Chinese Oral Presentations

Recently, our Chinese teacher seem to like giving us opportunities to gain OP point during Chinese lessons. We were allowed to speak to the class on any topic under the sun, and this freedom has been fully utilised by students, with topics ranging from Wei Yao’s newly acquired crush to the use of vulgarities. During the first few sessions, around last week, the topics were largely humourous, such as the effect of a crush on Wei Yao’s attitude towards studies by Daniel. Sure, I appreciate a hearty laugh once in a while, but thought-inspiring issues are more the cup of tea for me. I seem to love academic debate (sometimes even bordering on argument…Hehe).

 Today, we had the usual session to give a last opportunity to those who are still in dire need of OP points, tomorrow is the deadline for teachers to input all marks and scores into the school system. Everybody got a chance to speak, including those who don’t need anymore OP points. Previously, only those deemed to have insufficient OP points are accorded a chance to speak. The looser criteria for a chance to speak today may be the explanations for better speechs and arguments (in my opinion, of course).

Bian He (who has 10 OP points…), brought up the topic of the few members of our class frequently thought of as lazy and who do not perform well academically. He, as a friend and class monitor, has observed some improvements in this group of people. People involved include Chee Shuan, Wei Yao, Daniel, Jun Wen, Alanson et cetera. Bian He observes that they have became more mature and aware of the importance of their studies since last year. I have seen the same change. While they still play cards during recess and after school, they seem more interested during lessons and more frequent involvement in class discussions is also observed. I feel very touched to see the efforts my classmates have put in to make a difference in their lives. Whether you succeed is not the issue. You may have regrets if you try and fail, but you will definitely have regrets when you did nothing to try.

After Bian He spoke, Alanson may have got some inspiration from what Bian He said and spoke about the same topic. This provides the onlooker with a different perspective as Alanson was one of those people widely regarded as lazy and not academically-inclined. Alanson surprised me greatly with a focused and emotional speech. The usually happy-go-lucky person that used to skip EP3 show his sentimental side. Alanson said that when he first discovered that he was in a class dominated by Malaysian scholars, he felt unhappy. But he has since assimilated into the community in 2B and likes the class. These were all confessions from the heart of Alanson, but what touched me the most was his closing sentence. He said that he will not be in the same class with us next year. Because he is “so close to 3P”. By that time, Alanson has became rather emotional. I think that sentence touched most of the class with its enormity; we, as a class, changed Alanson’s initial views at entering 2B entirely. From feeling that he is unlucky to enter this class, Alanson came to like this class so much that he felt sad at prospectively having to leave this class next year. I think he actually shed a few tears.

 What I want to say to Alanson is almost along the lines of what our Chinese teacher said. Given that you give your best, it is still possible to escape the fate of entering 3P even with your not-so-good results in the first three terms. Work. For yourself, for 2B, for us.

Are Vulgarities Acceptable in Today’s World?

A few weeks ago, I read a featured article on Wikipedia which says that until a UK law was officially abolished in the 1960s, it is officially illegal to swear in the UK. The law carried a penalty of a small fine, either five pence or something along the lines of it. At that time, I found this article rather humourous. Face it, swearing has became so commonplace nowadays among teenagers that if we were to be slapped with that punishment each time we swear, we will be bankrupt before we even join the workforce. It was the discussion about the use of vulgarities among us students during Chinese lesson today that got me thinking. This rather controversial topic was introduced by Nicholas Yeo, a self-confessed user of vulgarities.

 I gave my views on whether vulgarities are acceptable in today’s world and in what kind of circumstances are they acceptable and in what kinds of situations are they not condoned. Vulgarities to me are originally normal words that have come to become taboo during the course of human cultural evolution. To a certain extent, words that are considered uncouth and unrefined today have seen widespread use in the past. For instance, faeces was once upon a time known as “crap”, even in medical fields. This shows that whether certain words are considered taboo has got much to do with human intepretation.

Personally, I feel that use of vulgarities are acceptable if the person or persons on the receiving end are tolerant of vulgarities. I know that this may come across as a rather controversial view. However, it must be noted that I do not mean that vulgarities become good or beneficial in the event of tolerance. Acceptance is not the same as encouragement. On the same line of logic, if the receiving party feels uncomfortable hearing or seeing expletives, it is not acceptable. The meaning of a word lies not in it’s formal defination, rather, in the intentions of the user and the interpretation of the receiving party. Due to the fact that we may not be clear about the personal views and preferences of a person, vulgarities must only be used if absolutely neccessary or with the closest of relations. Even then, there should not be any ill-intentions in the heart of the user.

A person may argue that the use of vulgarities reflects poorly on the character and personality of the user and that the use of vulgarities is not “refined” nor “civilised”. Whether a person is refined or civilised is bound by the rules of human society norms. Therefore, it is rather safe to infer that if a receiving party is tolerant of vulgarities, he or she will not be offended and think that a user of vulgarities are unrefined or uncivilised. However, I feel the need to reinstate my point that I am not promoting the use of vulgarities unless absolutely neccessary or beneficial to inter-personal relationship.

In addition, vulgarities should also never be used in public places or in the presence of any strangers. This is because of the fact that we will not know the personal views of a person we are not close with towards the use of vulgarities.

 While I think vulgarities can be acceptable on the condition that the receiving person(s) are tolerant towards vulgarities, I still think that anybody who wants to project the image of a professional and cultured person should never use vulgarities in the presence of anybody else. While I confess that I am not able to and most likely never will attain the feat of not using any vulgarities, I do encourage those of you who pride yourself on your great self-restrain to try working towards becoming a better person.

 To those of you who think I am contradicting myself by saying that vulgarities are acceptable in a manner but encourage people to try not to use vulgarities so often, I have an explanation. While vulgarities may be accepted by some, it is not often that anybody will especially like the use of vulgarities. Most of the population still remain intolerant towards the use of vulgarities, regardless of the intention behind the word. So if most people don’t like vulgarities while some merely adopt a neutral stance and almost nobody really likes vulgarities over normal words, why use them? But I do not wish to give anybody the impression that stopping to use vulgarities is a simple matter. It is not. But a person who does not use vulgarities is definitely a better person than one who utter expletives at the slightest provocation (such as pain… =.=||).

Oral History Presentation and Geography Presentation

With a new and Australian teacher comes new teaching methods. We were required to give a presentation on life during the Japanese Occupation complete with interview transcript and analysis. Some of the groups actually interviewed war survivors they knew but I heard some groups actually faked the interview… **Chuckles**… We did not really have anyone to interview nor wish to. So the alternative action plan was to obtain the interview from the internet and analyse it. There were only so many interviews available online and some of them have rather poor sound quality caused by non-professional recording. I wanted to do something different from others and suggested to my group that we get the interview from the vast databases of the National Heritage Board Oral History Centre. And so the four of us journeyed to the National Archives adjacent to Fort Canning. After much time spent trying to find the location and plowing through the copyright issues, we finally obtained one part of the transcript of an interview with a Malay war survivor.

We brought to bear the issue of whether the Japanese especially favoured any race by looking at the tragic Sook Ching Massacre which was aimed specially at the Chinese community. Generally the opinion of the interviewee is that the Japanese treated all the races equally. But there was the issue of the Sook Ching Massacre. My personal interpretation is that the Japanese was fulfilling a functional need by eliminating the Chinese anti-Japanese elements. The Japanese did not treat the other races especially well, but they did treat the Chinese especially badly. This is one big difference. Hitler, although to not too large an extent, did treat the Aryans better while discriminating against Jews. However, I think the Japanese did not especially like any race in Singapore, whatever they did was not because of hatred or racism, rather it is because of a strategic or tactical need.

This presentation is one very good example of thought on the basis of knowledge. The historical records in the National Archives are knowledge. And a researcher draws the information from the archives, examine it and try to reach a conclusive interpretation of whatever the topic in issue is. By this direction of thought, the archivers’ jobs are more knowledge and fact based than thought based. Although they deal with historical sources, their jobs are to preserve and archive the historical sources without providing a personal touch or any interpretation to the sources.

Now moving on to the topic of the Geography presentation I gave on Monday. After watching the presentation on nuclear energy use by Shi Jie and Zhi Hao, I was prompted to think about the energy problem. First we have to establish firmly that we will DEFINITELY have to at least largely phase out the fossil fuels we are using today. It is simply far too inefficient, far too dirty and far too suited to monopoly by mega-corporates. It deviates from the currently hot issue about freedom. While we cannot discount the fact that human beings are not solitary animals, my personal take on this is to reduce the dependency on other humans or groups of humans to thought and information purposes. Ideally, every human being should be able to sustain his or her own life while still requiring other human beings to satisfy the primal instinct to communicate and to help develop thought through debate. This is to say that, by today’s standards, one very important aspect of human survival is energy. We can plant our own  vegetables and hunt or rear animals but we are not able to generate the energy we need to sustain life in today’s model short of getting your own firewood etc. Most of the population in the developed world use energy provided by a central producer such as oil companies such as ExxonMobil, Shell et cetera. Methinks that this is one very big liability in a human being’s survival. The halting of energy provision by these companies or whatever organisation it is that provide energy will effectively force a human being to revert back to the way of living people thousands of years ago adopted, without energy to aid daily work. Human beings may not be able to survive such a revert after countless evolutions to suit the less labour-intensive life today. Therefore I advocate energy self-sufficiency.

In view of depleting fossil fuels and the utter inefficiency of the IC engine, I think we should revolutionise the current way of getting energy towards a more self-sustainable and efficient way of getting energy, entitling every human being to the natural resources and energy as intended by nature. A complete revolution is the way to go, I think. But the great amount of cost and infrastructure is rather impeding for more different sources such as nuclear power. You have to modify your car to run on electricity to utilise the electric energy produced by nuclear means.

Therefore a transition period and system is needed. Something that can utilise the current infrastructure while it is being gradually replaced by newer systems. While you can start producing stock electric cars from today onwards. But what happens to your currently working IC engines? It would be a waste to dispose of them so we should use them till they are totally phased out. And that is what I was presenting on, biofuels.

While biofuels can be a long term solution to the energy problem as well, I think it is more suited as a transition. Biodiesels can be used on almost all diesel engines without any modifications and slight modifications are all that are needed to run E200 fuel on a gasoline engine. If full biofuels are not desired, a blend of organically derived fuels and conventional mineral fuels can be useful. All diesel sold in the EU is scheduled to be blended with small amounts of biodiesel in a few years time if I am not mistaken. While mineral fossil fuels are phased out. Biofuels provide a stopgap measure to the increasingly severe environmental problems we are experiencing today. If carbon neutral or even carbon negative biofuels can be derived in a feasible way, then we may well be able to use biofuels as a long-term measure. But in the event that even with our best efforts, biofuels can only slow down and not stop or reverse the greenhouse effect, we should take up the challenge of radical energy sources.

The only conclusion I can reach at this point in time is that one way or another, fossil fuels will be going. What will be the replacement will only become evident when currently ongoing research return their factual results to be the basis for consideration in the decision of the human race regarding energy sources. Once again, factual information as the basis for thought.

Weekends in the Boarding School

This post is not meant to be a solid record of any event that took place in reality. Most of this will be my my own thoughts and reflections. I ask you to bear with me. I still welcome feedback, though.

Last year, weekends for me were plainly chances to return home. I used to find returning to Johor Bahru a way to relax after a week of school. Eventually, this became obsessive, and I tried to return home every weekend. When there are obligations for me to fulfill in school, I would have chosen to return home after the activity for a very short visit. Put simply, returning home became an integral part of my weekly schedule. I actually spent more weekends in JB than in the boarding school.

From the start of 2007, the school became stricter on leave applications by Malaysian scholars to return home. We were advised not to return home every weekend. When this new policy was newly implemented, I felt rather uncomfortable about this. I went as far as to spend most of my weekends in the boarding school sleeping or otherwise lying on my bed, doing nothing. My mental state deteriorated quite severely. Most of my time in those days was spent looking forward towards the less-frequent-than-before visits back home. I was visibly less motivated than before. I procrastinated more and I think that contributed to my utter failure of a project this year.

It was after a few terms, around the start of term 3 that my mentality about this issue changed to what it is today. After a series of events including busy rehearsing for 王鼎昌 and going out for sup kambing with friends, I began to appreciate the benefits of spending weekends in the boarding school. I started to go to the gym in my free time, do my laundry, going for morning walks etc to kill time. Thought not exactly academically enriching, these activities are at least more meaningful than lying on the bed wasting time. Hardcore studying is just not my style, I hate cramming information without developing a passion for the subject matter.

I am actually beginning to like spending weekends in the boarding school! But that is not to say that I do not welcome the occasional trip back home. The familiarity and nostalgia back home never fails to get to me. I guess this is all part of assimilating into Singapore society.

 Dear reader, you deserve a pat on the back for putting up with my ramblings. Thanks! Leave a comment if you have any thoughts to voice, feedback actually helps me improve myself.

Hwa Chong Institution Boarding School Corporate Video Shooting and Other Events

Since EP3 stopped last week or so, Friday afternoons had since became free time for me. So right after school, I returned to the boarding school with a few friends. We were chatting and enjoying the cooling wind beside the koi pond when Miss Pauline Yee approached us. Seems like the boarding school was shooting the corporate video that afternoon.

We were asked to “act” in the video as members of the Hwa Chong Family. At first we were reluctant, but when Miss Yee said that some girls would also be present, the reaction changed immediately. Actually it was only partially for that reason, we can see the girls anytime soon. It was more like we were staying there for the heck of it and as an excuse to stay downstairs and continue chatting until later.

We spent around half an hour waiting for the cameraman and his crew to prep the shoot but the actual shoot was actually rather anti-climatic. All we were asked to do was sit down there and “do our own things” like “discussing”. So we just disregarded the camera crew and continued chatting. The shoot lasted a mere 5-10 minutes.

After that, Zhi Hao, Zhao Hong and I proceeded to the computer room to access the Internet. All of a sudden, Miss Pauline poked her head into the computer room and asked for a “few” people to act as audiences for a second session of corporate video shooting. However, seems like she did not really stuck to the orthodox meaning of the word “few”… Almost the entire computer room was emptied out by the time the shoot was in progress. We actually braved the rain (just a light sprinkle) for the sake of shooting the corporate video. Hwa Chong spirit, eh?

And after the 15-minute video shoot, I noticed that our dear classmate, Lit Xian, was in the Fitness Centre. I pointed out that observation to Zhi Hao and both of us decided to go to the Fitness Centre as well to join in the fun. Lit Xian had been running and was visibly sweaty when I entered the air-conditioned Fitness Centre. We greeted each other and Lit Xian continued on to mount the stationary bike. To my great surprise (I am a rather frequent user of the stationary bike), Lit Xian started pedaling as soon as he was on the bike. Huh? Don’t he have to turn on the power supply and input route profile? Apparently not. And he dismounted in less than 2 minutes by my estimation. Call that aerobic exercise? And and important thing to note is that he did not bend down to power the bike off.

Lit Xian left the Fitness Centre soon after, stating that he is going to the computer room. And so I went over to check the stationary bike out to see whether there is something amiss. Hahahaha. I observed that the bike was not turned on. Apparently, either Lit Xian, for all his other great abilities, did not know how to turn on the bike; or he just wanted to pedal a few rounds. Personally, I do find the former more probable, but I will leave this up to the reader to interpret.

And rewinding a bit, back to the 11.20 to 12.00 lesson, I have some interesting events to share. Ms Tan Yew Hui was instructing the class on grammatical errors we commonly commit. When she made the comment “this is the type of language you guys use on MSN, on your blogs…”, some students protested loudly “got meh?”. Somehow, by a twist in the realms of science unknown to mankind, this “got meh?” set off a major reaction in Ms Tan. She simply flared up and scolded the whole class.After the bout of loud lecturing, she asked me to “come up and conduct the lesson”. I was dumbfounded… Huh?? At first I though that I did something wrong, but at least she was rather calm and friendly when she offered me markers to use. Anyway, I discussed the grammar error correction worksheet with the class. At the end of the lesson, Ms Tan had cooled off considerably.

After the lesson, Aaron suggested to me that maybe she asked me to conduct the lesson while she cooled off from her recent flare-up. But whatever the reason, this was rather an experience for me. After all, it’s not everyday that a student get to conduct a lesson.

Something else, does the title remind anybody of children’s books? As in “Jack and the Beanstalk and Other Stories”… Haha. A shot of nostalgia in the very modern context of a blog. Ironic.

Malay Imbuhan Presentation

Okay, before I start writing anything else, I must make it clear to all that my Malay had never been that good. Not even when I was in primary school back in MALAY-sia.

Part of the motivation for me to come to Singapore was to end my struggle with my worse language, Malay. (I said “part”, this is just a fraction of it ;P) Little did I know that Malaysian scholars in Hwa Chong Institution have to learn Malay. Rumour has it that this is because we need the Malay qualifications if and when we decide to pursue a career in Malaysia.

Well. Technically we are allowed to drop Malay as a subject if we “really dislike” it. But history had not seen many such cases. At least not many that I know of. I harboured the thought of dropping Malay when Mr. Hon told us we could opt out of it. After all, I find it difficult to get the hang of Malay grammar.

But after turning this thought over and over in my mind, I finally came to the conclusion that continuing my study of the Malay language will be beneficial to me. Yes, I have to stay back after school once a week. Yes, I have one more subject to add to my workload. Yes, I bear the liability of having Malay pulling my year-end grades down.

However, I am in an EP3 that is only busy if and when there are performances, I am relatively free from EP3 commitments for the rest of the year. Staying back once a week for a brief 40 minutes does not shave unacceptably much off my personal time. With regards to the problem with the workload, it is not that significant. After all, how much homework can you get in 2 lessons a week? Furthermore, if Malay has the ability to pull down my grades at the end of the year, it will also have the ability to pull up my grades. The trade-off is that i have to ensure I get decent results for this subject. On top of all these, when Xue Zheng, Chern Yuen and I were shortlisted for the top student award at the start of the year, I observed that there could not be only 6 1.00s in the entire Sec 2.  Chern Yuen informed me that we had the edge as we took 1 more subject more than the others. That one subject is Malay.

 And so, I made the decision to continue taking Malay. To prevent this from backfiring on me, I have to work hard on this subject. Period. On the more humorous side, continue taking Malay ensures that I will be able to buy goreng pisang (I know its supposed to be pisang goreng, but seems like most people invert the term…) in the future. Hehe.

 After all the tonnes of off-topic content, lets return to the main point of the presentation. Along with the study of Malay comes the need for Malay ACE points in order to secure a higher grade. Therefore, in a feeble attempt at increasing my pathetic 2 ACE points, I decided  to provide a presentation to the class regarding the usage of the affix or imbuhan “ke-an”. I did this ACE project with Aaron (who was equally desperate for additional Malay ACE). This may even qualify as a resource package, with the worksheets and notes we came up with.

 Generally, the presentation went smoothly excluding some technical glitches resulting from the snail’s-pace of the internet connection. We are supposed to discuss answers with the class during the next lesson, which is on Friday. Hope this will get me a decent number of ACE points… But at least I still have the compulsary ACE presentation on festivals to fall back on. Good luck to me!

New Blogging Service Provider

I finally decided to change service providers after putting up with the monotony of Blogger’s templates. Well. So far so good in using WordPress. This will be my new blog. Friends please relink! Thanks.

My New Blog

http://shienyang.wordpress.com

I have decided to switch my blogging services provider. All readers please take note. Friends please relink. Thanks!