Graduate school

Eric Rauchway has a great post up on Open University about graduate school in the US. Rauchway's an historian, but much of what he says is broadly applicable to any academic discipline.
Posted by kungfuzi at 1:36 pm | 0 comments

  Meanwhile, on Dartobserver...

I take objection to Doug Feith's characterisation of Donald Rumsfeld as, among other things, "a fascinating character in a work of epic literature."
Posted by kungfuzi at 7:18 pm | 0 comments

  More course reviews

Educational Psychology II

This class was divided into two parts, the first on classroom management, and the second (only four weeks long) on providing for individual differences in learning and teaching . Since the two parts were radically different from each other, I shall focus on them individually.

Classroom Management

Not bad. The instructor was competent and taught her stuff. That said, I don't remember a single thing she said or we learned which couldn't have been acquired with experience and common sense.

Grade: B-

Providing for Individual Differences in Learning and Teaching

Awful. This segment was supposed to be about how to deal with disabled people in your class, but our instructor, a scatterbrained and incoherent woman with a PhD, spent all her time drawing silly graphs on the board, outlining her proposals for world peace, and prosyletising. We learned absolutely nothing, unless dubious theories about the relationship between the angle of your ears and how whole-brained you are count as knowledge. Thank goodness it was only four weeks.

Grade: F

Communication Skills for Teachers

A marginally useful course for teachers who can't speak and write properly, i.e. most teachers, but not me. The instructor knew her stuff and wasn't afraid to pass judgement on others; but she did go over the top at times. The assignments were also all done in class: no homework!

Grade: B-
Posted by kungfuzi at 7:43 pm | 0 comments

  My first term at NIE: a brief course review (Part I)

With my first term at NIE coming to an end soon (thank god), it seems as good a time as any to review the courses I've taken this term. These are the ones that I've completed so far. I'll talk about the others after next Wednesday.

Educational Psychology I

This class, which started very early and ended earlier than others, consisted largely of uninspiring weekly lectures on theories of educational psychology. The instructor, a trained child psychologist and school counsellor, was a sweet lady who plied us with sweets to keep us awake and whose counselling stories were frequently amusing. But her lectures would only have been useful to people interested in educational psychology as an academic discipline -- that is to say, no one in the class. And getting a bunch of adults to use scissors, glue, and trashy magazines to construct a "self-concept" of themselves was just infantilising (a word that I'll be using quite a lot to describe various activities and classes).

Grade: C+

Aims and Approaches to Teaching English Literature

The grammatical incorrectness of the course's title (there should be an "of" after "Aims") tells you more than you need to know about this awful class, whose instructor I have already blogged about here. Since that previous post, my opinion of her as a person has improved (she's harmless, well-meaning, and eccentric), but my judgement of her as a teacher of literature and literature pedagogy hasn't. The class hit a nadir a few weeks back when we were made to form a circle and participate in activities more suited to a kid's birthday party than a literature classroom. For instance, we were given a mineral water bottle and told to perform an action with it; every person in the circle was to perform all the actions of those before them. I decided to perform something, er, provocative -- just because I was bored and annoyed. This was supposed to be a class on teaching drama, by the way.

The course was also structurally flawed. We completed five assignments: two individual essays (1,000 words each; 60%), a group poetry package (12%), a group narrative package (12%), and a 10-minute micro-teaching session (16%). Given that we aren't going to be writing papers on how to teach literature while actually teaching literature, making those two essays worth 60% of the grade is just stupid. We worked so much harder on the two genre packages: I spent 15, yes, 15 hours one Sunday just compiling the poetry package; this doesn't take into account the hours and hours of planning that went into writing the stuff I compiled. Oh, and you should have seen the laundry list of instructions for the second essay. Fulfilling them in 1,000 words was just impossible.

Grade: C

Information and Communication Technology (ICT) for Engaged Learning

How to use PowerPoint to jazz up your lessons, and why working individually is a crime against humanity. Utterly, utterly pointless. No one learned how to use ICT tools that he or she didn't know previously. The assignment required us to put together a "self-learning package" -- that is to say, a set of PowerPoint slides that groups of students could use to learn a particular topic, with minimal intervention by the teacher. My partner and I decided to teach Rhythm and Meter in Poetry for JC1 students using self-made audio clips, while other pairs attempted topics from the History and Geography syllabi. The problem was that our instructor taught Physics. She was absolutely unqualified to judge what we had produced. The idea that you can separate content and form and focus solely on the latter while being completely ignorant of the former is just ridiculous. It didn't help that she was about as enthusiastic in class as a talking robot.

Grade: D+
Posted by kungfuzi at 11:36 pm | 0 comments

  Oh, cut out the bloody moral equivalence

Look, Singabloodypore, George W. Bush is not the world's biggest terrorist. Let's stop taking our talking points from Chomsky and be a bit more precise about our terms here. Terrorist organisations like al-Qaeda, the LTTE (that's the Tamil Tigers), Jemaah Islamiyah, and (previously) the IRA purposely set out to kill large numbers of non-combatants to advance a political agenda. When conceived as a political tactic employed by transnational, non-state actors against states, terrorism aims to weaken people's confidence in their governments' ability to protect them, and, in doing so, pressurise governments into submitting to the terrorists' demands. Terrorism can also be employed by states can against their own citizens (Saddam's Iraq); in such cases, terrorism aims to coerce citizens into compliance with state authority.

For all its screw-ups in Iraq, the US military does not go out of its way to deliberately kill Iraqi civilians, unless it considers them to be combatants. While inevitably and tragically, many civilians have died as a result of the US's actions, these losses in no way mark the US out as a terrorist state, or its President as a terrorist. To equate George W. Bush -- whom I have no fondness for -- with the likes of Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri, Saddam Hussein, and other genuine terrorists trivialises the significance of terrorism and deflects attention from the real problems faced by the US military in Iraq today, and those of Iraqi civilians struggling to make ends meet.
Posted by kungfuzi at 6:50 pm | 0 comments

  Balinese and Javanese Art

This is from one of the more enjoyable essays I wrote at Dartmouth:

Perhaps the most significant difference is where exactly one finds artists and artistic performances. In Java, while folk art does exist in the form of plaiting, weaving, textiles, and metalwork, most of what we regard as Javanese art - wayang, dances, gamelan - flourishes in the royal courts, such as those in Yogyakarta and Surakarta, which are closed off, both spatially and culturally, to most people save tourists and members of the nobility. In Bali, on the other hand, the arts are so fully integrated into society that there is no word for "art" in the Balinese language. They cannot be dichotomized into "Great" or "little traditions, or "courtly" art versus "folk," "peasant," or village arts; not only the aristocracy can create informal beauty, but a commoner may be as finished an artist as the educated nobleman. Artistic life revolves around not courts or villages, but the temple - a place in which all sorts of people interact and participate in common religious festivals, regardless of class or caste. The arts in Bali also serve specific social functions: elaborate religious-artistic ceremonies help coordinate irrigation schedules, for instance, while ceremonies on slightly smaller scales mark the beginning of important phases in a person's life.

The class was Anthropology 26, which focused on the cultures of Southeast Asia. I took it in the winter of 2002, but missed the class on Singapore because of a farewell lunch for my retiring English professor.
Posted by kungfuzi at 6:15 pm | 0 comments

  Thought for the Day

Studies serve for delight, for ornament, and for ability. Their chief use for delight is in privateness and retiring; for ornament, is in discourse; and for ability, is in the judgement and disposition of business. For expert man can execute, and perhaps judge of particulars, one by one; but the general counsels, and the plots and marshalling of affairs, come best from those that are learned. To spend to much time in studies is sloth; to use them too much for ornament is affectation; to make judgement wholly by their rules is the humour of a scholar. They perfect nature, and are perfected by experience; for natural abilities are like natural plants, that need proyning by study; and studies themselves do give forth directions too much at large, except they be founded in by experience.

From Francis Bacon, Of Studies (1625).
Posted by kungfuzi at 6:08 pm | 0 comments

  Writing from the Past

I finally hauled myself down to Sim Lim Square today to get my ancient laptop fixed. As things turned out, I didn't actually get anything fixed: I just got the hard drive removed and made accessible via USB. The rest of the machine, which I bought in 2001, got scrapped for $70. I also laid my hands on Gothic 3 and Neverwinter Nights 2, which I must resist the temptation to play until this term is over.

I've now had the chance to peer inside that hard drive. What wonders abound! The BBC radio adaptation of The Lord of the Rings! Old emails (have you ever seen a 3 MB text file?)! Tons of old DOS computer games plus And most importantly, all my college writing from the winter of 2002 (that's January) till graduation, including my thesis!

So without further ado, here's a sample of what I wrote way back in the cold winter months of 2002 for History 3: Europe in Medieval and Early Modern Times. This is the concluding paragraph from my essay on the morality of Machiavelli's Prince:

The Prince is such a complex and sometimes contradictory text that no single analysis can hope to unify all of it under any single theory. A mere sifting of the text alone is insufficient and only confuses us further. But when we turn to the incredibly rich cultural matrix that Machiavelli was born into and influenced by, certain patterns begin to emerge. Underlying Machiavelli's pragmatism, as we have seen, is an almost overwhelming desire on the author's part to see the restoration and preservation of Italian sovereignty as it was not too long ago during the quattrocento, or 15th century, before all the chaos caused by successive foreign invasions. Should there be no attempt to stem the influx of barbarians, Italy would suffer the same fate as the Roman Republic did and go the way of despotism and tyranny. Grounded in the lessons of the past and the present, The Prince was Machiavelli's desperate attempt to prevent this. In this light, his political morality is consistent: it may not be Christian, but it certainly aspires towards the greater good.

I wrote the essay referring only to Machiavelli and the course textbook. I have no idea if I'd reach the same conclusion if I wrote the essay today under similar conditions.
Posted by kungfuzi at 12:22 am | 0 comments

  Comments have been enabled. Behave, or else.
Posted by kungfuzi at 3:01 pm | 1 comments

  I've always dreamed of becoming an astronaut / a doctor / a footballer / Permanent Secretary (Environment and Water Resources)

If you're a bright, 18-year old Singaporean JC2 student thinking about taking up a government scholarship (i.e. any scholarship that comes with a bond attached) to study overseas, here's some food for thought.

Why do you want a scholarship? I can think of three possible responses. A lot of students give more than one:

1) "My parents can't afford to pay for a Harvard / Cambridge / Oxford / MIT / Stanford / Cornell / Dartmouth education." This is most commonly mentioned by students to their friends and teachers, occasionally during the scholarship interview.

2) "I really want to work for the government / A*Star / EDB / SPH." This is most commonly mentioned during the scholarship interview.

3) "It'll look good on my CV." This is never mentioned.

And here are some thoughts on them, starting with reason #3.

3) Yes, it does look good on your CV. But a lot of other things do as well -- like interning for Goldman Sachs during your freshman summer, or getting your undergraduate research paper published in a major scientific journal, or graduating summa cum laude. The point is that having received a scholarship from the Singapore government isn't going to seal your admission to the University of Chicago's Committee on Social Thought or a job at Microsoft after your bond expires (or even before that, if you decide to break it); at most it'll guarantee you a cushy job in the administrative service. Did you really grow up wanting to be a...civil servant? I can even imagine that some institutions may not look too favourably upon government scholars because of certain values which the Singapore civil service places importance on. If you want to work for The New Republic, six years at the Straits Times spent toeing the PAP line isn't going to cut the mustard.

1) This is a good reason if it's paired with reason #2. A lot of parents don't have the means to pay for three or four years at a private US or British university; four years at Dartmouth, for instance, cost around $160,000. But a government scholarship is only one of three ways of paying for an overseas education. You can get financial aid from the university you're applying to, or you could secure an overseas study loan from a local bank. Both these other means, however, have their problems. With the exception of a few really rich US universities, most US and all British universities offer only limited financial support to international students. If you're an international student applying to Dartmouth or Stanford, for example, your ability to pay will affect your chances of getting in. The more you need, the harder it'll be. Financial aid may also take the form of loans, which of course have to be paid back, just like bank loans, with interest.

2) Even if you are generally supportive of the government, you've got to have some idea of what working for them is really like from day to day. Ask friends and family who work in the civil service or GLCs to give you unvarnished descriptions of their jobs, and do the same for people in the private sector. Which group seems happier? What sort of tasks do they perform from day to day, week to week, month to month, and year to year? What are their colleagues and bosses like? Now it may just happen that the opinions you receive on life in the civil service are really positive (although I can't imagine this). You still need to ask yourself if, at the age of 18, you really know what you want in life. Very few JC2 students, I think, can answer this question with absolute certainty, if only because they've had relatively little experience of the world at their age. That's why you go to university -- and here I'm thinking of an American liberal arts education. You might find out that you're gifted at acting and want to become an actor. You might decide after a Wall Street internship that investment banking (yawn!) turns you on. Or, like me, you might discover that you love history and want to become an historian. In other words, it's unreasonable and silly of the government to force 18-year olds to commit six years of their lives to the civil service or some stat board, when the students have neither any idea of what it's really like to work in the government, nor had any opportunity to sample other careers. While it is true that you'll still be able to pursue these careers after you leave the civil service, why risk six years of your life that you could be spending doing something that you really want?

That's all for now. I'll talk more about my experiences at a later date.
Posted by kungfuzi at 1:14 am | 3 comments

  NUS's alumni giving rate

Aaron Ng wonders why only 1% of NUS alumni give back to their alma mater and is shocked by Princeton's and Harvard's alumni giving rates of 61% and 44% respectively. His reason's that NUS students right now (unlike in the 70s and early 80s) don't feel that they have a say in how their university is being run, whereas at other top-ranked universities, "students have the ability to influence policy." The "net result is that students end up not feeling for their university anymore."

Some thoughts:

1) NUS can't be compared to Princeton or Harvard or Dartmouth. The latter are private universities which depend entirely on alumni giving to survive. NUS gets subsidised by the government. Its alumni know this, and a lot of them just don't think that they need to give money to what was, until very recently, a government statutory board. The institutions whose giving rates NUS's should be compared to are top American public universities like UC Berkeley or the University of Virginia. (According to this PDF, those rates for 2006 are 14% and 26% respectively.)

2) Hypothesis: the wealthier a university's alumni, the more likely they are to give money to their school. How much on average does an NUS graduate earn per month compared to, say, the average Harvard graduate? And what about the graduates of other top Asian universities?

3) We've heard from those who aren't giving to NUS. What about those who do? What are their reasons for doing so?

4) Is the 1% figure really down to students not having a say in how their school's being run? And is it really true that students elsewhere have the ability to influence policy in the way that NUS students don't? I'm not so sure. I don't think any American university today allows its students a real say in major policy decisions. At Dartmouth, the trustees raise the school fees every year. But we were never asked what we thought about it (at least NUS goes through the motions); we were simply told to accept it as a fact of life. And yet, Dartmouth's alumni giving rate remains really high (47% if I'm not mistaken). It may be, of course, that NUS alumni really don't give money to their alma mater because of how politically marginalised they felt while as students. But I don't see this causal relationship being very applicable.

5) The real reason, I suspect, is that NUS simply doesn't inspire in its students the same affection that places like Dartmouth do. Not having attended the school, and not really having spoken to many of my friends about their experiences at NUS, I can't really say more on this. I will say, though, that I am more attached to Dartmouth than I am to any of my Singapore schools, Liverpool Football Club, and Singapore itself.
Posted by kungfuzi at 12:03 am | 0 comments