my ajumma notes

A heartening letter in yesterday's (30 October) Forum: 'Hopeless case' now manager in top bank I was delighted to read the Saturday special report, 'No dead end' (ST, Oct 27), on the Institute of Technical Education (ITE). When I was an ITE student, I used to curse and swear when I went to school in the awful ITE uniform, ever conscious that I would be seen as a 'hopeless case'. Today, I am a manager in one of the world's top financial institutions. Apart from all that was written in the papers, I would like to share with readers how ITE gave its students many opportunities to develop their leadership skills and confidence, opportunities not available in secondary school or polytechnic. It developed in students academic and soft skills needed in the working world. ITE had workshops on public speaking that gave me the opportunity to speak and built up my confidence. I also had the chance to be the emcee for some award ceremony when I would probably have b...

Anyone who can beat Federer is a hero of sorts. He has lost only 7 matches this year. It was such a change to see him the one scrambling, looking worried, committing forced and unforced errors, etc. Congratulations to Nalbandian on doing a Djokovic , i.e., beating the world numbers 1, 2 and 3 in the same tournament. The poor guy has been on the downward curve for such a long time. About 2 years, if I'm not wrong. And I must admit that I had practically written him off. I can just imagine Roddick and Hewitt now scratching their heads and wondering how these 2 guys managed to beat Federer. Well, hopefully this livens up the party somewhat. Federer, Nadal, Federer, Nadal... that was getting really boring. Anyway, over all these years, I've had the impression that Nalbandian was on the bulky, hulking side. It was only last week that I realised he is actually one of the smaller players. He looked half of Federer's size, which makes him maybe one-third Nadal's size, and he i...

I did something unprecedented last weekend. I watched the Shanghai Formula One race. Like any other kaypoh, I'm intrigued by scandals of all types. The whole year I've been seeing news about Alonso and Hamilton so since I happened to turn the TV on sometime during the live telecast of the race, I decided to see if Hamilton would indeed turn out to be world champion. As it turned out, that was about the time Hamilton and his car ended up in the gravel . So... there's the next race next weekend somewhere in Brazil. Don't know if I'll watch it. Watching Formula One is potentially heart attack-inducing. And anyway, watching fast cars going round 56 laps isn't really my kind of thing. Arguably, though, the biggest news in sports recently must be the Marion Jones business . What can I say? Basically, I'm suspicious of anybody and everybody, athlete or official. Also this week, Andy Murray is the latest guy who talks about tennis match-fixing , plus, a Chinese ch...

Initially, I didn't want to comment on the now infamous PSLE Math paper because I didn't want to be a broken record. However, there is this letter by a P6 student in TODAY, which I think is worth saying a thing or two about. The letter I mean is the second one, which starts in the third column with, 'This year's paper has indeed caused much anguish.' Don't know why they like to merge the letters in the on-line version. This Lee Zhicong, whom I will refer to as a 'he' because the name sounds male (apologies if Lee Zhicong is actually a girl), has written the only 'positive' letter I've seen about the paper. I congratulate him for his optimistic attitude towards challenge. He actually sounds happy that the paper was tough! My guess is that he is a gifted child and has already secured a place in a choice secondary school through DSA. If my guess is wrong, based on his letter, I think we can assume he will do well in all his PSLE papers anyway an...