Incidentally, last nite while at TP with Necroz, I saw something totally cool, it was a MINI POOL TABLE!!! Courts is selling a mini pool table, and it's not some cheap plastic thing, it's like made of the same materials for an actual pool table, so the balls are damn solid and the cue is wood! AARGH!!! I WANT! But it's $60!!! *cries* I found it so freakin' cute, I actually played on it for a while, despite Necroz's profound embarrassment. She said I was like some big kid playing with the table, but I repeat: IT"S FREAKIN" CUTE!!!
For Slayer's interest, DoE and I went to Sylveracyd's house for dinner last Sat. Now, the interesting thing about this visit is that Sylveracyd is currently studying in Adelaide, and her parents were nice enuff to have me n DoE over for curry chicken dinner. *Smackeroos!* Afterwhich, they set up the webcam, and let us see Sylver online through the cam, and even talk to her on their handphones. *2 thumbs up* to these parents. But is it any wonder, considering they've known DoE since she was like, 2? :p
Sylver looks much the same, though she's BORED STIFF OUT OF HER MIND over there. Can you blame her? Put a vivacious, party animal in a place like Adelaide, and no wonder she feels restless. Krystal, do you get the same way sometimes? ;p We spent the time chatting, making stupid faces in front of the webcam, insulting her stuffed fish, [ok, that last one was me, and resulted in me getting whacked with a stuffed pea by DoE] and she showed her some pix of her and her bf too.
Sylver> Hey hey lemme show you something
*Pic of her n BF appears on screen
[note: Her family doesn't know of BF]
Khel> Eh the screen just froze
[sometimes due to connection probs the frame will hang, and the scene be stuck there for a while]
Sylver> Wat??
Khel> Yah the pic's stuck there, and your mom's coming out of the kitchen
Sylver> OH NO!!!!!
Boing. Nah, the screen unhung itself b4 her mom came out, so it was fine after all. :p
Otherwise the past week, I've been hopping from house to house for tuition as usual, and then coming home and reading. At the house of my O' Level English student, I realised that an awareness of current affairs could be severely lacking in our youth. [or at least the one I'm teaching anyway] So onto the essay proper...
School of Life
This actually happened during a recent lesson with my O' LEvel English student:
Me: Ok, I want you to write an essay saying whether you agree with this phrase, ["Spare the rod, spoil the child"] and make references to the Nan Chiau incident.
Student: What's Nan Chiau?
Me: *blink blink* Did I pronounce that wrong? Nah-n Cha-o? Nah-n Qia-o?
Student: Oh, that sounds familiar, is that the one where the guy committed suicide?
Me: ?????????????????
What the freakin' heck???? This topic has been making the rounds of the newspapers, the TV, the Internet forums, and all the kopitiams around Singapore, and you have no idea what it is about??? What insulated, plexi-glass dome have you been living in the past few weeks??? Good God!!!
Everytime I encounter a student with problems in English, [or current affairs]I make the sincere vow that I will teach my kids to READ, read as if your LIFE and SOUL depended on it. Ye Gods! I'm not gonna let them out into the world with bad English, bad writing and total ignorance of the world outside the entertainment sphere!
In fact, wonder whether you think we learned the really important stuff in school after all. I mean, we pay all that money in school fees, uniforms, books and stationery, and all they teach you are some stupid Grammar, maths and science concepts, half of which we don't even use once we're out in the real world. And then lessons like Civics and Moral ed, they pass you over to bored, uninterested [and hence uninteresting] teachers and give you dumb exam questions, like one that popped out in my Sec 3 exam:
If you see a wallet on the road, do you:
a) Pick it up and keep the money?
b) Pick it up and give the money to a charity?
c) Pass the wallet over to a policeman?
d) Leave it there?
Like PUH-LEEZE LOR. What kinda dumbasses do you take us for?
But then again, I didn't really attend ANY civics and moral ed lesson throughout sec sch and JC, not becos I'm a moral-less being, but because being from a convent school and later a Catholic JC, and a Catholic [on paper anyway], you get sent to the Cathecism lessons, which are mainly about God, the Bible, and why you should do what He says.
Ok, but the point of this post is not about whether kids should receive religious education or not in schools. The point is that they spend so much time trying to cram all these so-called useful facts to us in school, and hammer us about how important our exams and studies are, they forget just how short a period these things are in our lives.
Consider this: If you learn algebra in school, for eg, ( X + Y ) * 2 = ?, the concept is useful to you as long as you're learning Maths. This could start in Pri 6, all the way up to Uni, if you're taking Maths or Engine or something like that. The life expectancy of a human is about 100 years, [if you believe the Five for Fighting song] and throughout those 100 years, the concept of Mathematics is only useful for about 10-12 of those years. [John Nash-wannabes excluded]
So essentially, the concept of Maths is only useful for about 10% of our entire lives! Why do they continually drill it into our minds that it has the power to shape our entire future? Because it doesn't! The knowledge is only good for about 10-12 years!
Why don't schools teach you more about stuff that's gonna affect you the WHOLE of your lives? Why can't they teach you stuff with more long term value, like:
- Love. How to handle falling in love? How do you know you're in love? What should you do to get the girl/guy of your dreams? What should a love relationship be about? How do you tell a girl that you love her?
- Heartbreak. How much it hurts to have your heart broken. What should you do? How can you handle it? How do you walk away from it?
- Ethics. What exactly is right and wrong? Why is there NO right and wrong? What should we do in grey areas? How come it's ok for the President to bomb and kill innocents, but not other people?
and generally, How To Be A Person? How To Live Life? What To Expect? How Will It All Turn Out?
You know what's the common feature of the 3 points I mentioned above? If you were a secondary school student, about to burst into adulthood, but still hazy about the details, mind pumped full of media trash, and you asked any respectable adult questions about those, most likely, the answer would be:
"You're still young. Don't worry about these, just concentrate on your studies."
Don't worry about these? OF COURSE I have to worry about these! Why should I put aside my 90 years of future happiness for these 10 years of Maths that I have to study in school?? I want to know about Love, Sex, Drugs and Rock N' Roll! [ok, scratch the last one]
The Govt still wondering why we don't have enough babies? There you go, INSUFFICIENT EDUCATION. Teaching kids the biology of things ain't enough, they need to know REAL stuff, like how do you know who is the one you want to marry? What is it like to raise a kid, for real? What do you have to expect? F'God's sakes, these things aren't instinctual in us, like birds you know, we have to be taught! And as long as you keep emphasising the 10 years of Maths over the 90 years of life, this is what you can expect.
Anyway, as an aside, you know the most likely theory why the adults just tell us to concentrate on our studies? The big secret is that THEY DON'T KNOW SHIT! They don't know themselves WHAT the answers are, and to save themselves the embarrassment of admitting this, they just brush our questions aside and tell us to concentrate on our studies. Actually, they totally don't have the answers, because their parents screwed up with them, and so when we try to find the answers ourselves, they get pissed with us for knowing something special that they don't, but which they should.
So hence, the one lifeline of parents:
"Just concentrate on your studies"
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