A future student

One of the Foreign Minister's sons will be a student of mine at RJC. I actually like him -- the Minister, that is, since I don't know the son yet -- more than some of his colleagues, and I can't say I have any major quarrels with how our foreign policy is conducted.
Posted by kungfuzi at 4:00 pm | 1 comments

  "Confucius, he say, name go in book"

This is brilliant.


Posted by kungfuzi at 10:56 pm | 1 comments

  How flattering

Instapundit, reacting to the news that Mike "Nurse" Bloomberg is contemplating a run for the American presidency, suggests that he adopt the campaign slogan "Making America like Singapore, only more so."

He'll have to be pretty awful, then.
Posted by kungfuzi at 6:31 pm | 0 comments

  Ugh...back to NIE

I'm back in NIE for the next couple of weeks, and was reminded today why I hate that sorry excuse for an institution of higher learning and can't wait to leave it. We had a Civics and Moral Education (CME) workshop in the afternoon for three hours conducted by some random MOE pod person. I had been prepared to wisecrack my way through it, but after half an hour or so I lost all patience and made a beeline for my tutor's office to gripe about life.

There's only so much condescension I can take. I'm in my mid-20s and university-educated. I don't appreciate being spoken to or treated as if I were a little kid -- which is precisely what the MOE minion did. We did a collage using scissors, glue, postcards, and fashion magazines -- primary school art class, anyone? We were organised into groups based on actions ("swim," "dance," etc.) written on little slips of paper that we had to perform. She had this...this rattle or buzzer which she used to signal the end of an activity. And, to top things off, she had this green card which she said she'd use to eject recalcitrant students from the class. I asked her for it immediately, but she wasn't willing to play along. Ah, that famous MOE sense of humour again. It was then that I decided to take my leave and seek refuge elsewhere.

Hell is other people, as Sartre once said.
Posted by kungfuzi at 6:25 pm | 2 comments

  RJC

Finally, what I've been waiting almost a year for: confirmation that I'll be going to RJC -- eight years after graduating from there. The letter arrived this afternoon, surreptitiously, while I was asleep, and much earlier than I expected.

The hard work starts now, I suppose. (Ok, I laboured at Queensway, but admittedly not that much after I had finished my observations.) The new school (or old school) has been in touch, and I am heading up there tomorrow afternoon for a benchmarking meeting, at which I will discuss four 2,000-word essays that I've marked and be given 30 more to critique. If you think that's a lot, well, I'll be marking 120 mid-year exam papers come July, on top of having to prepare for lectures and tutorials.

I won't mind it though. I've started delving into postwar Southeast Asian history and though not as compelling as, say, the fall of Rome, it has its historiographically interesting parts. For instance, I'm intrigued by the question over whether or not the end of colonial rule in Southeast Asia after World War II was inevitable. It looks so at first given how badly hit the European powers were by the war. But as my handy Cambridge History points out, their wartime losses made them redouble their efforts to reimpose their rule on countries whose nationalist movements had also been severely affected by the Japanese Occupation. For some reason, Herbert Butterfield comes to mind here, and I think I will make use of him in my first lecture. I might actually have to read The Whig Interpretation of History first though.
Posted by kungfuzi at 5:28 pm | 1 comments