my ajumma notes

I suppose some people would be disappointed to know that no, the casino is not to open next week after all. It's also kind of amusing to see how the reports about the casino are fairly low key and carefully worded. Anyway, I did wonder why, if Universal Studios is opening next week, there was so little fanfare. And I'd like to know what percentage of the actual Universal Studios park we are getting at Sentosa. Will we suffer from small-scale-ness, like Hong Kong Disneyland? From the reports about the dunno-how-many-trillion-dollar plans for South Korea's park, ours sure sounds small... So, next to open is this 'Festive Walk', suspiciously sounding like Festival Walk ...

My next point is: why don't we learn from what other education systems are doing? It is not as though we are the only country in the world that has a 'bilingual' system (contrary to what some people seem to think). For example, we could look at how Malaysians learn English and/or Mandarin. I know many Malaysians who studied most of their subjects in Bahasa Melayu but are proficient in English and/or Mandarin (in some cases, more so than Singaporeans...). Or non-English-speaking European countries where people learn English. The Dutch priests in our church speak very good English (definitely much better than many Singaporeans) and, surely, English was not their first language. Perhaps someone can go ask them how they did it. We also have an Indonesian priest who speaks English like it is his first language. I know he studied overseas but I believe that was only in his uni days. How did he do it?

Clarissa Oon's article yesterday, 'English home, Chinese class', continued the all-important Mother Tongue discussion, surely another discussion which requires a great deal of common sense (among other things). Some of her main points: 1. '... from my experience, and that of a few friends, the fact that we spoke almost entirely English at home was no obstacle at all to liking Chinese in school and becoming reasonably proficient in it.' 2. '... one should not be overly swayed by statistics showing changing linguistic dynamics at home.' 3. 'Further tweaks to the system could inadvertently lower the bar in Chinese-language proficiency for the average Chinese Singaporean student...' Like Ms Oon, I learnt to write my Chinese name only when I went to Primary 1. Like her too, I spoke practically nothing but English at home. And also like her, while I did not exactly have an easy time with Mandarin, I came to enjoy and appreciate it in school. As I have s

Some days there are no letters and some days there are no letters worth reading but today, there were two letters in TODAY that 'support' the so-called 'vandalism' of post boxes. Excerpts (nowadays you have to log in to read TODAY online, so, no link): Letter 1 1. '... what bothers me is not the issue of "vandalism" or the police's involvement (as it is clearly a miscommunication), but rather Singapore's lack of tolerance for anything radical.' 2. 'And now SingPost has had to apologise for a creative, "out-of-the-box" stunt that, frankly, did no harm.' Letter 2 1. 'I would like to give SingPost some credit for thinking differently.' 2. 'It is too extreme to think that it may inspire others to vandalism...' 3. 'However, SingPost, on its part, failed in carrying out the campaign properly.' I have to say that I did not follow the news reports much but did people actually say that graffiti on the postboxes