Yet another post taken from sth i typed long ago

Hmm You Rong, if you're reading this, well perhaps you can tune in for more...i posted this cos i didn't have time to type sth and i'll be out and only update some more tonight...and that''s if i dun fall asleep in front of the TV haha!

Anyway, the following is an email to my class yahoogroups regarding my views on the JC education system. This was in response to another email by my classmate, who expressed dissatisfaction at our maths lecturer coming up with a seating plan for our classes to sit together at certain rows. That email touched on the attitude towards student's learning attitude. or sth like that...lol

Here goes:

hey nice arguments put forth, James...hmm regarding the lack of individuality and making students conform to authorrity, i've had my more than fair share of it at robotics club already. some teachers who are more conservative do indeed think that way.Anyway, i do agree with you that the reasons for the seating plan are quite amusing. In fact, these days, i find any drastic measure a teacher takes to maintain his/her control over class/cca more amusing and laughable than really to be taken too seriously...its like a joke. I'd like to make known my views on VJ lectures and lecturers, and perhaps through all the stuff below, explain why things have turned out to be this way.JC education is a more rigid and "structured" one. Though both polytechnics and JCs use the lecture-tutorial system, the system is implemented in JCs with more rigidity, and it feels more like in a higher secondary school than a junior COLLEGE. While it seems that JC is supposed to prepare us for college, aka universities, the reality is that a JC education prepares us for the A levels, NOT life in university. Its really just an extension from O levels, where they squeeze you twice the intensity of the O level syllabus in half the time. And what is supposed to be "independent learning", is actually not. The very fact that teachers have to impose such things like seating plans, the N(L)ame Game would go to show that many JC teachers still do not understand nor practise the concept of a JC learning environment which is self-driven learning. Maybe MOE simply decided that simply emulating the lecture tutorial system in universities would more than prepare students for university education. JC ranking only worsens the situation, because even if teachers wanted to let their students take charge of their own learning, they would still be obliged to retain control over students' learning because they'd put the school's ranking at stake if they did otherwise. So the result is, teachers continue to drive students to work on their academics. They'd probably argue that if they just left their students alone, those students would just rot on their own. That's not surprising, given the sort of learning environment children go through since primary school. A sudden relaxation in rules in JC would be a culture shock to students after going through a decade of externally motivated learning. As a member of robotics club, I've seen too many pple shun away from learning seemingly "difficult" technical stuff instead of taking the task of learning into their own hands. Its a reflection of how we're taught to learn in school. I strongly support independent learning. Perhaps its because i learn best when i learn on my own. While not everyone is like that, education should still guide and facilitate learning. Even if some of us may be better of being guided through the process, knowing how to learn by oneself is an important life skill. Especially at this age, the student should take charge of his/her own learning. Thus we should have the freedom to take charge of our learning. Not be forced to learn in a certain way. The next point that is particularly important is that of the quality of lectures. If the quality control in industry was to be applied to lectures, i think most if not all lectures would fail miserably. While i do not feel that the she who dictates our seating arrangements is incompetent or anything, i think that many lecturers just do not have enough passion in what they teach. The imparting of knowledge in a lecture has been reduced to a mere task of feeding enough knowledge to meet examination requirements. It pisses me off everytime i hear a teacher says "the syllabus needs you to know this this and that" and says, "don't worry, so many years still never come out in A levels b4, so not impt to know", or "this is a minor/unimportant chapter". Almost ALL lecturers say that, even the good ones. I remember recently, Mrs Choo telling us at the chem Kinetics lecture that we should have "more passion for what we learn" and all that. Moments before I thought i heard her say one of the sentences above. I've heard Mr. Michael Lim say that the topic on Capacitance was a "minor and unimportant" topic. Truth is, capacitors are simply TOO important in electronics. No wonder EEEs are complaining that the young EEs nowadays are incompetent. Lectures come and go, lecturers ramble on for an hour plus, go away, come back again and ramble on some more, then disappear. It's becoming routine and uninteresting. How many of you would say "wow i'm really interested in finding out more!" ? More like "I need to know this because there's a test tmr". Also, what's in the mind of a lecturer? I doubt that most teachers lecturing would actually consider, "How could i make this lesson more interesting and more easily understood by my students? How would i better increase the effectiveness of my lesson?" What I feel most teachers would think is, "How can i complete teaching everything that the syllabus requires in x number of periods allocated to me?" and if they can't, they'd just hold you back in the LT. Such teachers should look to the prominent physicist and a great lecturer, Richard Feynman, and his book, 6 Easy Pieces. You'd probably suspect he was teaching primary school children physics! Think about the Quantum Physics lectures. Or rather, what do you think about them? Isit really just any other lecture on physics? Equations, experimental set ups, tutorials, assignments, tests....BUT how many of you actually know that the quest for the true nature of light (wave or particle?) and its results, was one of the DEFINING moments of physics? It happened at a time when physicists thought that physics was over, and everything to be known was known. Niels Bohr (i think) was told by his professor that he'd have no future in physics. In fact, it turned out to be that the photoelectric effect, along with many other phenomena, redefined and shook the foundations of physics. Quantum physics is a pillar of what we call modern physics, and F=ma can be derived from quantum physics!These are the truly important details of the knowledge that we are supposed to learn. We should be taught to appreciate what we learn, instead of just knowing for the sake of knowing. When will teachers and the education service realise this?

Those words above, I stand by them, because my heart spoke them.
Hang Jian