Virtual meeting [The teachers received this earlier today. It's a notice to teachers informing them of a last-minute cancellation of the weekly staff meting today. The English translation is found further below.] Dear Colleagues The Staff Contact Time today (3 July) is cancelled as many of our colleagues will be away on official duties. We are riding on this opportunity to experiment tapping on ICT to conduct a virtual meeting. The success of this mode of meeting demands that important information and decisions are communicated and understood by all to ensure effectve school functions. Hence, all staff must read the information which will be posted via e-mail and seek clarification as and when necessary. If this virtual meeting is effective, we can have more of such meetings which would cut down on the need to physically meet and hence “save” time. For this first virtual meeting, I will email important communication to all of you via email this afternoon at 3pm. Please access your email & remind your buddies to do so too. Cheers! VP 3 July 2008 English Translation Peasants, listen up! We know we ask you to do lesson plans which we don’t bother to look through every week. We know that we have grandiose long-term strategic planning sessions with fancy terms like ‘Strategic Thrusts’ and ‘Holistic Leadership’. But hey, don’t look at us, we couldn’t foresee that teachers will be away for oral exam invigilation! Dude, this schedule was out 3 weeks ago! That is just not enough time to see that teachers wouldn’t be around, right, right? BAM! The realisation just hit us today. It’s ok, we still have the People Developer Standard for all the wayang planning, we can still keep the trophy. It’s allll goooood. So listen up. Because this last-minute shit bit us in the a… I mean, caught us off-guard, we had to quickly come up with some cock-and-bull right? We couldn’t make it look like we do things ad-hoc. It don’t look good bro. So yeah we disregarded the fact that the suggestion to communicate information via email instead of meetings had already been done by many teachers over many many years, and pretended to come up with the idea all by ourselves! Don’t give me that look, peasant, I’m 3 pay grades higher than you. But we were thinking HEY, you know what would a good idea? If we gave a fancy name to this new and innovative way of meeting! So we were thinking, and thinking, and HEY, why not pretend to call it what it isn’t, and call it a VIRTUAL MEETING. I mean those fancy buttons on your keyboard are pretty cool stuff, no? They make… VIRTUAL stuff! Ok yeah so it really isn’t a MEETING, but we’re hoping we can squeeze this one past you. I hereby declare all use of the word ‘email’ banned. We’ll just add some other fancy schmuck words like ‘opportunity’ when we actually mean ‘fuckup’, ‘experiment’ when we actually mean ‘totally not thought out properly’, and ‘effective school functions’ when we actually mean ‘the same old shit you do every day anyway’. Problem solved! We made it look as if we had planned this all along, we pretended we created this newfangled mumbojumbo and gave it a neat name and best of all, we got to use big words describing it! How cool is that! I think I’ll go treat myself to another car with my pay grade which is 3 levels above yours. Suck it up! Your lordess and pwner of all Ur a$$ 3 July 2008   Pioneering the backward stagnaters Today, in a junior college in the Northwest, where I went for interviews with the PW Head and P: [After a series of irrelevant questions and snide remarks by the Head] PW Head: I don’t think you’ve immersed yourself enough into the school experience. You haven’t even done any work such as timetabling and you’re not able to appreciate how a school functions and what goes on behind the scenes. Me: [Wills all my resume job descriptions into his miniscule brain with a death stare] I didn’t realise that being on the timetabling committee entails all there is to knowing all there is about school. For one, my school only has ONE HOD and ONE teacher to help him with the timetables. There are so many aspects of teaching in school, that I can safely say that the smallest percentages of the whole staff actually get to experience a whole spectrum of jobs. Also, why do you think that what I have done so far is not relevant to getting behind the scenes? I have been doing my part, just that in your eyes, it is not equivalent to, oh, creating timetables. PW Head: Oh I didn’t say that timetabling is an important thing [mumbles mumbles changes subject] [PW Head goes on to make snarky under-the-breath comment about why I would want to switch to PW, puts himself on a perch by saying he wants to learn more, and that's why he went into management (unlike me who turned down such an offer), and asks a lot of pointless what-ifs: 'What if your P lets you go only after 6 months?' Then I can't really do anything about that right, you stupid little fuck.] On to the interview with the P. More irrelevant and rude questions, including a few about how I am non-committal about marriage in the next few years (those questions seriously kneed Professionalism in the balls and spit on his face), so i decide fuckthisshit and reply with irreverence. An exchange: P: Where will you be in 5 years? Me: Since I’m new to PW, I’ll probably want to learn more about this new area and I’ll see then where it takes me. P: [A lot of drivel about No, I must know right now what i want to do in 5 years, planning blahblah vision blah] Me: Where are you going to be in 5 years? P: I’ve always known what I was going to do, and I have been through 8 postings in my career so far. I always feel happy where I am, and this is what I have always wanted to do. Me: [Punctuates her answers with fake smiles and 'Good for you's and 'Sure's. Thinks: You still haven't answered my question.] So if you’re up for an assault on reason, a lack of professionalism and much, much shooting off the mouth without thinking, do drop by the Northwest area. Sit tight and buckle in though, it’s pretty much a sinking ship helmed by clueless, witless fools. Their loss, not mine. Knife When the Vice-President of the Student Council quite matter-of-factly told me that she wouldn’t be able to come for a meeting as she had an outing with friends, I died a little inside. When students nominated for the Combined Student Leaders Camp kept mum about not being able to come as they’re jetting off for a holiday they knew about for a long time, I took a look at the money the school had already paid for them and I died a little inside. When Secondary 3 Third Sergeants smsed me asking if they could be excused from wearing the uniform for NCC Day tomorrow as they weren’t dry yet from Friday’s training, I took a look at the calendar displaying today’s day, Monday, and I died a little inside. When I take a look at my colleague spending all her waking hours running, and rushing, and chasing, and crying and in despair because a bunch of 50 non-tie-wearing, meeting-skipping, duty-absenting councillors need to be handheld every single step of the way, and I do mean, every single step, I died a little inside. It used to be that students were my reason for staying alive, but it’s pretty hard to stay on your feet when they rip your heart out and eat it in front of you, time and time again. Today I had a bunch who kept me bright and hopeful (my SMILE mentees, i love you), but soon enough, others appear, twisting the knife inwards ever so slowly. Espana! It was a dead giveaway from the start: Germany had just 5 attempts at goal against a Turkish reserve side. They had struggled against Austria, squeezed past a suspect Portugese defence and limped against the decimated Turks. Ballack tried to muscle his way through, but hard luck bro, you’ll forever be the bridesmaid. =D We decided not to wait… . . . . . . . … and went ahead to give it a try in carrying Ili’s baby. =D For me, it was less of ‘carrying’ and more of ‘using my arm as a barrier to prevent the baby from rolling away’. Noticed the hunched, tense, anxious shoulders. Hahah. S’pore - Hadyai - S’pore, the scenic route (proudly drawn with MS paint) With two pieces of clean underwear, a copy of Mark Penn’s Microtrends, a toothbrush, my Lumix FZ7 and little else, I went to Hadyai with my girlfriend. Most people don’t take much longer than 15 hours to get there by coach (or a couple, via Thai Airways). We took about 24 hours. A. S’pore-Hadyai via the East Coast i. Singapore-JB-Pasir Mas Fuel prices on the rise? Pah. Trains are somewhat less affected, whereas we heard from a fellow vagabond traveller that a bus from JB to KL would cost RM50 now. Don’t take the train from S’pore; you’d have to pay for the tickets in Sing dollars. A 2nd Class seat on the overnight from JB to Wakaf Bahru (the station nearest Kota Bahru, the state capital of Kelantan) costs RM39 (about 16 SGD). Add a couple more dollars for sleepers (seats which can be converted to beds). We asked the ticket guy on the train for advice, and got off at a stop earlier instead, at Pasir Mas, at almost 9 in the morning. ii. Pasir Mas-Rantau Panjang (Msia-Thai border) A half-hourly bus from the town of Pasir Mas to the border town of Rantau Panjang will take 30 minutes of your time and RM2.50 of your wallet. It’s a nice air-con coach too, not a rickety skeleton as I would have expected from a small town on the East Coast. iii. Rantau Panjang-Sungai Golok (Thai-Msia border) From here it’s a simple walk across to Thailand, though we encountered an ‘ahem’ crossing (left photo below), pointed out to us by locals who thought we were… locals. Sungai Golok was a little disorienting. They speak Kelantanese Malay in addition to Thai, and accept payment in Ringgit. No wonder the Thai govt has a hard time winning the Thai South over. The border was a 3km walk from the train station, so we took a good ol’ rickshaw, and I tipped the uncle RM 3 in addition to the 7 ringgit fee (exorbitant actually, but we were probably his only customers for the day). iv. Sungai Golok-Hadyai My favourite section of the whole trip. The 1130 fast train had broken down, so we had the option of taking the 5-hour, 1220 slow train. This would cost all of 42 baht (1.70 SGD), and what an experience it was. Cross-legged on the floor, peddlers convincing you to buy quail eggs with fish sauce for 20 baht, iced tea to wash it down for 10 baht, the guy who carried his motorbike onto the carriage (!) offering his seat to tired strangers, aunties carrying plastic bags laden with sundry, dandelions fluttering in through the open windows, teens in their Sunday best jostling to sms on their handphones. Hadyai What once used to be the default transit point for tourists heading further north to Ko Samui, Krabi and elsewhere, has now turned into a quiet town on its last legs, desperately clutching at straws to relive its former glory. I first set foot in Hadyai in 2000, taking a one-hour break after a migraine-inducing 15-hour bus ride from S’pore, before taking what was to be a death-defying slalom to Krabi town at 140km/h and with 3 other screaming, shrieking 20-year old rockclimbers. That was before Krabi had turned into the tourist beach cliche it now is, before other faster, more direct transportation alternatives had opened up. One would be hard-pressed to find tourists in Hadyai, other than Malaysians on a weekend jaunt to buy local products. This suited me; there is nothing less appealing than jostling with dreadlocked, henna-ed, sarong-wearing, Lonely Planet-toting clones in the streets. It’s not so good for the town though, and I wonder how the deserted businesses and hotels can keep up much longer. Should you choose to go to (or stop over in) Hadyai, stay at least a night, and trawl the night market in town. There aren’t many places where good food can be had at great prices; we had grilled sotong and cockles with killer sauce for less than 4 SGD. B. Hadyai-S’pore via the West Coast i. Hadyai-KL (integrated Thai and Msian immigration and customs at Padang Besar) KTM overnight trains are pretty dodgy in terms of speed and smoothness, and it was this leg that my girlfriend got nauseated. Hadyai-KL costs about 500 baht (20 SGD) for the sleepers, vomiting and dizziness not included in the price. Good to bring pills which reduce motion sickness. ii. KL-JB At KL Sentral I started getting jelly legs too, so we decided to head back ASAP rather than spending the day in the city and taking the overnight train back. While my girlfriend recovered in the station I took a look around the somewhat-new station: KL Sentral’s reminiscent of Melbourne’s Southern Cross Station, with much of the hardware similar. The heartware is lacking, though. The public announcement kept imploring passengers to head to the platform, but the escalators were barricaded, and questions directed to the burly KTM staff manning the barriers were ignored. The train was already late, but there was no announcement as such, and no monitors at the waiting area informing of the delay. When we got down to the platform the train was on the wrong one, and when I asked a staff as to why the screen said ‘Hadyai’ instead of ‘JB’ or ‘Singapore’, he said that the screen was not in use. Long way to go, guys. Malaysia truly boleh. More photos here. Kaitlyn * Patience is procrastination without the anxiety. Gotta love Spooks. * Nothing happened in The Happening. Don’t watch it. Rating: 0/5 stars. Yes, this is the first time I have ever given a zero for any movie. It is that bad. The Incredible Hulk gets 3.5/5 stars, nevermind what Ong Sor Fern, that upturned-nose old hag says in Life!. * Before watching these two movies at City Square JB yesterday, I was wondering why people living anywhere remotely near Woodlands would bother spending their money watching the same movies in S’pore, when they could have crossed the Causeway and spend RM10 on each movie. 4 Sing dollars! (And RM5 before 12, OMG). I kinda got my answer in the cinema itself. Mobile phones ringing incessantly with the latest eardrum-bursting tunes (they haven’t seemed to have discovered the silent function). People giving live commentaries to each other during the movie. Popcorn and drinks all over the floor. All these happen over here too, but I have never encountered it consistently throughout a movie, and practised by numerous groups of people, not just a small bunch of dumbasses. And this was a Cathay-owned new theatre, mind you, not some Bedok Princess-styled one where old geezers watch soft-porn flicks in raincoats. You get what you give. Woes with Starhub Euro Season Pass So I stared at a black screen at 245 in the morning last night, willing it to turn into swathes of green, showing little men in red and white chasing a small ball. Frustrated, I called Starhub’s Customer Care hotline, only to discover that they Care only when it’s daylight, nevermind that their core services: cable tv, mobile plans and broadband internet, all operate round the clock. So if something goes wrong while you’re texting your best friend at 4am about the latest gay online porn while MTV Asia blares on the wall, hard luck, sucker. I shot off an email, only to see that as of 1015 this morning, there is still no reply, other than the nameless, soulless autoreply which assures you that they are looking into the matter, and will get back to me as soon as possible. I called the hotline again this morning. After 8 minutes of being on hold, I got through. So it appears that Starhub outsources its services to telemarketers, and the fucker who had called me yesterday did not actually have the means to activate my account. You see, my girlfriend had applied for it online at 9pm last night and had had her soccer activated almost immediately, whereas Mr Telemarketer had called my house in the early afternoon, and probably decided to have a shit, a shower and a shave before reporting my application in oh, whenever it feels convenient. So ok. It was Starhub’s fault that they outsourced such frontline functions to lowest-bidding inept idiots who can’t do much other than to tick off a few boxes on a clipboard, but the Customer Care guy I was now talking to wasn’t directly responsible. Still- Me: I paid for this, how could it not have been activated immediately? I missed a match last night! Guy: We have already given you a good price of $10.70…. Me: I don’t really care if it’s $50 or $5! My point is, I’ve already paid! How could you have not provided the match! Guy: (Momentary silence) I have just activated it for you. if you turn to Channel 30 now… *click* Euro 2008 Starhub subscription I don’t normally watch EPL or the other leagues for that matter, but every two years I’ll tune in to the World Cup and Euro. I had been procrastinating the pay-per-view subscription on Starhub for Euro (which starts tonight), when they actually called my house a few minutes ago. There must have been a really low take-up on the screenings, cos they offered me a $10.70 fee instead the the advertised $21.40 for non-early bird Sports Group subscribers. Sweet enough deal. The inevitable predictions for the quarterfinalists (group winners first): Group A: Portugal, Turkey Group B: Germany, Croatia Group C: Holland, France Group D: Spain, Russia Actually, my only wish is for Greece to lose all their matches by at least 3 goals each, and to never score a single goal. That would still not make up for how they made a farce of the sport at the last Euro though. Kungfu Panda …was a riot. I thought it would be a lameass Madagascar-type cartoon, but it turned out to be surprisingly entertaining. I think one can never go wrong with a kungfu cartoon; you could have all these amazing chopsocky fight sequences without the jaded overexposed-to-Matrix-type-stunts audience going ‘…yeahhh right’. It’s a cartoon after all eh. Rating; 4/5 stars! Lessons in the June holidays There has been a flurry of letters and opinions in the media on the oh-so-sudden revelation that schools were making their students come back in the June hols for extra lessons. It seemed that everybody from parents to journalists to random soundbite-spouters on the street had something to say. These people all had one thing in common: they aren’t teachers. One major voice has been missing in all this: that of the Ministry itself. But let’s get one thing straight: There isn’t much that they have to say, and even if their PR department should one day decide to fill in their public reply template with official-sounding words, it would mean nothing. As far as the June holidays are concerned, the Ministry isn’t the one pulling the strings. The principals, people. the principals. Schools don’t have PR people, ever-ready to counter the public’s perceptions. Principals don’t have to respond to Chua’s simplistic, generalised suggestion to question schools whose internal results are out of sync (she used the term out of whack, oh my, how Gen-Y-esque is she!) with the national exams, on page 49 of the papers today. All that matters, much like how the final score of the 1999 Champions League final will always favour Manyoo no matter how powerfully Munich had dominated, is that history only records the numbers. The percentage distinctions. The Mean Subject Grade. And to principals, no matter what their oft-repeated VisionMissionValues say, grades are the last stand, and gawddammit if we have to spend the holidays forcing the kids back to school so that it remains that way. What about teachers? Well, this is where teachers have got it all wrong. Ask any random teacher on why they have to conduct extra classes, and they will run the usual gamut of answers including ‘to complete syllabus’ and ‘for the weaker students to catch up’. Probe deeper, and you’ll find an answer that even their hearts whisper, that should not be spoken outrightly, that ears were never meant to hear. Teachers think that it is an unspoken rule that there should be classes. I need to qualify that what I will say is from my own experience only. There has never been any spoken, nor written rule that we should do so. It was never mentioned in any work review, nor official meetings, nor any official documents. Teachers believe that they have to, because performance is largely a matter of perception. It don’t look good if you don’t look good. Nonsense. I think teachers don’t understand that it is not any one single action or non-action that will lead to such negative perceptions. If you suck at your work, you suck in many things, and failure (!) to implement time and energy-sapping holiday lessons will not, in itself, lead to the negative perception of your work ethic. I have seen all too many times how useless and unnecessary lessons were conducted, for absolutely nothing. Tell me, how do two 1.5-hour English lessons in the holidays contribute substantially to results? For that matter, how do two lessons in any subject have a profound effect on the kids’ grades? So teachers, work hard during the term, and push your students. Hard. Should you be worried about people’s perceptions, this will certainly help to restrain them(though if this is how you function, you should probably find another job for the kids’ sake). But let’s not make the holidays a misnomer, shall we? Tue, 03 Jun 2008 23:45:24 +0000 I withdrew myself from Airborne. 2010 World Cup Qualifiers, 3rd Round - Singapore 3 Uzbekistan 7 Uzbekistan We locals are way too hard on our own team. Our defence did suck crap out of a donkey’s ass, but we forget that only teams with the Uzbeks’ calibre would have the cake, eat it, and then spit it out again to smash it all over our faces. Seven times. Uzbekistan is Asia’s 5th-ranked team, and it wasn’t surprising at all that they took 100% of our slip-ups that came their way. At times they were mesmerising. I just had to sincerely clap for them after their fourth goal. Its breathtaking simplicity and fluidity was reminiscent of the Arsenal of 2004-2005; I couldn’t help it. But then they started to drop like flies, rolling around and writhing in pain a la the Klinnsman School of Diving. One memorably disgusting incident was near the final whistle, when an Uzbek player was in agony in his own penalty box, only to get up and sprint when he realised that his teammates had lost possession and that the ref had paid no heed. Singapore Raddy’s tactics in the first half were brilliant. A word to sum up our play would be: unconventional. The Uzbeks didn’t know what to expect, and we took the game to them from the start. It would’ve been easier for Duric to miss kissing an elephant’s backside at a bus stop, but his blunder in front of the goalmouth only showcased our lack of big-match experience. Khairul Amri was probably our best lad, and I loved it that he showed them zero respect. Size was rarely a problem for our kateks, though the gorillas did muscle them off the ball a few times. Of course, our defence had chosen to stay at home to twiddle their thumbs and play Nintendo Wii instead. The fans We had the rare and glorious honour of being seated right in front of a panel of commentators with wisdom gleaned from, oh, hours of watching the EPL on tv, probably. With their very enlightened cheers of ‘Dominate the midfield! Dominate the midfiiieeellddd!’ (I didn’t realise that ‘dominating the midfield’ came from any one single action or move) and ‘How come there’s no chemistry! Where’s the chemistryyyyyy!’ , sitting there was as pleasant as having an enema on a bed of nails. I was surprised that the halftime score of 2-5 hadn’t instigated a Ten Commandments-esque exodus. The prat who kept grumbling about it being so quiet (You complain so much, you also never cheer or anything what!) and the non-singing of the national anthem were sore points for me, but you gotta give it to the fans for staying… till it was 7 goals for the other side, at least. Wings here I come 8 pullups 30 pushups in 40 seconds 30 situps in 45 seconds 2.4km in 11:37 All in army long no. 4 and boots, and at 9am in the blistering hot sun at Hendon Camp. Not bad for an overweight, out-of-shape secondary school Chemistry teacher eh. =D Photo update Saigon/Dalat in March Changi/Ubin in May Southern Ridges/Sentosa It’s 1.54am on a school night and I just finished my EPMS, an Extraneous Piece of Miserable Shit created by the pencilpushers in HQ to make our lives miserable. Okay it’s actually the Enhanced Performance Management System, which is not so much a ’system’ as a fancy MS Word table with neat rows and columns we’re supposed to pencil in with pomp and circumstance to make ourselves look good. I read Fiona’s entry about the encounter she had with jackasses early in her career, and it reminded me of similar experiences I had when i first started out. Back then I was easily intimidated by Rangen and Chin. They were, after all, much bigger in stature (physically and hierarchically) and I was an FNG still feeling my way around. I remember how Rangen brushed me off when I approached him about K 2 years back. He had reported K to the police for vandalism, but hadn’t informed me of all people, K’s own form teacher. His mother was coming to school to talk to the P, and I had no fuckidea what had happened. With a magical wave of his hand, Rangen told me that it was basically my problem now. It was a little more dramatic than that actually, but the drama in the P’s office was even more. I was shaken by that event (note that I still haven’t really revealed much), and I don’t know if my skin had grown thicker in the months since then, or if I give less of a flying fuck about what other people think now, but the epiphanous moment probably came when Chin screamed at me through the walkie headset during the Anniversary Dinner last year, barking at me to get the councillors onto the stage at the very last minute to sing the school song. Problem is, the councillors had already been sent home; their duties had ended. And he knew that. So of course, I screamed back at him. Within earshot was, oh, everyone else, quite likely. I probably could’ve handled that with a little more class, but for the past year or so, I guess it’s been less about what other people think, and more about me doing my job, fuckall if pompous HODs twitch an eyebrow or two. Stupidz Fragranceprince (the guy who got arrested for putting up racist remarks on his blog) is really a stupid himbo with a vacuum between his ears. He’s a Sungei Road pirated version of xiaxue, another blogger with borderline bigoted notions, both resorting to histrionics, loud colours and bad grammar to either get readership or turn your eyes into porridge, whichever gets you off more. For some voyeuristic reason I managed to get to the cache of fragranceprince’s blog (just google his blogspot and click on cached), and read the infamous post which got him into the good ol’ ball and chain. He basically rants against Malays, that fucker, calling them satay sellers (or something to that effect) and challenging all Malays to mount a verbal argument against him. I’ll pass on the message at our next big meeting. The rest of his posts are basically vanity shots, but there’s something about him that makes me think he’s a little… fey. Nevertheless, stupid is stupid is stupid, and no amount of apology or retraction or i-didn’t-really-mean-it-in-that-way-s could repair his poor, demented soul. Southern Ridges I have no idea how Matt, Bah and Pul managed to complete the 9km walk in 3 hours complete with camwhoring, but I suspect they must’ve tied themselves to a kite and skipped all the boring parts (read: NUS). My legs turned to jelly right around Alexandra Arch, which is where the hordes of prams and grandparents came crawling out of the woodwork. Hort Park (they really couldn’t think of a more imaginative name, could they) was a pleasant surprise, and the tall glass windows  of the greenhouses gave a non-tropical feel to the setting. On the way back from baking ourselves at Sentosa we encountered three angmoh cheesedicks who decided to hop over the barriers and cut the queue for the Sentosa Express. My response was instinctive and vitriolic, as I always am with regards to stupid people, and they must’ve been slightly startled at the sight of someone two heads shorter suddenly barking at them. The phrase ‘typical Singaporean’ is a fallacy, kids; stupidity actually does cut across race, language, religion and nationality. Even in the far flung deserts of Morocco have I witnessed kiasuism and total disregard for others. We are too hard on ourselves, sometimes. Photos when I get home. Not an in-depth review of Ayat Ayat Cinta For one that is, do visit my girlfriend’s blog. =D Here, it suffices to say that Rianti Cartwright is delicious enough to be eaten alive. Mmm. Rating: 4/5 stars! (For Rianti) Delirious I’m in school now, blogging on company time. Hoho. The high fever I had last night has subsided, but I’m not fully well. There’s still a general feeling of.. unwellness. My body’s stil aching, my head feels congested and I haven’t attained my normal lucidity. I had to sit down in the canteen during assembly just now, and Janice was nice enough to come over and volunteer to take over my invigilation duties. I don’t know what I was thinking; standing and walking around the class for any period of time would have been a major disaster. Last evening as I tossed and turned in bed with a temperature, I started hallucinating about bikes. That sounds normal enough, but the scenario was pretty warped. My students were with me, and they were tasked to untangle a bike from wires and ropes that were attached to it. In my mind’s eye they could not do it properly, and I berated them over and over till they got the highest marks possibly by untangling the bike in the shortest time possible. Say whuttttt. All this time I was delirious, and hot, and hyperventilating, kinda. Not a nice place to be in. . When I was in Sec 3, there was an assembly debate matchup between the school team and the English department. The motion was ‘Better never than late’ (yeah you read that right) and the students, egged on by a partisan crowd, resoundingly crushed the teachers who made up the opposition team. ‘Twas all in the name of fun, and the teachers accepted defeat with grace. I miss that. I could never claim to being as eloquent and purposeful in speech as the school debaters had been, but in the course of the last three years, I have lost some edge in forming coherent arguments. You know how the million and one scientific studies advise us to practise brain puzzles in our silver-haired years to delay the onset of dementia? Likewise, the lack of intelligent discourse in my working life ain’t exactly making me the sharpest tool in the shed. You could ask me to draw the different structural isomers of pentene, list all five equations outlining the extraction of pure iron in a blast furnace, or calculate the percentage yield of sodium chloride given the relevant values. I can do all that, and I can teach all that. The thing is, I don’t want to be good in only that. A colleague of mine left my school last year. He had wanted to pursue a PhD overseas. Applying for a scholarship from the Ministry, rejection letter after rejection letter ensued, all without reasons given. It didn’t help that that old geezer Dolly didn’t support his cause, but that’s another story. With a Fuckit!fuckthatshit! and without a scholarship nor an approved leave of absence, my colleague then threw in his letter of resignation. You see, he believed that further education was a step forward in self-improvement, never mind what the labcoats at MOE said, never mind that he eventually had to quit his job of five years. I don’t really see any self-improvement after being in this job for almost three years. Sure I can teach Chemistry, but being in a work environment where my colleagues shirk and scurry away at the slightest whispers of say, political discussion over laksa in the canteen is seriously retarding, nay, reversing my mental growth. I shiver at the thought of growing old knowing only alkanes and catalytic cracking and displacement reactions. To my boys and girls, though none of you would ever read this: I think it’s befitting that I’ve watched you guys grow up from when you were in Sec 1. We made this journey together, and I promise that regardless of my leaving and my feelings about the school, I will never, ever abandon you. I owe you that much, and I will give my all and more to you guys. It’s been a tough few months, and it’s gonna get rockier. Hang in there my brave ones, keep your chins up, and it’ll be all fine. =) helios I love the sun. It’s warm, it’s humid, it’s an excruciating scorching  sensation, but I’d take it over gloomy murky skies any day. I love it that every time I go out with Kaitlyn these days, I get a mobile suntan, and I have to squint as I lug exam papers to and from class. I would rather squint than sidestep puddles of mudd. I snark at people who complain when it’s raining, and then complain when it’s hot, and then complain a bit more. It’s exam season, and the only thing bad about it is the mind-numbing exercise of walking up and down the aisles, counting watches, counting hairbands, appearing vigilant, and counting the seconds down. Even distributing bits of string for tying paper together becomes cathartic; it’s like wishing for a quick death while undergoing torture. Torture by tickling, that is. I’ve learnt to let go a little. I’ve learnt that their future is in their hands, and no amount of mollycoddling and handholding will pull them up from an F9 to a B3, or a B3 to an A1, for that matter. I’ve done what I can, and they would have to last the home stretch on their own terms. Sun, 27 Apr 2008 10:14:02 +0000 The Five Love Languages My primary love language is probablyQuality Timewith a secondary love language beingActs of Service. Complete set of results Quality Time: 8 Acts of Service: 7 Physical Touch: 6 Words of Affirmation: 6 Receiving Gifts: 3 Information Unhappiness in relationships, according to Dr. Gary Chapman, is often due to the fact that we speak different love languages. Sometimes we don’t understand our partner’s requirements, or even our own. We all have a “love tank” that needs to be filled in order for us to express love to others, but there are different means by which our tank can be filled, and there are different ways that we can express love to others. Take the quiz Wed, 23 Apr 2008 15:51:28 +0000 I was seething when I was watching the start of this, but keep in mind that the guy behind the counter is acting and part of the charade. Personally, I like the guy was stormed off with a Go Fuck Yourself the best hahaha. A fuckup is a fuckup is a fuckup Watching LHL on tv tonight, desperately trying to reassure everyone that hey, let’s not worry about who takes the blame, the most important thing is getting down to the root of the problem, many other countries have come to admire our ISD and we owe many many to the people who have worked hard there. That you shouldn’t mind that when it comes to ministerial pay, we tie it to the corporate sector, but when it comes to ministerial fuckups, we don’t follow the corporate sector, cos hey, changing of CEOs in the private sector isn’t always a good thing. Watching him building a brick wall around himself, singing the same old tune. Hurry hurry 2011. Q: How many apples in the basket? A: There are 2 pears. MP Inderjit Singh: Who checks the ISD? Home Affairs Minister WKS: There will be checks not just by the ISD, but by the Prisons Department blahblahblblah snoreee….zzZZzzzz A while later… WKS: Let’s make a mockery of the opposition MP’s question even though it’s totally valid and he was addressing the concerns of the man on the street! In the same breath, we can totally ignore the question too! How cool is that! All you grammar nazis pay attention ‘Attaching a piece of zinc to iron helps to slow down rusting.’ My (grammatically-challenged-but-blissfully-unaware) P insists that this is not even a sentence. Choose one of the options below and shade in your answers on the attached Optical Test Answer Sheet using a soft 2B pencil. a) mI dUnnoE, mi TypEs lYk dIs anIwAy hiAkzZz. b) Subject-verb inversion, that sentence is. Speaking like Yoda, I am not. c) Chemistry is evil and should be banished from all known written texts. d) I can has cheezburger? Staple your answer sheets together, write your name and hand it in. post-post-traumatic stress Post-running endorphins are delicious. I re-read my entry from yesterday, and though I was a little startled at witnessing the product of my emotional state when banging that out on the keyboard, nothing has changed. I have an expiry date now. But it seems like ages before December 31st, doesn’t it? It’s like turning the pages of an endless play (King Lear! heheh), not knowing when the final act will pounce on you. Ah but to the teachers-to-be, I apologise for the all-round moroseness. I hope I haven’t scared you off the profession. It wasn’t this bad all the way. It only started about a year or so ago. Snark. Of the 30000 teachers or so, only about 700 leave every year. Which makes for some really remarkable statistics I think; an attrition rate of only 2%, an achievement in any field. * At Gerald’s wedding on Saturday, seated at the table next to mine were 10 middle-aged ladies. Dressed in cardigans and shawls, they had comfortable banter amongst themselves, occasionally slipping past the odd naughty joke about the bride and groom; polite laughter would then ensue. Horrifyingly, though I had never met them, I immediately identified them as his colleagues. Teachers. They had that sense of stifled resignation, that whiff of simmering discontent, that je ne sais quois that they unwittingly wore as badges to enable me to pick them out instantly. Some of the other 98% live their lives in quiet desperation. Albatross As I was running yesterday, it hit me. I don’t give a shit about chemistry. Or rather, I stopped giving a shit. I need to be doing something else, to be somewhere else. And I told this much to my HOD just now, when she asked me what my plans were. She had been getting the vibes that I have been discontented, and she wanted to know for sure. I told her about how I felt that I had been stagnating, about how my contributions had been largely unrecognised to their fullest, about how I had been doing a HOD’s job but not getting anything back, about how I was sick of giving, giving and giving. About how I felt the new P was an extreme micro-manager, about how I felt that I wasn’t growing as a person, about how I’m signing up for June for me and only me for once, about how I have been given the same shit year in year out. And how I was going to leave Bartley end of this year, one way or another. You know what she said? She said I’m one of the best teachers around, and it would be a loss to the school if I left. She said I should try other schools, and not leave teaching, or to come back to teaching if I do leave, cos it would be great for everyone. She said she was disappointed, but she had been feeling my dissatisfaction for awhile. She said she understood, and that was all I really needed to hear. Thanks for your affirmations, SS. They’re not gonna change my mind, but I do feel less despair now. Fuck you kyla You came into my life, tantalising me with your stripes and sound. Then one day, you coughed and spluttered and ran into the ground. For the past 4 months, to you I was gagged and bound, Till today I finally junked you, when to my senses, I finally came around. Rust in peace, bitch.