A departure from the usual norm of a minimum of five posts a day, this is only my third post for today. The whole afternoon was spent at Island Plaza, my third and final visit to the Times Book Fair :-) since today is the last day. Following that, despite being so tired and sleepy after scrutinizing almost every book on display, I went for my evening run at the park near my home. As it was quite late, I skipped the warm up exercises and started my brisk walk and then began my usual run round the park.
By the time I was into my fourth round, my lungs were bursting for air and my knees began to feel terribly wobbly. I could imagine my knee-caps screaming out "STOP! STOP!" but Madam Kiasu here still pushed herself to run because there was another lady there who was running at a slow and steady pace with her husband. As the sweat trickled down my forehead and my tongue could taste its saltiness, I relished the thought of my fats being burnt at turbo speed and an image of a slimmer me appeared before me and propelled me forward. :-) Well, Miss Vain here pushed herself too much for by the time I finished my sixth round, my legs refused to move and I made my way home, leaving my two heroes at the basketball court. The rivulets of sweat trickling down my legs and neck gave me such a deep sense of satisfaction as I made my way home. Yet, I felt so guilty because I used to be able to do ten rounds easily. Age is definitely catching up!
Soon after, the guys returned and I declared that I was too weak and feeble to walk anywhere else unless they could carry me sedan-chair style :-) and so we decided to go to a Japanese Restaurant near my home called Chikuma.
As usual, I ordered my favorite Sukiyaki set which comes in very generous portions indeed. The chicken meat is normally thinly sliced, tender to taste and the soup cooked almost to perfection. The other condiments mainly cawan mushi, miso soup, rice and fruit are more than enough to satisfy even one with a hearty appetite. Since I am not a meat lover, I scooped the chicken meat, poached egg, vegetables etc into another bowl for my dear hubby.
He had ordered the Salmon Batayaki set where the salmon is marinaded and then fried in butter. The fish meat was very fresh, tasty and crispy without being overcooked. The fish was served with a salad, rice, cawan mushi, miso soup and rice.
On the other hand, my boy ordered the Salmon Teriyaki and he insisted that his selection was the best of the three sets because he loved the teriyaki sauce and ate his food slowly to allow the taste to burst in his mouth.
Chikuma Japanese Restaurant is located at Gembira Parade (Island Glades) just beside a hair saloon. Ben Loo, one of the partners, told me that Chikuma means childhood friends in Japanese. The name Chikuma was chosen because the restaurant is owned by both Ben and his childhood friend Allan Tan, who previously worked at Miyako (one of the first Japanese restaurants in Penang) for many years before embarking on this venture.
The concept of the restaurant is fashioned after the usual family restaurant in Japan, where the decor is simple and strictly traditional Japanese cuisine is served. Ben, who is married to a Japanese, emphasized that culturally, Japanese place great emphasis on food preparation and take pride in their cuisine to the extent that it is even considered as an art form. Fusion food is not served in Chikuma and all the dishes are typical of home-cooked Japanese dishes.
Personally, I love Japanese food because it is fairly fat-free, tofu based in many dishes and very healthy indeed. My family love to go to Chikuma because of its fair pricing, generous portions and friendly staff. Here's Ben with two of his staff.
If you have not been there before, do pay a visit to Chikuma (which is closed on Monday). For reservations, please call 6 04 656 5521. Believe me, you will not regret it because of its fair prices, generous portions, tasty food, friendly staff and simple uncluttered decor.
When reading my blog posts about my teaching experiences, one may think that the teaching is a bed of roses. It is not.
Different types of teachers exist just as there are many categories of students. As such, it is no surprise to see an assortment of articles either condemning or praising both teachers and students in various media.
In other blog posts, I have mentioned that the very reason why I retired from the teaching profession is because of the deplorable standards of education, especially in the 21st century.
Being an arty farty type of person, I am also an idealistic character, often times a dreamer with lofty hopes for the world :-), preferring to enjoy intrinsic rather than extrinsic values of work. Thus, I gave up my teaching profession, preferring to remember the best moments of my career rather than suffering the nonsense from students who are not interested in the learning process. Of course, I enjoy the liberty of doing this because I live a simple lifestyle, seldom go shopping, do not follow and am not interested in fashion trends and I do not use cosmetics except for those I have received as presents. When I do shop, the main aim would be to expand my collection of books. To that end, my hubby always says that I am a low maintenance wife :-).
I find that as the years go by, (I am making a generalization based on my personal teaching experience of over twenty years in different institutions) the following prevalent trends are most worrying:
* Students are less likely to display critical thinking skills
* Rote learning has limited their creative thinking abilities
* The desire to inquire and to test the validity of syllabus content is virtually absent as many aim to regurgitate information in a prescribed template as dictated by model answers or workbooks which are being churned out nineteen to the dozen by various publishing houses.
* The love for reading is hardly ever present.
* Few would bother to do research in a topic that is being taught.
* If they could get away with scoring the highest marks with minimal input, they would.
* The ability to form sound and reasoned judgement is a monumental task, especially for lazy economics students who cannot be bothered to even remember the factors of production and fundamental concepts of the syllabus.
* Learning is carried out with an unhealthy emphasis on quantitative achievement, and not for learning per se, to develop minds or to enrich their personal lives with the knowledge that has been acquired.
* Many are so lacking in general knowledge that one begins to wonder if they even know anything about current events.
* Self discipline is a major problem and so written work is rare and the quality is quite depressing.
* Far too often, procrastination has seriously undermined the quality of work and the development of their skills and understanding.
* Some can spend hours on end in on-line chats or computer games but only ten to thirty minutes in a task which needs perhaps two hours of serious contemplation.
* Most display a weak mastery of the language and are unable to express themselves, let alone understand what is in the textbook or reference book, particularly if they abhor reading.
* There is an unhealthy over dependence on tuition classes that I wonder why the parents did not opt for home schooling instead of burdening their children with the demands of attending school and tuition classes. I know a fifth former who has ELEVEN tuition classes and she is very thin due to lack of sleep and rest as she tries, to the best of her ability, to finish work given in all her classes. Fact is, self-starters who do not depend on tuition classes are more likely to be high achievers who display sharp thinking skills and confidence.
* Many are reluctant to think and to analyze when doing objective questions and expect to be spoon fed the answer, without bothering to decipher the true meaning of the question, the intent of the examiner and the syllabus content being tested. As such, they would fare poorly in such areas.
* The ability to form opinions is truly lacking as many rely on secondary information.
* The appalling practice of plagiarism has bloomed with the advent of Internet and many have no qualms about submitting a cut and paste job without attributing to sources of information.
* When writing, many move at a snail's pace and would rather refer to model answers than to use their God-given abilities to produce a well-reasoned piece of work.
* Few students display initiative, expecting instead to be told what to do or what to read every step of the way, in short, they want to and expect to be spoon-fed.
* Do not forget the role of the parents in molding their children either positively or negatively. And why do I say that? Some have unrealistic expectations for their children and impose ridiculous demands on both the child and the teacher. Others live in denial and refuse to accept constructive criticisms of their child while some are inconsistent in the way they relate to their children or teachers. Few allow the children to grow naturally and many want their kids to live out the dreams they had for themselves.
* Many students are most unwilling to exert themselves intellectually and this intellectual inertia is a serious problem because it has far and long lasting effects.
* Many students study for material rewards. Years ago, I had a student who told me that he would be given 30 000RM if he scored straight A's for the PMR. My response - would your parents like to adopt me? I don't mind studying for the PMR again :-) and he responded by telling me that his younger brother will be given 10 000RM if he scored straight A's for the UPSR examination. *faint* Then there were others who were promised 1000RM per distinction and another one who was promised 10 000RM per distinction for PMR. Yup. Such people exist. Did they survive my class? LOL!!! MOST DEFINITELY A RESOUNDING NO !!! Few are ready to work, I mean really work to be on the path to excellence, opting for immediate gratification and not deferred gratification. Very tragic!
* Generally, the commitment to excellence is not there in many students. For example, I have told many in the past to review their work many times to iron out basic problems such as:
- Subject-Verb Agreement errors
- Misuse of Infinitives
- Malapropism
- Misplaced Modifiers
-Split infinitives
- Tautology, Redundancy and Fallacies
-Ending a sentence with a preposition
- Run-on sentences, incomplete sentences etc
- Major spelling errors plus commonly misspelled words
etc etc etc The list is endless! Yet, despite countless reminders, they still turned in sub-standard work.
I am so sorry to sound like a prophetess of doom but that is the sad state of affairs. I do not intend to offend any student and if you do not display the above-mentioned malaise, I am truly happy for you. If you do, then it is certainly time to change.
The bottom-line is this : Few have pride in their work, choosing to finish the task in the shortest possible time with minimal effort to get the license to play or do what their hearts desire.
For me, teaching was really most fulfilling from 1987 to 2005. Thereafter, my experience has been an endless nightmare, with the exception of Hobart, Eugene, Jackson, Michelle, the Ang triplets, Shear Min, Franco and Kevin. As such, instead of teaching, I now spend my time blogging. I do not earn any money from blogging and have to incur expenses but the rewards I derive are limitless and remain. Had I continued, with my kind of commitment and expectation and the current trends, I would have died from disappointment or from cardiac arrest.
Quite a number of colleges used to call me up to invite me to join their faculty but I declined their offers most politely and humbly. I shudder to think of the situation now. In my last Sociology course for a Diploma Course at a local college, I nearly fainted when the students did their ppt presentations and submitted their term papers. If you are a young student, please work hard - not just for yourself or your parents, but also for your motherland. I pray the next generation of young voters will be able to make sound decisions about their voting preferences.
However, through blogging, I have met some very bright students/young people who display excellent language abilities, thinking skills and I comfort myself because there is still hope...These bright young people include Mei San, Nerdcore Fishfoot, B. Y. (who actually emailed her request and a write-up about herself, background and experience to ask me to coach her!!! Bless this lovely lass!) and Jonathan Ong.
Do you want to know the truth about how I feel with regards to education standards?
*sigh*
Sometimes, words are unnecessary.
Standards are moving anti-gravitationally all over the world, not just in the home ground. In 2002, I was an overseas examiner for an international examining board and I have marked scripts from Kenya, Tanzania, Bangladesh, Myanmar and a few other developing countries. It was a tedious and arduous task (and I passed on the opportunity to another friend) but I was greatly surprised because students from those countries displayed a better command of the language, a more analytical approach to the given tasks and a deeper understanding of the syllabus content than those I had taught in my courses. The shock made me think of what might befall us in future. Guess what? My deepest fears were not unfounded.
Even standards for international examination boards are sliding. For example, the IGCSE Economics Exam used to have five options for the forty objective questions to be answered in one hour (extended level and core level). Then in the early 1990's, this was changed to four options for forty questions for both levels. This coming May 2009 will be the FIRST time that students only need to answer THIRTY questions (four options) in ONE HOUR. Obviously, it means that the candidates will be given more time to analyze and to make their responses.
Get my drift?
Take a look at Bloom's Toxonomy. One can see that many students are only at Level 3, or if they are lucky, Level 4.
In 1956, Benjamin Bloom headed a group of educational psychologists who developed a classification of levels of intellectual behavior important in learning. Bloom found that over 95 % of the test questions students encounter require them to think only at the lowest possible level...the recall of information.
Bloom identified six levels within the cognitive domain, from the simple recall or recognition of facts, as the lowest level, through increasingly more complex and abstract mental levels, to the highest order which is classified as evaluation. Verb examples that represent intellectual activity on each level are listed here.
In recent years, the terms have been redefined as follows:
1. Knowledge: arrange, define, duplicate, label, list, memorize, name, order, recognize, relate, recall, repeat, reproduce state.
2. Comprehension: classify, describe, discuss, explain, express, identify, indicate, locate, recognize, report, restate, review, select, translate,
3. Application: apply, choose, demonstrate, dramatize, employ, illustrate, interpret, operate, practice, schedule, sketch, solve, use, write.
4. Analysis: analyze, appraise, calculate, categorize, compare, contrast, criticize, differentiate, discriminate, distinguish, examine, experiment, question, test.
5. Synthesis: arrange, assemble, collect, compose, construct, create, design, develop, formulate, manage, organize, plan, prepare, propose, set up, write.
6. Evaluation: appraise, argue, assess, attach, choose compare, defend estimate, judge, predict, rate, core, select, support, value, evaluate.
* Remembering: Retrieving, recognizing, and recalling relevant knowledge from long-term memory.Now, in my retirement, although I am deficient in income, I am rich in memories of yester-years when students really had grey matter and knew how to use it. I know I was greatly blessed with the opportunity to teach many great minds, majority of whom have ended up with at least one post-graduate degree and a sizeable number who are pursuing/or intend to pursue their doctorates. I have oft thought about writing a book about my experiences and to inject humor into those scenarios and I will reserve that for another blog post because this is already such a long post.
* Understanding: Constructing meaning from oral, written, and graphic messages through interpreting, exemplifying, classifying, summarizing, inferring, comparing, and explaining.
* Applying: Carrying out or using a procedure through executing, or implementing.
* Analyzing: Breaking material into constituent parts, determining how the parts relate to one another and to an overall structure or purpose through differentiating, organizing, and attributing.
* Evaluating: Making judgments based on criteria and standards through checking and critiquing.
* Creating: Putting elements together to form a coherent or functional whole; reorganizing elements into a new pattern or structure through generating, planning, or producing.
Frankly, I could go on and on about the pathetic state of affairs but I will conclude on a positive note.
If you are a parent, please do not burden your child with tuition classes. Do not spoil your child. Emphasize a well-rounded development of your child that includes a five-pronged approach:
* spiritual development
* social development (the child must have the confidence to carry himself well and to relate to people confidently)
* emotional development
* physical development
* intellectual development
I do not proclaim to be Madam Know-all. In fact, I have had my fair share of failures with my older boy and have reformed, which is why my older boy claims that he is the guinea pig for my experiment in parenting skills and that his younger brother is enjoying the fruit of the experiment :-). My older boy and I have a great relationship, but that only happened when I humbled myself and faced up to my weaknesses and made a conscious effort to improve in my areas of weakness.
Parenting is not for cowards. Not at all, if we desire to be a good one. If truth be told, the same can be said of teaching - a profession which demands commitment, zeal, patience, persistence etc....
I am in my late forties and now realize why many of my friends opted for early retirement and why many of my former teachers tell me that they do not want to teach any more and have no intention to tutor either. It is one thing to teach to impart knowledge alone and another to teach in order to challenge, transform and to mold minds and touch lives. I chose the latter, being idealistic. Suffice to say that is the more difficult and challenging route but believe me, the rewards are just great because at the end of the day, in doing so, in trying to be the best that I can be, to give nothing but the best ...I became friends with almost all of my former students, many of whom still keep in touch with me until today.
So dear reader, that is the other side of my story - a tip of the iceberg account of the struggles that I have had to encounter in my endeavors as an educator. Would I want to continue lecturing in an institution? I am sure you know the answer to that one.
Finally, regardless of whether you are a teacher, student or parent or whatever your task, let us give our best, doing it for God and not unto man.
God bless you and have a nice day!
Anyone who has run a marathon knows about commitment. To compete, the athlete relies on extensive training and physical fitness. But when the initial enthusiasm wanes and the painful, long-distance realities grip the runner's body, it is sheer dedication -- commitment to completing what she started -- that sustains the runner's motivation as she reaches for the finish line.
A relationship is a lot like running a marathon. There are highs and lows, challenges and rewards, and times when you may want to give up -- when it feels too difficult to continue. What will keep you on track and moving forward when your relationship hits the inevitable rough patch? Will love be enough?
Commitment: Your relationship lifeline
Commitment is a belief in relationship permanence and the understanding that at times your union will need a life-jacket to stay afloat.
When you and your partner are committed to the relationship, the union remains more important then your (and your partner's) individual needs. Without mutual commitment, deep trust will never take root and intimacy will wither. When one person's commitment is tenuous, the very fabric of the relationship is weakened. A lack of commitment reduces the buffer that holds relationships together during times of conflict and stress. Imagine living with the fear that periodic slumps in your relationship can cause your partner to bail.
Trust and deep intimacy will only grow in the soil of commitment.
Commitment has a dual role in your relationship. You can view commitment as the vehicle to help deepen your love, and you can also view it as a safety net of sorts, a way to protect your marriage or relationship during the difficult periods that each and every relationship experiences.
Commitment allows love and intimacy to mature over time. Someone who ends a relationship because the excitement of new love has diminished misses out on the opportunities that relationships bring for individual and mutual growth.
Some erroneously believe that a commitment like "till death do us part" means foolishly locking yourself into a lifetime of potential unhappiness. No one should commit to a relationship that cannot meet their needs. Your needs (and your partner's needs) do matter and should be part of the overall commitment equation. But life and relationships are complicated, and there will be stretches of time when your partner does not meet your needs (and you will not meet your partner's needs). Commitment is what will get you through those rough stretches, enabling each of you to get back on track in meeting each other's needs once again.
All couples (married and unmarried) face an enormous challenge: How to stay devoted to one another throughout the life of your relationship, even when early enthusiasm and euphoria naturally wane.
Commitment is a very personal process. Unfortunately, for some it will mean blind dedication to a union that rarely meets their needs, while others eschew commitment and impulsively use the ebb and flow of happiness as the gauge whether to stay or leave. Both of these approaches are flawed. Ideally, commitment will remain in place as happiness comes and goes and your relationship finds its footing along life's shifting terrain.
Commitment checklist:
Commit to ________:
...understanding that love grows and deepens over a lifetime.
...acknowledging that all relationships go through ups and downs.
...continuously working toward a meaningful relationship that will transcend momentary happiness.
...working through problems with your partner (while resisting the temptation to get your needs met outside of the relationship).
...finding solutions that will keep your relationship moving forward.
...compromising (even when you think you're right).
...yourself and the relationship.
Don't commit to ________:
...anything that feels abusive.
...always sacrificing what's most important to you.
...the idea that if your relationship requires hard work it means your relationship is flawed.
...the mindset that it's acceptable for your needs to continuously go unmet.
One of the greatest challenges to commitment lies in the instant-gratification mindset -- the idea that you deserve to have what you want when you want it. The settings to our pleasure barometer have been altered, and humans are less willing to deal with frustrating circumstances or anything that feels like it stands in the way of immediate happiness. This poses a problem for relationships.
When you make decisions about your relationship based solely on the need to feel happy (all the time), you abandon commitment and the rich opportunities that are essential for your relationship to grow.
I invite you to think about what commitment means to you. What you are committing to in your marriage or relationship?
written by Richard Nicastro, Ph.D.
About the Author:
Richard Nicastro, Ph.D. is a psychologist and relationship coach who is passionate about helping couples protect the sanctuary of their relationship. Rich and his wife, Lucia, founded LifeTalk Coaching, an internet-based coaching business that helps couples strengthen their relationships.
To discover many practical tips for a stronger relationship, visit Dr. Nicastro's website at http://www.strengthenyourrelationship.com and sign up for his FREE monthly newsletter. You will also immediately receive two free reports that can help you build the relationship of your dreams.
