When you\u2019re still in the early stages of your formal education, you have a pretty good idea about what the next year will bring. Once you\u2019re through with it, things become different. The illusion of certainty fades. You realise with progressive clarity that you\u2019re in the driver\u2019s seat now, and in unfamiliar territory. Your degree of control over yourself increases, while the environment around you gets increasingly volatile as well.<\/p>\n
Work hard? Me? But I’m Gifted!<\/a>\u00a0 I used to be a minimum-effort student who was proud of how little effort I needed to get by. Now wish I had learnt the value of hard work instead.<\/p>\n The Singapore Education System.<\/a>\u00a0Learning should be fun. It isn’t. We still stick to an outdated ‘bad medicine’ doctrine. This was designed for 60s Singapore. We probably ought to re-imagine our system from scratch. We probably won’t.<\/p>\n Further thoughts about Singapore’s education system.<\/a>\u00a0Stratification and divisions are everywhere. We go to school to socialize. We don’t really trust our teachers\u2013 what happens outside of curriculum is what matters most. Apathy isn’t inborn, it’s instilled. Culture influences school more than the other way around. Schools are insular, artificial, and slow to adapt to changes.<\/p>\n The University Dilemma<\/a>\u00a0I didn’t do well enough in Junior College to get into the local universities, and I was repulsed by the idea of going to a private university and buying a degree.\u00a0Most of this was probably sour grapes + preemptive bridge burning.<\/p>\n what to do after ord<\/a>:\u00a0A lengthy conversation with a close friend where I discuss my plans for world domination. I’d go to University if I got a full scholarship, but otherwise it doesn’t seem worth the $$ to me. I list out a bunch of random goals that I probably ought to revisit.<\/p>\n Disparity in tertiary education facilities<\/a>\u00a0A JC student wrote to the press asking why ITE facilities seemed more luxurious than JC and Poly ones. He immediately got flamed for being elitist, insensitive (as opposed to naive and ignorant, which is what he probably was). I sympathized with the kid, who was subject to a degree of public scrutiny that few people can actually withstand.<\/p>\n Defining Education<\/a>\u00a0Schools and education are non-static; they have changed over time. How should life be lived? How do you make a living? How would you design a curriculum if you were to design it from scratch? What got us here won’t get us there.<\/p>\n Gamifying Educatiom + Can we make people care?<\/a>\u00a0Games evolve quicker than schools. So they’re more engaging. We ought to learn from games. Can we make people care more about more socially optimal things, at scale?<\/p>\n Schools should learn from video games<\/a>\u00a0\u2013\u00a0It\u2019s selfish, myopic and unfair to blame kids if they don\u2019t automatically work well in a factory-called-school. (This post is a bit of a ‘fragment’, I should probably integrate it into something else.)<\/p>\n Singaporean students lack drive, why ah?<\/a>\u00a0Our kids lack drive because our culture sucks it out of them. Not all Singaporeans are afraid of leaving their comfort zones\u2013 some have already packed up and left.<\/p>\n Taking your GCE A Levels as a Private Candidate<\/a>. Register, choose your subjects, put together a study plan. I\u00a0linked a few resources I found helpful. I suppose I should update this post with more useful advice- this gets me a flurry of emails every year when kids flunk or prepare to flunk their exams. (Look at the comments.)<\/p>\n Hair for hope<\/a>\u00a0Back in 2012, it was considered somehow controversial for students to shave their heads in support of cancer. This bothered me enough to write about it, because it seemed symptomatic of the broader BS that schools perpetuate.<\/p>\n My goals as a tutor<\/a>\u00a0At some point I decided that I wanted to be a tutor. This never materialized, but I still feel strongly about what I expressed in it. Spend as little time studying as possible. Enjoy learning.<\/p>\n A teacher’s passion<\/a>\u00a0A story about my then-girlfriend (now-wife), her 10-year-old students and Google Maps. Kids can smell your bullshit.<\/p>\n Meeting Dr. Bruce Hood<\/a>\u00a0A thrilling conversation I had with a man who studies the human brain.<\/p>\n Real space<\/a>.\u00a0We don’t need to ‘create real space’ for our students. Real space is all around us. We just need to acknowledge it, and\u00a0actually talk about the actual problems that everybody’s going through every day.<\/p>\n2011<\/h3>\n
2012<\/h3>\n