Wee Shu Min could have been my student

If Shu Min were in JC1 this year, I might be teaching her in 2007. What would I do right now if I were in her form teacher's shoes? (It's quite likely that her form teacher taught me as well.)

Probably not much in the way of moralising. (Right, that's all the evidence you need to lump me in the category of elitist insensitive government scholar types!) The principal and assorted counsellors will already have done the moralising, and I'm not very good at it. I don't agree with what she wrote, of course, either in form or content, but she doesn't need me to tell her why she's offended a lot of people. Instead, as per what I said earlier, I'd encourage her to continue blogging -- with capital letters this time, and perhaps after her A-Levels. Illegitimi non carborundum and all that.

Nor do I even believe that teachers are in the business of teaching ethics. They're responsible for teaching History, Literature, Physics, Mathematics, and other subjects which can be taught; the inculcation of virtues, however praiseworthy they may be, can only be done indirectly, through these subjects. Ethics must be seen to be believed, as Jacques Barzun once wrote.

Update (2 November 2006): Shu Min's Civics Tutor did in fact teach me, as I found out on Saturday night.
Posted by kungfuzi at 2:43 am | 0 comments

  Hypocrisy, Singapore-style

When I blogged earlier about the need for more civility, decency, and thoughtfulness in the Singaporean blogosphere (heck, in the blogosphere in general), I wasn't just referring to Wee Shu Min. I also meant people who do this. Seriously folks. She may have been crass and insensitive, but digging up pictures of her in a swimsuit (even if they are already online) and making lewd remarks about them is not any better.
Posted by kungfuzi at 2:24 am | 0 comments

  I hate people *

Yawning Bread comments on this remarkable letter in the ST Forum by one George Lim. Several years ago, the same person wrote to the Forum complaining about gays in the civil service. I shot back with this response.

Is this guy for real? Or some MHA operative who's paid to write drivel that corroborates the government's characterisation of Singapore society as "conservative"?

* The immortal refrain of an alum on my fraternity's mailing list, in response to incidences of extreme human depravity, such as this story about traditional healers in Zimbabwe advising HIV-positive men to cure themselves by having sex with virgins.
Posted by kungfuzi at 8:56 pm | 0 comments

  Write for your life

As you can tell from this, this, and this post, I like talking about my fellow alumni. So here's a story about a young female blogger from RJC, where I spent two years of my life and hope to return to next year as a History teacher.

Oops.

I'm not going to comment extensively on the substance of her remarks -- plenty have already. I do think it unfortunate, though, that she's taken down her blog, whether voluntarily, or because someone told her to. The Singaporean blogosphere needs intelligent people like her. It needs civility, decency, and thoughtfulness, as well, of course, but these can be acquired in time, and with more, not less writing.

Writing, you see, as I've found out in the past six years, where I've done more of it than at any other time in my life, can change the way you think. When properly supplemented by reading, it forces you to order the insides of your brain for public scrutiny (I was going to say "public consumption," but that brought to mind zombies); you don't truly know something until you've fleshed (zombies!) it out in words, words, words. How many times have you started writing an essay with a particular end in mine only to find yourself midway through that you've strayed from the path and ended up in woods lovely, dark, and deep? Writing, to borrow from the vocabulary of American progressive thought, is an agent for change. My co-blogger at Dartobserver, for instance, has moved from the center-right of American politics to the center-left, thanks in no small way to blogging and writing (and reading, of course).
Posted by kungfuzi at 1:08 pm | 0 comments

  I'm on a roll

Why, after nearly a month's hiatus, this sudden deluge of posts, one after the other in such quick succession? One explanation is that there is no school tomorrow and no assignments due until Friday (see below). Another is that I'm not playing Oblivion or reading Shakespeare's English Kings (which I confess not to have read when assigned to do so by the man who wrote the book). But the most important reason's that I happen to have spent some time before this blogging spree writing a formal paper. In other words, I've warmed up sufficiently -- it was quite an intense session -- and am now, so to speak, running at a nice pace. I ought to switch back to that paper soon though. Like immediately after I type these words.
Posted by kungfuzi at 1:39 am | 0 comments

  Another thought for the day!

Since we're talking about History, I thought I'd post this piece of light verse. It's found on p. 130 of David Hackett Fischer's invaluable work, Historians' Fallacies, but it's not clear who penned it. Probably him.

Historians, rather like primitive moles,
Live purposeless lives in particular holes,
Which they dig with their noses, or else with their toeses
(A few have invented small shovels and hoeses).
They're burrowing blindly in Byzantine tunnels
Constructed like sinous serpentine funnels;
They're burrowing busily, back to the past:
A steady regression to nowhere -- fast.

Brilliant. Although, to be fair, not applicable to all -- just most -- historians working today.
Posted by kungfuzi at 1:18 am | 0 comments

  Les Belles Lettres

Readers of Dartobserver (why do I even assume that anyone's actually reading this?) will know that I'm a huge fan of Arts & Letters Daily, which sizzles and hums with more intelligence than most of the Internet put together. Today, for instance, you'll find a link to this Slate article, which talks about an intriguing research paper on European colonisation and economic growth by two Dartmouth economists. And if you scroll all the way down to the bottom of the page, you'll find on the left-hand column links to some truly seminal essays (a list which I wish the editors would update more often), including Orwell on the English language, Fukuyama on the End of History, and Andrew Delbanco on the decline of literary criticism (I'm not providing the links; explore the page and find them yourself!). I actually cited the Delbanco essay in my very first post on Dartobserver, more than four years ago.
Posted by kungfuzi at 12:54 am | 0 comments

  Thought for the Day

For shorter quotations such as these, even if they can be obtained electronically, I usually take the effort to type them out; sometimes, I even write them down on note cards. I find that doing so helps me get a feel for the author's diction and syntax that I don't get from simply cutting and pasting the quotation.

The historians play right into my court. They are pleasant and delightful; and at the same time Man in general whom I seek to know appears in them more alive and more entire than in any other sort of writing, showing the true diversity of his inward qualities, both wholesale and retail, the variety of ways in which he is put together and the events which menace him.

From Michel de Montaigne, On Books (trans. M. A. Screech).
Posted by kungfuzi at 12:42 am | 0 comments

  Apologies - and a quick comment

Sorry, I really should be posting more. I do have stuff to say. At the same time, I've got a truckload of NIE assignments due, including a 3000-word essay on critical and creative thinking due this Friday. Perhaps I'll post portions of it here when I'm done. Maybe I'll post excerpts from my other NIE essays (and, if I can fix my laptop, my Dartmouth essays) as well.

Now for some thoughts on a recent ST story -- the one about Ronald Susilo (why did I nearly type "Ronaldo" there?) and Li Jiawei. (Ronald, incidentally, was in the same year as me in secondary school. Besides being better than everyone at badminton, he was also a fabulous cross-country runner and a pretty good student. The Principal once cited him as a model scholar-athlete, possible to spur the not-so-scholarly athletes among us.) What on earth possessed the ST to make the problems in their relationship headline news? Leave that to the New Paper, and leave the two of them alone to sort out their own problems. You could've devoted those column inches to a non-outsourced article on, say, the philosophical underpinnings of contemporary American conservatism. Or the infamous Mearsheimer and Walt paper on the "Israel Lobby" and American foreign policy. Or something similarly...interesting.
Posted by kungfuzi at 12:24 am | 0 comments