Term 3 Blog Comments

Comment on Lee Liak Ghee’s Blog (10), “Should Leaders be judged by their Private Lives”, Aug 7

“In my opinion, everyone is judged by everything they do. I feel that it is perfectly reasonable for a leader to be judged by their private lives. Some may say that he is good at leading, but how would you like a man who cheated on his wife to be your president? A person's morals directly influence his actions. If a leader were to have a sex scandal, it would reflect on how bad his morals are, and thus he is not fit to be a leader. In any case, I also agree with your point about how normal people are judged by their private lives. If your relative or friend did something morally wrong, would you still be his friend or even want to relate to him/her?”

- August 9, 2011

Comment on Jonathan Ng’s Blog (17), “eBooks vs Traditional Books”, July 25

“Personally, I would prefer real books to eBooks. Firstly, as you said, the eBook lacks the physical attributes that normal books have. I like the feeling of the paper against my palm when I read a book, because it feels more real compared to an eBook. Besides, I'm not the kind who would regularly read, but the type that will read when I'm exceptionally free or when I want to, so I guess the eBook isn't for me. Despite that, I agree that the eBook is a really convenient device. It takes a lot of trouble for me to find a book at a library, but with an eBook, the book I am finding would probably only be a feel clicks/taps away. Also, books at the library aren't always in good condition.”

- August 9, 2011

Comment on Kervin Tay’s Blog (23), “This is Believe --- What are your beliefs?”, Aug 8

“I feel that it is really good that you know how to work smart! I know that you have been working really hard but sometimes you just don't get the results that you want. These methods that you listed above are really helpful! Sometimes, practising and practising and practising isn't going to solve the root of the problem. The point about practising is so that you can allow that thought to flow into your mind faster (to think faster). However, if you have no idea on what you are practising on, it is basically useless to practise! Also, I agree that there are different ways to study. Personally for me, I HAVE to create notes. Looking over all my worksheets wouldn't help because I really need a clear view and my worksheets are just a jumbled-up mess of stuff. The point about me creating notes is to organise things in a coherent manner so that I can study better. Find you own way of studying and start excelling by the end of the year!”

- August 9, 2011

Comment on Gaw Ban Siang’s Blog (06), “Justice – Retributive or Rehabilitative”, Aug 7

“In my opinion, I feel that sometimes capital punishment is rehabilitative justice as well. By getting rid of the assailant for life, the victim will be at ease (instead of thinking that the person who once tried to murder you is still living and coming after you). Although some may argue that life imprisonment would be enough, the victim will still not be at ease. How many prisoners break out of the prison each year? Mas Selamat is a good example of it. I feel that in all cases, rehabilitative justice is the better option. Vengeance will only lead to more hate, and more hate leads to more wrong-doings, which makes everything chaotic. However, I do not agree that everyone can turn over a new leaf. Sometimes, the person has already sunk too deep and cannot get out. Also, not every victim is able to forgive and forget. Physical scars may be lost, but emotional scars last for as long as a lifetime, and this is why some people choose retributive justice.”

- August 9, 2011

Comment on Wei Kiat’s Blog (12), “Plagiarism #10”, Aug 7

“I feel that it is pretty hard to define plagiarising. What if you were to be finding an answer to a question and, Bam!, there goes you find everything that you need in there. How would you try to get the information without plagiarising then? Does switching words (but essentially the meaning is still the same) count as plagiarising? I guess it means that you have to add in your own opinion as well for it to count as not being a plagiarised work. For example, for many of my blog posts, I actually get the idea and the story from the Monday's newspaper article, IN. However, I add my own reflections and opinions to the issue.”

- August 9, 2011

Comment on Gaw Ban Siang's Blog (06), "The choice I made", Aug 1

"Ban Siang, it's great to know that you love your CCA. I am from Chinese Orchestra, and I find that my CCA suits me a lot as I'm not very active. I feel that how much a person likes his CCA depends on his interest and passion for this certain CCA. Chester's passion for drama faded soon after he joined his CCA. I feel that choosing a CCA should not be a hasty decision. One must clearly know what he wants to choose the appropriate CCA for oneself. For me, I already knew Sports and Uniformed Groups were out of question. As such, I picked my CCA from performing arts."

- August 13, 2011

Comment on Gaw Ban Siang's Blog (06), "Why?", Aug 15

"Actually, I really agree with you on this point. Fortunately for me, my parents are not really the sort to focus on my grades, and instead they focus on my overall well-being. I feel that parents should not get so worked up about grades. The most important thing about learning is about the progress and the process. The way I see pupils ask so many questions during lessons, I can't help but think again that it is just because of the OP and not because they want to learn. And no this is totally NOTNOTNOT insane. Or delusional. It's critical thinking :)"

- August 16, 2011

Comment on Gaw Ban Siang's Blog (06), "The Future School: What's the point?", 25 July

"I agree with you to some extent. There are flaws in this system. For example, teachers who have no need for students to use their laptops during Online Lessons are forced to come up with something for them to do during the Online Lesson, obviously, on their laptops. This only brings more trouble. For my Chinese teacher, she really dislikes people handing up soft copies of assignments to her. This is because some students make use of technical issues to hand up their work late. Emails are sent by students, yet not received by teachers. I have seen students lie to teachers about handing up their work online when they did not. This are examples of unnecessary use of the laptops. However, this system is not entirely useless. The use of Geogebra software has enabled me to understand math concepts better. For Science, it would be convenient if I could do some searching on the Internet anytime."

-August 9, 2011

Comment on Lu Wen Hao's Blog (14), "Symbolism of the Three Caskets", 26 July

I feel that it is good that you have done your background research, and it has enlightened me about some points in Merchant of Venice that I didn't know before. However, I would like to point out that you made an assumption. How would you know if the Princes of Morocco and Arragon are Christians? Despite that, I feel that it is an interesting idea that you have about how the caskets represent the three different characters. Awesome :)"

- August 10, 2011

Comment on Loh Wei Kiat's Blog (12), "Euthanasia", 1 Aug

I believe that the doctors actually do have to check if a patient is in the right state of mind to decide whether he wants to have euthanasia carried out on him. However, I disagree with euthanasia to some extent too, as the patient can also use his remaining time left to try to reflect on his past years living. There is always something you can do no matter what state you are in."

- August 16, 2011

Poetry Analysis - Walking Away

Walking Away

It is eighteen years ago, almost to the day –

A sunny day with leaves just turning,

The touch-lines new-ruled – since I watched you play

Your first game of football, then, like a satellite

Wrenched from its orbit, go drifting away

Behind a scatter of boys. I can see

You walking away from me towards the school

With the pathos of a half-fledged thing set free

Into a wilderness, the gait of one

Who finds no path where the path should be.

That hesitant figure, eddying away

Like a winged seed loosened from its parent stem,

Has something I never quite grasp to convey

About nature’s give-and-take – the small, the scorching

Ordeals which fire one’s irresolute clay.

I have had worse partings, but none that so

Gnaws at my mind still. Perhaps it is roughly

Saying what God alone could perfectly show –

How selfhood begins with a walking away,

And love is proved in the letting go.

This poem describes the sadness of a child leaving his parent. This is actually part of growing up, something that is inevitable for every child, like me.

This poem, however, focuses more on the sadness of the father. When reading it, I can put myself in the shoes of my parents, and understand the sadness that I have not experienced myself.

Poem Analysis

Language –

• Usage of enjambment
• Evokes a sense of lack of control in persona
• This allows the sentences to be stretched longer to fit in more descriptions as well
• Rhyme scheme A,B,A,C,A
• The rhyming goes like this: start, middle, end. This allows the rhyming to balance out through the poem.
• Flashback
• Evokes a sense of nostalgia in the reader, making the reader look back when they first left their child at school
• Repetition
• “walking away” is repeated twice in the poem.
• The first “walking away” is a physical movement, the parent leaving the child for the first time
• The second “walking away” is a mental/emotional one.
• “walking away” is thus both literal and metaphorical

• Metaphor/simile
• “like a satellite, wrenched from orbit”
• The child is compared to a “satellite”, “wrenched from orbit”, meaning the child has been forcefully taken from his parent
• “a half-fledged thing set free”
• The child is compared to the “half-fledged thing”, a young bird, leaving its parents, just as the child is leaving his father
• “Like a winged seed loosened from its parent stem”
• The child is compared to a “winged seed”, which is slowly drifts away as it loosens from its parent stem (the child leaves the father)
• NOTE: As the poem goes on, the usage of metaphor/simile to describe the child leaving the father slowly becomes less strong. “wrenched” à “set free” (fly away) à “loosened”
• Notice that the word used at the start, “wrenched”, is more forceful than the one used towards the end, “loosened”
• This shows that the father’s emotions slowly calm down after a while.
• “the scorching ordeals which fires one’s irresolute clay”
• Ordeals faced in life is compared to a kiln, while the child’s mind is compared to clay, which is normally soft and mouldable when unfired, but solid after firing in a kiln.
• Usage of onomatopoeia
• “gnaws at my mind still” This enhances descriptions because the reader can almost “hear” the sound of it gnawing.

Imagery –

• Metaphor
• With the various metaphors, there are a few images seen that can be compared to a child leaving his parent.
• Flashback
• The flashback eighteen years back creates an image of nostalgia (as if looking at a sepia/black and white photograph).

Poetry Analysis - Three or So

Three or So

Is that child in the snapshot me?

That little girl in the woollen dress

By a broken door in a tiny yard

She’s shy and laughing and ready to run

And shielding her eyes from the morning sun

I’ve forgotten the dress, the colour of it

I’ve forgotten who took the photograph

I’ve forgotten the little girl, three or so

She’s someone else now, to be wondered at

With my mother’s eyes and my own child’s hair

And my brother’s smile, but the child who’s there –

The real soul of her – fled long ago

To the alley-way where she mustn’t go

Through the broken door in that tiny yard

Rough men on motorbikes, not to be looked at

Scrawny cats scratching, not to be touched

Down to the railway line, never to go there

Nor up to the road where the traffic rushed

Stay close in the yard with the sun in your eyes

Come and be still for your photograph

I hear now the drones of those bikes

And the loud dark voices of men

I can hear the scream and shush of the train

And the whooshing of the traffic on the road

But the summer buzz in that tiny yard

And the child who laughed with her best dress on

And the voice that told her t stand in the sun

And the click that pressed the shutter down

Have gone

As if they had never been

This poem shows childhood memories. However, instead of the light and happy mood like “Snapshotland”, this is an adult looking back in her happy memories and it has a sad mood. In the poem, it is stated that she has forgotten her child self. The poem has a nostalgic feeling, causing one to look back into his or her childhood.

Poem Analysis

Language –

• Usage of enjambment
• Helps evoke a sense of lack of control of the persona.
• “Stretches” the sentence, creating a feeling of nostalgia, as if one is looking back to his own past.
• Rhyme scheme is totally random
• Again, helps evoke a sense of lack of control of the persona.
• Repetition
• “I’ve forgotten the dress, the colour of it, I’ve forgotten who took the photograph, I’ve forgotten the little girl, three or so”
• The repetition of the word “forgotten” emphasizes the feeling of sadness and nostalgia.
• “shy and laughing and ready to run” This repetition
• Strong emphasis
• Instead of just saying “I’ve forgotten the colour of the dress”, the poem says “I’ve forgotten the dress, the colour of it”. This effectively creates emphasis on the sentence itself. This technique is used on other sentences as well.

Imagery –

• Detailed descriptions
• The image created by the poet is very clear because the description is very detailed.
• This is probably to show how the persona actually remembers her childhood clearly. A few examples are shown below.
• Instead of just saying dress, the poet says “woollen dress”
• Instead of saying door, the poet says “broken door”

• Instead of yard, the poet says “tiny yard”
• Sound
• The usage of onomatopoeia creates a stronger image, as if the reader is hearing the sound as well.
• “summer buzz”

• “click that press the shutter down”
• “shush of the train”
• “whooshing of the traffic”
• “drone of those bikes”

Home Room system - Pros and Cons

Every hour, one can hear murmurs and footsteps. Students carrying their school bags, files in hand, hurrying up and down the staircase. This scenario is being played out day after day in several secondary schools and even primary schools. This is the home room system. The teachers remain in the classrooms and students move from class to class to attend different lessons. In the Gifted Education Programme that I was in when I was in primary school we also practised such a system. I will now talk about the pros and cons of such a system.

Pros:

• Student can adopt the mindset that they are "coming to learn" and not that "the teacher is coming to teach us". This gives them a desire to learn.
• Teachers can set up the home room in preparation from lessons. This saves trouble for the teacher and also provides a conducive working environment (posters and noticeboards are only filled with stuff from the particular subject).
• Students are able move around after lesson, counting in as a short break from lessons, to prevent them from getting restless during lessons.

Cons:

• Troublesome for students to move from class to class.
• As I have observed in HCI, some students prefer to stick to their own table as they keep many of their worksheets and textbooks under their own table. Shifting class to class every hour would be very troublesome them.
• Also, students have to lug their heavy bags along, which is tiring.
• Space in school is limited. Small schools are not able to implement such a system.

From these, I have reached a conclusion that the home room system is a good idea. My own experience as a student has allowed me to reach such a conclusion. On Wednesdays, Conversational Malay, Chinese and Language Arts lessons are all carried out from 9:30 am to 12:30 pm. 3 hours of work without any breaks makes me feel very tired and lethargic and I feel that it would help if we moved a little. For example, when we are told to go to the Space for AAT lesson, I would feel more energetic and awake after talking a short while to walk there. As such, I can concentrate better. Breaks in between also allows us to clear out minds and prepare for the next lesson.

Tuition - good only if you want it

Tuition is only good if you really want to learn. Nothing can stop a passionate heart. Currently, I only have tuition in one subject, which is Chinese, one of my worse scoring subjects. This is fairly different from most of my other classmates, who have about 3 tuitions to attend each week. In my tuition class, I realised that some of the students in the tuition class do not really pay any attention.

When told to write a composition, they would only write the minimum number of pages (that's how they count it in the tuition) required. To meet the requirement, they would have a lot of paragraphs and leave a few lines after each paragraphs. It was then I realised that they only attend tuition classes to meet parents' expectations.

Is tuition really helpful? By attending more tuition classes, can a student excel in his/her studies automatically? There is a Chinese saying “耳到，眼到，心不到”, which roughly means that despite having your physical body here, you are actually not paying attention (your mind is elsewhere). This behaviour can be found in many students who are forced by their parents to attend tuition classes.

In my opinion, this does not apply to tuition only. If forced to do assessment books/exercises by their parents, children will not improve because they are not putting it the effort (due to their reluctance). The child himself must have a desire to learn and to improve for him to excel.

Here's where the problem comes in. What if the child is unable to focus and give priority to his studies? Even with failing grades, he or she still has no desire to learn. What can he/she do? This is a question that I am still unable to answer for myself. Comment please!

Home schooling - Pros and Cons

Some teens do not attend school, yet they still get an all rounded education. In this blog post, we'll be finding out what their lives are like.

Most parents of home-schoolers want their children to be free of the national school system because they think that it is too stressful and grades-driven. They also prefer their child's education to have a greater emphasis on family and moral values. However, home schooling also has its disadvantages.

Pros:

• The best teachers are parents. Parents can guide their children instead of having the child turn to their peers to solve problems, which sometimes result in trouble.
• Parents are also able to give their full attention to the child, while a teacher has to teach more than 20 pupils at once.
• Not exposed to negative influences in school (e.g. vulgarities)
• Flexible time schedule

Cons:

• No Edusave money
• Students home schooled at secondary level get no student concession for public transport.
• Some experts say that home schooling potentially limits the teen's opportunities for socialisation.

Extracts from IN article - Matthew Lim, 13, aspires to be a American Olympic gold medallist. Unlike other teen swimmers of his age group, who juggles the tough training tuition and homework, Matthew balances between both swimming and studies. Matthew is a home-schooled child, and thus has a more flexible time table to allow him to have more time to swim. Studies take up four hours each day from Monday to Friday, leaving him with plenty of time to pursue his hobbies and of course, swim.

In my opinion, home schooling is good for different children. For a child who would like to pursue academic qualifications, I believe going for the national school system is a good choice. In a case like Matthew's, he aspires to be the next Michael Phelps, as such, he will need a more flexible schedule and thus home schooling is more suited for him.

Debate on embryonic stem cell research

I believe that embryonic stem cell research is sustainable.

I will start with some background information. Embryonic stem cells are stem cells derived from the inner cell mass of the blastocyst, an early-stage embryo. Human embryos reach the blastocyst stage 4–5 days post fertilization, at which time they consist of 50–150 cells. Isolating the embryoblast or inner cell mass (ICM) results in destruction of the fertilized human embryo, which raises ethical issues.

Most may be thinking that it is cruel to end a life like that just for experimental research. However, we must think, when does life actually start? Does the embryo know what is happening? Unlike abortion which is usually done much later during pregnancy, the embryo of 4-5 days old has barely developed any of its sensory organs. Besides, embryos are cultivated by in vitro culture, meaning they aren’t even placed in a parent’s womb, and it has been proven. “If the pre implantation embryo is left or maintained outside the uterus, it cannot develop into a human being.” Also, More than a third of zygotes do not implant after conception. Thus, far more embryos are lost due to chance than are proposed to be used for embryonic stem cell research or treatments.

Also, when harvesting the stem cells, consent from the involved parties is required. If all parties agree to it, why not? It is for the greater good of everyone. The stem cells can be used for research to cure people who are in need of these cells, people who are already on the verge of dying.

ES cell therapies have been proposed for regenerative medicine and tissue replacement after injury or disease due to its special property of being able to replicate infinitely. Diseases that could potentially be treated by these stem cells include a number of blood and immune-system related genetic diseases, cancers, and disorders; juvenile diabetes; Parkinson's; blindness and spinal cord injuries.

With all the above reasons, I believe that embryonic stem cell research is sustainable.

In this debate...

I learnt about the Lincoln-Douglas Format.

1. The Affirmative (almost always) reads a pre-written case

2. The Negative asks the Affirmative questions.

3. The Negative (almost always) reads a pre-written case and (almost always) moves on to address the Affirmative's case.

4. The Affirmative asks the Negative questions.

5. The Affirmative addresses both his/her opponent's case and his/her own. This speech is considered by many debaters to be the most difficult.

6. The Negative addresses the arguments of the previous speech and summarizes the round for the judge.

7. The Affirmative addresses the arguments of the previous speech and summarizes the round for the judge.