's good for her to live by a set of predictable rules.

As with every kid attending school for the first time, there are certain circumstances to get used to. Our trainer is the choke chain type. He explained that the choke chain does not harm the dog no matter how small, but is a form of effective communication between dog and handler. As you can see, she doesn't like it much. The metal chain and clasp are kinda' heavy and they drag the floor. But we have to accustom her to it anyway as it's going to play a major role in her training regimen.

After 10 weeks, with consistent daily practice, she should learn heel, stay, sit, stand, come. In the meantime, young as she is, she's demonstrating a disturbing affinity for her handsome male classmates. She was practically drooling over the demonstrator, an English sheepdog -- like a 14-year old going starry-eyed over the confident senior jock. Hmm... better keep an eye on this one.

Now free of the choke chain, she's clearly less distressed. Well, it isn't meant to stay on forever.

You have one job!

I am quite perturbed by grown adults who are grads, qualified and certified to work but can't think for themselves without referring to a crutch of a pre-digested template.

A proper dog

I wonder if it's too early to say, but Tasha's exhibiting proper toilet habits. There have been appreciably fewer 'accidents' indoors, and she understands what 'going out' means for her to do. Good girl, Tasha!

Personality-wise, she's turning out to be rambunctious, energetic and attention-seeking, while at rest she prefers to be around people. All these traits are expected of dog behaviour.

I mention this only because her doggie behaviour is something the cats are not used to. So far, both Maui and Kaiser have taken swipes at her when she got too close. Certainly, these relationships bear watching. Hopefully, they'll adapt to each other quickly.

Kickstarting a Pebble

Yes, I'm a bandwagon jumper on Kickstarter who ordered a Pebble e-paper smartwatch and made it the best funded project to date, contributing to the over US$10m raised via this crowdfunding portal.

The packaging Pebble ships in opens up into a well-padded interior, securely cradling the watch and its magnetic USB charging cable. Apparently, a single charge keeps the watch going for 5-7 days. We'll see.

The Pebble looks a bit big on my dainty wrist, but I like the idea of being able to change watch faces on the fly. Currently, there are digital, textual and whimsical watch faces to choose from, and when the SDK finally gets released in April, lots more users will be able to design more watch faces to add to the growing list of options available.

Apart from the cosmetic face changing ability, the cool idea behind the Pebble is that it pairs with your smartphone via Bluetooth and alerts you to incoming calls by displaying caller ID; SMS messages with sender info and a preview of the message; and with further firmware updates, other smartphone notifications from Facebook, Twitter and their ilk if you so desire. The practical effect is that you don't always have to fish your phone out of your pocket every time it buzzes in silent mode to see if a response is urgently needed. Just casually glance at your watch and nobody will be the wiser.

Other apps involving the in-built accelerometer are in the pipeline as well. For the moment, it activates the backlight through a flick of the wrist. Not much, but it's a cool one-handed operation which no other watch currently in the market can duplicate.

On the backplate you can see "Kickstarter Edition" showing that this unit is the very first commercially available production model of its kind. A lot of people who ordered the Pebble through Kickstarter are quite upset over how long it has taken the company to deliver. We've been waiting for very nearly a year and many initial backers' patience has worn thin. The company has only manufactured the jet black colour option to date. Good luck to those who ordered their Pebble in other colours.

The debate among Pebble backers is over what it is we have plonked our money down on. The most impatient think they have bought a product like they would have on Amazon or E-Bay. The many production delays have made these people feel that their money's been spirited away with nothing tangible to show for it.

Although I have been impatiently checking the delivery schedule on a near-daily basis and hyperventilating whenever a company update goes online, my take is that I haven't bought so much a product than I have a process. The product is only the reward for putting faith (and some money) in the process. What I felt I was funding was a learning process for the young entrepreneurs at Pebble, helping them with a little seed-money to develop a cool concept into a fully operational commercially available device I would be proud to wear on my wrist.

Despite the wait, I will say the company has been responsible with its startup capital. The production delays were mostly due to a steep learning curve; upscaling of production processes; R&D on further improvements such as waterproofing to a depth of 50m and upgrading Bluetooth to 4.0 from 2.0; acquiring proper FCC licencing; testing shipping procedures and schedules... but my Pebble is finally here. It works like it should, and though it still looks somewhat like a prototype I'm happy with it's geek-cool cred.

Just because I received my first Kickstarter delivery... I funded something else. Heh.

In other news: look what campus admin surprised me with today! Has it really been that long?

it's (about!) time

Ironically, the words "it's time" are printed on the package delivered to my house today. Ironic because I ordered it just shy of a year ago, hoping it would arrive by my birthday. Then I watched Christmas; New Year and Chinese New Year; Valentine's Day; and wife's birthday roll by... and finally, finally, it's here! Yet I still have to wait another 24 hours because no one was home to accept delivery and I have to collect it in person at the local post office during opening hours tomorrow. Rawr.

A Rocky morning

The Animal Rescue Squad swung into action again, reuniting this naughty runaway dog with his owner.

This bad boy was running around loose on campus with one of our students in hot pursuit. She eventually pinned him down, while I arrived huffing and puffing to see if assistance was required.

Fortunately, his owners had tagged him with his name (Rocky) and their cellphone numbers. A couple of calls later and we established contact; the owners' daughter would collect him from us.

Unfortunately, he decided not to wait with us any longer. Sensing a slight lapse in attention, he bounded off again and I had to run after him. He ran out of the main gate (without signing an early-leave form!), but at least had the good sense not to cross the main road; and even better sense to know that the construction site he ran into eventually was not any more hospitable for him. Making a U-turn, he ran back into my arms.

With a firm grip on his collar, we both marched back to campus. For safekeeping, we locked him in the new HODs' room with air-conditioning and lots of well-meaning company.

That would include Wayne who fetched him a bowl of water; Josh who feels it was partially his fault Rocky got away the second time; HOD PE who ran with me after the escapee; Gurmit who fetched a hefty hemp rope to secure him; Amy who rescued my tea from breakfast when we were so abruptly interrupted by the unauthorized new arrival, and offering her room to keep him in; and all the kaypoh little children who tried to make him feel all warm and welcome while we waited for owner to show up.

And that's where his owner caught up to him. Mission accomplished.

The Literature paradox

The reason why Literature as a school subject is in trouble is because we don't know what we want from it. By 'trouble', I mean that it is declining in take-up by students who are favouring the more 'practical' subjects like the sciences and math. All the hand-wringing that been going on in recent weeks is nothing new -- lit has been in decline for a long time now.

The issue isn't really about whether to keep it on as a subject or phase it out. No one is actively campaigning to eradicate it from the syllabus; a number of vocal supporters are rallying support for it; some are lamenting how pragmatic our society's become; but most are silently indifferent and will neither be sorry nor surprised if it dies a natural death.

I belong to the vocally indifferent camp. We love good books, but the link between the enjoyment of reading and having to take an exam about it is problematic. Both are diametrically opposite activities. Old man story follows:

Way back when I was a green trainee with a class of my own, I had to give a lit test. My objective was to see what creative things the kids could do with the poems they were reading. I designed a test to assess their interpretation of the text through a choreographed or dramatized group movement, i.e., a dramatic reading of the poem of their choice. I even designed a rubric so I could grade the performance with a clear conscience.

As much as the kids were astonished by my test design and rubric which I briefed them on beforehand, they astounded me with their interpretative performances. Working together, not only did they show they understood their poems, they showed that they were able to translate text into visuals, and visuals to aesthetic movement -- and they did it all on their own. I didn't teach them to do anything that they did, I just said, 'GO!', sat back and marvelled.

A couple of days later, I returned to the classroom with a heavy heart and a text-based re-test. Since the kids were sitting for a written exam at the end of the year, my mentors insisted that I give them a written test now. I guess they wanted to see how effectively the kids had memorized their Coles' Notes or whatever else they were studying. I never knew how the kids did on the re-test but I'd like to think that the rescinded test helped them some.

The lit exam is a very different animal from the simple activity of text reading. Despite the fluidity of subject matter, there's nothing whimsical about how questions are to be answered, or subjective in the way the answers are graded. The exam is purely mechanical in its emphasis on critical analysis, and that it rewards logic and structure -- just like the other kind of argumentative academic study. The questions require a scientific hypothesis and a mathematically logical approach to developing a reasoned conclusion.

Lit is a subject that bundles more content than its packaging can possibly hold. It's the elephant all of us blind men are feeling a different aspect of. Yes, it is creative, humanistic, historical, expressive, and everything else a lit buff identifies as good for the growing child; but it is also as practical as it gets, training the same child to think and appreciate current realities while developing a critical mind and a personal voice to match.

The problem is, people don't see how two contradictory objectives can co-exist in the same subject. Me, I enjoyed the books I read and most of the lit classes I attended. And I aced every test and exam I took beyond Sec 2. AND I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one to be able to say that.

I don't believe anyone wants lit to die (apart from those poor sods who only know lit through memorizing notes), but if it is to have a renewed viability, the people setting the syllabus and the people setting the exams will have to start talking to each other once again to figure out how to market the best of both worlds and ditch the public opinion of lit stemming from the worst; while making it relevant to a generation of twits*.

*by which I mean people who tweet. On Twitter. Rather than like some old pedagogue ponderously pontificating on Blogger.