my ajumma notes

This Chinese as Mother Tongue business is just sounding so strange now. The reason for 'downgrading' the weighting - so that kids can get a better shot at getting into top schools? How educationally sound is this kind of reasoning? I didn't know whether I was supposed to laugh when I read the article yesterday about the Sec 1 girl who apparently struggled with Chinese and 'only' got an A and who is now in a 'top girls' school' anyway. Or the letter in the forum complaining of how the grandchild could 'only' get a 240 PSLE score because he/she could not get an A* for Chinese (presumably, he/she got an 'A'). Ok, now, what is wrong with getting A for Chinese or getting 240 for the PSLE? What about the children who are struggling to pass the subject? What about the children who have problems with any or all of the other subjects? This obsession with A*s and top schools is at fault, not the fact that Mother Tongue has equal weighting wi...

Today, there was an article 'No sense of history in these buildings?' I must say that it is no surprise that many people care very little even for gazetted national monuments. If you take a straw poll among Singaporeans today, how many would name a historical landmark as a Singaporean 'icon'? My guess is many people would name places like Singapore Flyer, Changi Airport, or something along Orchard Road. The worst is still to come, of course. Very soon, the IRs will also join that list. Sad but true. As an old (ha!) IJ girl, I agree totally that the 'sense of history' is lost when the building houses shops, restaurants and nightspots that have nothing to do with its past. At least SJI got to become SAM. It would have been nice if our building had become a library or something to do with school, girls or history. And I do not mean just having those old-looking signs explaining the history of the place.

Chanced upon this article about The Nine Rooms of Happiness in Self (March 2010). Interesting idea. Imagine your life a house with nine rooms. Different aspects of your life go into each room (e.g. the living room is for stuff related to your friends and other social matters; the office - i.e. a room in the house called 'office', not your workplace - is for career-related stuff etc) , where you deal with whatever issues there are for that aspect of your life. I suppose that facilitates one's getting one's house in order, ha ha. So corny. That's how I understand it anyway. They have a blog for it: here Yet another modern-day self-help re-labelling of ideas. They did not have 'shed'; guess it's not really part of the house...