It has certainly been a very eventful past month - and in the interests of providing applicable learning aids (i am a teacher after all), i shall summarize them in the form of relevant M words.
Mugging and Marking:
The past month at school has been a very hectic one due to the exam period. Let me say though that based on the results, there was far less of the mugging on the part of my students than there was of marking on my part. This was the first exam period of the four that i've encountered thus far whereby i only had upper sec scripts to mark, and only for History for that matter. (Previously it was always only lower sec, and a mixture of English and History). While as a setter this made things easier as upper sec assessment is far more straightforward than that for lower sec, as a marker this made things far more tedious. Since there's a much greater focus on so-called higher-order thinking skills, it means a greater level of cerebral involvement on the part of the marker. So much so that encountering scripts of answers of only a couple of lines long (if there were any answers to begin with) in response to 12 or 13 mark questions was, while bad for the student, rather a relief for me.
Challenges to marking are not only qualitative, but also quantitative in nature. Hence, over the two weeks or so of marking you would see me marking at school, marking at home, marking in the bus or train, marking while waiting for the bus or train, marking while having overpriced coffee at coffee bean, and the ultimate - marking while at a wedding dinner. Certainly not my shining moment.
So by the end of the marking period, it almost felt as though my purpose in life had gone, since the good part of each day would ave been taken up by marking.
MM and his Minions:
Of course the other major event of this past month was the general elections. Ironically, while at the last elections, i still had managed to vote although only more than half the seats were contested, this time round i didn't get to vote although only five of the seats (out of 87) were uncontested. Chalk it down to suddenly finding myself living in Tanjong Pagar, under the watchful eye of the above team. And of course having their potential opponents be a bunch of jokers who submitted their documents 35 seconds too late. And you'd think that by this time they'd get their act together.
On the plus side, staying in an uncontested ward meant that i was not required to perform any election duty. Which meant more time for marking on polling day itself.
This was definitely the most eventful of all Singapore's elections, at least since we gained independence. It was certainly encouraging to see more Singaporeans really thinking through the issues at hand before casting their vote (provided they didn't stay in Tanjong Pagar, of course), regardless of whom they voted for. What i cannot stand are people who cast a default vote without much, if any thought, beyond "oh everything seems well and good to me." I still encountered some of such people, who are testament to the dumbing-down of the political process here over the decades.
Well i hope to see this trend continue at the presidential elections - and i hope that there'll be one this time round. Certainly at the least i've had enough of the oompaloompa..
