Obviously not the end

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 been last on the list had I been in secondary school. Being a vice-president of the concert band gave me the chance to fly to Australia with my ITE mates for a band performance, which was like a dream come true.

I applaud and thank my lecturers, especially Mr Aaron Tang, who made me realise that I actually had leadership qualities. Mr Tang showed us how dreams could come true, when he went all out to raise funds to make our Australian trip happen. This gave us hope and allowed us to rise to the occasion.

A few of my schoolmates were involved in four to six ECAs, yet they scored fantastic results. What does this show? ITE has a unique educational system, and with it a unique and passionate team of lecturers who go the extra mile to make our dreams come true.

We students may have been less academically inclined, less attentive, more playful and lacked guidance during our younger days but our lecturers understood us and made things happen for us.

Tan Sock Hua (Miss)

Actually, I think the ITE uniform, at least the uniform of the ITE near me, looks pretty cool.

But, moving away from my instinctive trivial thoughts, obviously, there is more to ITE than meets most eyes. Well done, to the letter writer and others like her, as well as their teachers.

Hopefully, we will see more young people who are not on the conventional educational route prove themselves. That would say something about the quality of the education system here, more so, perhaps, than students' brilliant performance in math and science competitions.

Hero again!

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 is quite a bit shorter than Federer, Nadal and Djokovic. What a revelation, ha ha!

The party-like atmosphere at the prize presentation was an interesting change from the usual staid ones. It was cute having Nalbandian spray champagne on the model-ball girls (off-duty models doubling up as ball girls) and officials.

However, there was this Spanish-speaking dude at the prize-giving who suddenly broke into English, heaping praise upon praise praise on Federer, while reserving, as far as I could make out, just one or two congratulatory sentences in Spanish for Nalbandian. Now, what was up with that??

Pics from here

Champs, dopes and who knows what else

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 champion triathlete is found to have been taking stuff. Again, what can I say?

Sorry, blur picture. The sign says 'Doping Station'.

Sad and cynical as this may sound, if some news comes out tomorrow that half the tennis matches I've watched were fixed, half of a certain female soccer team is actually male, half of a certain rugby world championship team are actually bears in disguise or the whole of a certain synchro swimming team is actually a bunch of mermaids, well, what will there be to say?

What do you know? It's Mathematics again!

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 and hence make it to a secondary school of his choice.

What we must remember, though, is that children like him are in the minority. The majority of children would be worried that their PSLE score will now be affected, in the wrong way, by their performance in the Math paper. And this is not taking into account how well or badly they would have done in the other subjects yet.

He is right to point out that all the marks will be on a bell curve anyway, and that the paper will still differentiate the candidates into various performance bands. However, I would ask if a 'tough' paper is necessary to do all this. Wouldn't a paper with a few tough questions suffice?

As for the other letter, since it's there, I just want to say that I didn't know the PSLE was also a test of AQ. Sure, indirectly, any test or exam will draw on candidates' AQ but surely it can't be an aim of the PSLE? There are other better ways to build up children's AQ and the
'crucial' exam which will determine, in many ways, their future is not the time to 'test' it. And if it is meant to test children's AQ, SEAB should inform parents from Day 1, i.e. when our children start primary school, that the PSLE is not just an academic test but also a test of AQ and so we should prepare our children accordingly.

There were letters yesterday, too, and I agree largely with this one, about how it isn't necessary to make things so tough for all the kids.

Another letter here.

Picture source