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Naming names

What do you know, there's another naming contest on now, to name Orchard Road's latest soon-to-be-built mall, which will be where Glutton's Square used to be (opposite Centrepoint). Given the names decided upon for a couple of other places, you might just want to try getting your hands on the $8,888 prize money.

If you remember, Marina Bay was very creatively re-named Marina Bay, and the budget terminal, well, Budget Terminal. I remember a contest official explaining that they chose Budget Terminal because most entries contained the word 'budget'.

So, just make a guess as to which word is likely to appear in most of the entries, e.g. 'glutton', 'Orchard', 'Somerset', 'Killiney', etc, and you might just find yourself a lot richer than the boy who won $1,200 and a 3G phone for coming up with Budget Terminal. That is, if you can get into the Far East Organisation website, which I couldn't get into for some reason.

Anyway, I do remember Glutton's Square when it was Glutton's Square. We used to live near it. Ok, it has nothing to do with this.

I dug into Mr Brown's archives and found this article he wrote last year about naming.

On an unrelated note, I read in today's TODAY about the instrument that is used to rank and assess teachers, which goes by the rather unfortunate acronym, EPMS. It seems that it's not just the teaching that matters but also 'CCA achievements (eh, what if you happen to be i/c of a CCA which, for many very understandable reasons, can't chalk up 'achievements'), courses attended and shared..., community service..., a running 3-year portfolio of self-improvement plans, sourcing the Internet for teaching resources, etc.' (According to one of the letter writers)

And the other writer stated that during work review discussions, teachers 'are encouraged to showcase what they have done. Those who can produce photographs, video clips and reflective journals (such as blogs?) often steal the show.'

WOW. Amazing. I thought teachers already have their hands full teaching kids like my son. And some more still have to make clips of themselves, etc.

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