Red and Blue (but mostly red)

There were a lot of things going on last week, especially towards its latter half, as the exam papers of all my classes were ongoing, which also meant that my foot-high pile of marking also came in by last Friday. Meanwhile, the UK general election was going on, and especially with so many late results coming in, on Friday morning i was alternating between invigilating, checking on how my students were doing with their/my paper, and dashing back into the staff room whenever i could to catch the live streaming of the Beeb's election coverage.

While i'm less familiar with UK politics than i am with the situation in the States (and as such am still getting accustomed to the Tories' colour being blue and Labour's red, when their ideological counterparts across the pond adopt the exact opposite colors), it still was very interesting to see how things developed, especially with a credible third party also among the fray. That's even if thanks to excessive media hype, it seemed to culminate in a spectacular anti-climax when they actually experienced a net loss of seats. (It was extraordinary though, to see how all the news networks were harping on the disappointment for the Lib Dems after all the spotlight on Nick Clegg. Did they fail to see the irony of the fact that it was them who fed this angle incessantly in the first place?)

One thing that i was, and to a lesser extent, still am confused about, is the degree of importance they accord to exit polls and projections of winners. Of course that's partly because over here there are no exit polls (or for that matter, any means of political opinion polling in the first place), and practically everyone can project who the overall winner will be even before the election is called.

Conveniently enough, however, through marking my students' papers i did at least get some semblance of how this can work. Since i generally started marking from the easiest section onwards, by the time i reached the final section, and looking at the recorded marks from the previous sections, i could more or less project who would pass (my expectations are low), based on mental calculations on how many more marks they would require, weighed against the so-called swing from their previous test marks that would be needed. Somewhat confusing stuff, but it makes more sense when you actually are doing the marking.

But for the moment, at least, both (the elections and the exams, at least for me) are over, and the break (or whatever i'm able to take from it) is coming up. Not a moment too soon.

monocultural

On the bus to school this morning, there was this Caucasian girl of about eight or nine headed to school with her Filipino domestic helper, both of whom were sitting two seats in front of me. The helper had evidently been tasked by the girl's parents (probably the mother) to assist the girl with school stuff. Fair enough.

It turned out to be particularly bizarre and intriguing for me though, as the subject in question was Mandarin Chinese, and what the helper was doing was showing the girl a series of flashcards with Chinese characters on it which she had to try and identify. While the girl did not exactly seem to be the most enthusiastic learner of the language, she was definitely more enthusiastic than i ever was, and could identify most of the characters. The helper would then let the girl know if she was correct or wrong by referring to the hanyu pinyin written on the reverse side of the card.

So to recap, we had two totally non-Chinese people being the teacher and student in a rather effective Chinese lesson. From my own scarred perspective that's practically inhuman, but then again that's why today i have to fish out my NRIC each time i may be required to write my Chinese name somewhere (and the last time that happened was when i was registering for A levels methinks..

If it were up to me, there would not be this passionate ongoing debate about the weightage of PSLE second language (i refuse to term it as 'mother tongue' because a mother tongue it was not for me). I would rather permanently abolish the study of it, at the least for students from ethnic backgrounds that are not totally similar to the language being taught (i.e. me). After all, if you want to use the economic argument, surely not every single person who studies Chinese will eventually find, or for that matter, be interested in a job involving the so-called rising dragon that is China. Some will inevitably find jobs either here or elsewhere that would not require the utterance of a single word of Chinese (oh the bliss). (And then of course there are others like me who due to the nature of the job have had no choice but to speak Chinese anyways). And if you use the roots/cultural heritage argument, don't forget that there's the chance of overkill - as again is represented by me. Furthermore, this has come at the expense of the other half of my roots/cultural heritage, which is probably why today i'm pretty cultureless, with lots of Western stuff having filled the cultural vacuum..

In any case, if the second language exemption rule was in place all those years ago for me, my PSLE score would probably have jumped by at least 30 points or more. Though then again, that might have meant i'd have ended up in a school like VS, or horror of horrors, ACS(I). That's enough reason there for me to believe that God works through temporal adversity to bring about more long-term joy.