On Servant Leadership...

Ok, I'm officially buried by homework for the first time since the beginning of this year. I am not planning to complete my homework on time seeing that it is already 12am. I might as well blog instead cause there's a few thing that I want to talk about before the end of the council...

If you all had been following my blog very closely, you would know that there was a flame war over the last post in the comments section. The flames was personal attacks and are not in anyway related to the topic in question. I'll get back to this flaming issue when I get the time and I'll be addressing some issues that are particularly relevant to those flames.

In case you all do not know what is going on in the council now, allow me to enlighten you. Firstly, we are now currently waiting for AGM for the sec4s to step down and for the new batch of councillors to take over our job. As usual, lots of controversial decisions seems to always have to take place around this point in time. This year was no exception.

I feel that because of the introduction of the Peer Support Programme (which I had talked about in an earlier post which you can view here) this years council exco selection has been totally changed by the teachers. For one thing, some excos in some comm. (including disco) have sec 2 excos that immediately become excos the moment they get into council. Lots of people aren't really happy about it, and I thought I want to post some of my own thoughts here.

Lets remind ourselves (again). When we stepped into council and had one of our first leadership talks, what were we talking about? What? What did you say? Hang on, I think it start with an "S"... erm...
Oh ya, its "Servant Leadership"...

Q: So what is servant leadership?
A: Servant leadership is something like you do not become the leader because you want to be one but because you work hard first to be one.
There are a lot of advantages to servant leadership.

Firstly, the leader in the end usually knows what he/she needs to do and needs to know. I mean, if you were part of the service last time, you would know likely what to expect and thus you'll be able to allocate the jobs for your group of people correctly and accordingly

Secondly, because the leader has been with the group of people for some time, the person would most likely have been able to build up some sort of communications with his/her fellow members. This thus allows the members to accept the leadership of the leader easily and also respect and give full support to the leader since you know the leaders already.

There are a few others, but this are the slightly more important ones. As you can see above, the advantages are that:
1) You know what to do.
2) You have support.

Lets look at what teachers are doing now:
They are destroying this servant leadership idea in the council. How? Lets see,
1) Disco has a sec 2 exco that has no experience whatsoever in the council. Anyway, she is in PSP.
2) I think PB also suffered a similar fate with disco
3)Lots of sec 2s whom belonged to the PSP but has no experience at all in the council were sent for exco interview.

All these are indeed small actions, but it is really destroying the idea of servant leadership. For one thing, PSP does not equate to SC without rings. What they do and what we do is almost totally different (as I already pointed out quite some time ago) and I even questioned the need for this group of people, aside from the manpower issue (Which I still do not think is a good reason).

So lets continue shall we?
Firstly, by allowing sec 2s with no previous experience to become excos of certain committees, the teacher have done quite a lot of damage, not just to the committee itself, but also to the new exco.
The first point is that you let the committee feel unhappy. This isn't a unnatural feeling. How would you feel if someone whom you never knew before, never heard of, never ever helped you or even communicated with you in anyway, suddenly became your leader and you're supposed to listen to him/her? Obviously you would doubt the ability of that person, and if you doubt the person, would you respect and follow that person?
This might be a small thing you might think, but in a small committee of only about 17 people, this can be a big thing...

Which leads to the second point...
How would the exco in this situation feel? Obviously, if the person never wanted this, that person would be quite unhappy about it since that person will have a hard time coping in the first few months. Of course, I hope that my ears were wrong when I heard the exco said something like:" I was expecting to be the exco of PB" cause that would be.......

Anyhow, I had quite enough of teachers throwing out those sink or swim situations to disco. Yes, you could say that this is a chance for us to test our leadership potential, to lead the committee when we have leaders that do not know what needs to be done, and then hopefully a efficient transfer of power when the exco has gained enough experience. I just went through one of this, and I'm not exactly too excited to repeat it.

Lets look and compare the difference, and I'll be able to tell you why last year this sort of situations were better. For one thing, last year, most of disco was "kicked". If you all are confused, we had 2 sec 3s left and 4 sec 2s left from the previous council. By having lots of members out of disco, there wouldn't be as much pressure on the excos since he/she would be able to work with a group of people whom has never really worked with disco. This means that there would be more acceptance than now.

Secondly, the exco that got posted in has at least been in the council for one year. Most of disco had a bit of interaction with the exco before she even got in into disco and personally, I had worked with her before. What this means is that, you at least know something about her and it isn't all a question mark. This can be really important as you'll at least have a group of people that knows the leader and will support the leader. This however, is not apparent in the current disco. For one thing, the sec 2s don't sound exactly excited about this new exco, and hardly any of the sec 3/4 know her at all.

Thirdly, teachers always had to choose a really "apt" time for this changes to happen. Lets face it, the teachers likes to make us to be unable to react quickly enough to the situation at hand so that they "win". Add on to the fact that disco is dominating central again, and you know that having a new exco now that does not have support of the committee is not exactly a good idea.

Remind me again, what is servant leadership for? Now then, look at the above and think...

Servant leadership, to many people out there, especially the sec4s currently, have a lot of meaning. Most of the sec4s in council would remember one of the most important teaching we had, and that was on servant leadership, to serve before to lead. We all realised the importance of it and many of us are living proof of this "philosophy" (if you can call it one). Sure, we need to change from time to time, but when we change, we shouldn't change for the sake of changing, especially when the change is heavily criticised (Excos aren't exactly too happy about the changes)...

Oh ya, sink or swim. Disco last year, as all of you out there should know by now, had a very huge sink or swim situation. We had two new excos with no experience in leading disco. One had 1 year experience in disco. Disco was nearly kicked out totally, leaving only two sec 3s and most of the sec 2s. At the beginning, it really felt as though there was no exco at all, and it took a really long time for us to get disco to where it is today.

So, what are the teachers trying to do? Maybe they think that because disco had survived once, they will survive again... Wow, what a happy thought. I seriously do not appreciate this. Its the same as letting your civilisation wage war against your neighbours over and over and over again in "Age Of Empires". What happens in the end? You run out of resource, and you get overrun by the remaining civilisations whom survived your massacre...

The teachers might have saw some potential in the people whom they selected to unfortunately, through a weird twist of fate, become the "destroyers of the servant leadership" foundation. Since the teachers seems to be intent on destroying the servant leadership foundation, we should leave them to it and see what happens.

I won't go into criticisms on people since I do not feel that I know enough of those people to talk about them as yet. As you can all see, my main focus is on the destruction of the servant leadership foundation, which I believe would bring adverse effects to the council once people get into council not to serve but to try their luck to become an exco... Council will then become a collection of power-hungry people whom are, as Cheng Xi described it:

I think the "onion-ring" system of identifying student leaders is poisoning the minds of some of the students.

It is really true that you do not need those rings to lead. Whoever steps out in the situation and leads the group out of it together, working together, is one true leader of the group, regardless of how many people in there whom are "recognised" as leaders... and to do this, you need to be able to work well with your group, and not assume a leadership position the minute you enter it...

While I am here, let me wish disco all the best for the next council ahead. Shark are strong. we'll survive. Here, I also give my sincere wishes to the new exco that she'll be able to learn the ropes quickly and gain the respect of everyone in disco and even the council.
27th Disco is coming to an end...

Whatever happens, happens... but everything will work out in the end.
(Quotes from Cowboy Bebop and Shaman King respectively)

Discmon

On our deputy...

Some of you out there might have seen me writing this thing on a piece of paper earlier on today during chemistry lesson, so it should be no surprise to you all that I will be updating my blog today, even though I have test coming up and quite a bit of homework to clear...

The draft of course, was written in a bit of frustration and since I'm now retyping it, those frustration part might have been changed, so if you had read the draft, it won't be exactly the same.

Today, was a rather eventful day, what with the need to do the whole chapter on macromolecule in the chemistry TYS (which I am not planning to do). Anyway, this thing won't be exactly a rant on the thing that happened during chemistry lesson today.

So here it is:

In case you can't sense it by now, this is going to be a critical post. (Seems I ran out of joke eh?) Anyhow, I highly recommened you visit another site if you do not wish to read criticism.

What?! You're still here?! Ok...

If you had already known me before the end of the June Holidays, you would know that I was not exactly happy with my class's deputy chairperson. She was entrusted with passing a physics worksheet to the everyone in class, and she was given the worksheet during the second week of the holidays.

To everyone out there, this seems like a long amount of time to give the worksheet to the entire class, I mean, its two long weeks. Add on to the fact that we had a class outing during the third week of the june holidays in which both the class deputy and me attended and you'll be wondering why I never received the worksheet until the fourth week. Well, it turned out that she had to conviniently "forget" this important task of passing worksheets to her fellow classmates.

The teacher had given the worksheet during the second week of the June Holiday so that the class would have ample time to complete the worksheet. As half the class wasn't around, the teacher had entrusted the task of passing the worksheets to everyone to our deputy chairperson during the second week. In the end, I received the worksheet on the monday of the last week of the june holiday during the oral exam. Of course, its better then not receiving it at all, but do you think that this is a very responsible act? I mean, it would be best to inform everyone that there is such a worksheet circulating around and perhaps set up a date to collect it right?

If this was the only incident, I wouldn't be ranting this on my blog. There are even more acts of "responsibility" and "duty to class" from our good old deputy chairperson.

Just a few days back, we were queueing for food and I was near the back of the line with Hai Yuan and Jun Jie. We were chatting when we realised that our deputy chairperson had to cut our queue right there and then...
Of course, none of us are happy about it and we voiced our displeasure openly. I mean, if your very good friends is queueing, it doesn't mean that when your friend buys the food you automatically gets the right to cut the queue and buy your own food as well. Its very inconsiderate for the people who are queueing at the back of the queue. Everyone wants to eat, not just you...

At least, you don't have the thick face to stand there and continue buying things...

But it ain't over yet...
We were scheduled to have a chemistry test sometime during this week. No one is really sure when the test will be held and thus many speculated it to be held on monday since the teacher had mentioned something about it being on monday. Actually, everyone did not know except for one of them, that one of them is, you guessed it, our good old deputy chairperson again...
Apparently, our deputy chairperson was informed by our chemistry teacher that the test will be held on wednesday, and she never told the class about it...

Lets talk about Zi' Ang now. He might be "irritating" to some people but at least he communicates things very throughly, usually involving in person-to-person messaging all by himself so as to make sure that his message is brought across. What about our dear deputy chairperson? She says nothing about it, and the rest of the class have to be accused by the teacher for lying that we did not know that the chemistry test is on wednesday...

So, I question her responsibility to class and her "duty to the class". Do you think this sort of actions should really come out of a deputy chairperson who got elected because everyone believed in her? Don't you think that this is a basic responsiblity that anyone should fulfill? Being responsible for what others have entrusted you to do is a very basic thing, isn't it?

To all critics, this post might be inaccurate in some information, but this is what I saw and what I think. If there is any wrong information or I have accused her wrongly of somethings, please kindly leave a comment and I'll thank you for correcting me if I was wrong in the first place. If you want to pick a fight, I won't entertain you, you can do it elsewhere...

In the words of a post only two post ago:

And please, to all you people out there, think before you write...understand?
Think

Discmon

Afterthoughts on speech day...

Q: Why are you using the Q&A format again for this pathetic post? Or rather, are you pathetic?
A: Hmm, I'm using this Q&A format again as the last few times that I had written this post, I written about one-eighth of the way though it, then I looked at the post and I highlighted everything and pressed the delete button. I think it would be much easier for me to write this post using the Q&A format instead.
On another note, I'm not pathetic, and there's no need for you to speculate on that, 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Q: So, you are going to talk about how this speech day is the most tiring speech day ever for you, you pathetic being?
A: Unfortunately, yes... I believe I just bored a bunch of people and they are all clicking on another link somewhere on their screen to change the page. I am not bothered by it...

Q: You sound sarcastic...
A: That's the point.

Q: So, you want to tell us how your old speech day was like?
A: Ok, the speech days that I had attended last time as an usherer were pretty laggy anyway you see it. Basically, all I needed to do was to usher the students off to their seats and then give flowers to teachers who received (won isn't exactly a good word to use in this scenario) the long-service award. I remembered I gave the flower to Mr Desmond Lim sometime back.

Q: So how was it different?
A: This year, I got sent to the side of the stage. When you get sent there as an usherer, it usually means that you're in charge of VIP ushering, unlike the good-old simple-to-handle student ushering. Add on to the fact that you need to stand there throughout most of the prize giving ceremony and you got a recipe for being tired.

Q: So you stood there?
A: Yes... and I was a bit extra. During the rehearsals, the people who got selected to do the VIP ushering was made to rehearse sending VIPs on stage and off-stage and back to their seats. During the actual events, we were like guards. The teachers just walked over to them and we bacame a bit of an extra, standing there as though we are just an ornament...

Being made an extra is ok, I mean, I've been made an extra more than once by quite a lot of people, and I'm usually ok with it unless... never mind. The point is, when you make people extras, you shouldn't make them feel bad or anything.

(Please note that the below part is addressing another issue and not at all related with speech day.)
If you're going to make anyone an extra, please give a kind thought to that person. When it is supposed to be a two-person job, don't change it to become a one-person job. We all know you got the skills and talents needed for this two-person job and thus can complete it all by yourself. We also know that you have the leadership skills to be able to do it all by yourself. By all means, go ahead. I'm sick of trying to help people when I get posted to help people when they think that total control is the way to go.

Q: So you finished your sarcasm?
A: Yes. I finished my sarcasm...

Q: So are we continuing with the speech day thingy?
A: Hmm, ok. Speech day was pretty much ok, and I was pretty tired after the whole occasion was over. I'm so glad that the place where I was standing had a great big fan right above my head and it was blowing at me most of the time. Really need to thank the fan for keeping me cool while I was standing there being a stone. Yup, I think that's about it.

Note that the above sarcasm part just so happened to pop out while I was writing this post. Its something that I've been keeping in myself for sometime and some people might find it weird that it is only posted now. Don't worry, its just me worrying about stupid things and I thought it would be nice to just post everything out.

What have I learned from speech day? [Start Jo-Jo circus famous "what have you learnt today?" song]...
Done with the song yet? OK.
1. I got to stand there at the stage cause there doesn't seem to be any other uniformed group members in student council. It appears that the teachers allocated the uniformed groups members there as they have footdrill and thus can stand for a long amount of time...
Thus, I learned that we should use the proper people for the proper job.
2. I should stick to studying. Going to work is bad...
3. Being the extra sometimes can be good, but it all depends on the situation and your own point of view.

So, what have you learned today?

Discmon

Strong post, no reason = ??

A piece of good news for everybody...
Speech day has ENDED...

This phrase alone is worth about 30 cups of Glucose that I have been using quite a bit to keep myself awake...
Ok, that was a joke, but it was a really tiring bit of time. For one thing, this speech day is one of my most tiring speech day ever, and I'll get to this point in a while.

I got a more important thing to settle. So bear with me...

The sec/year 1 students have just gotten into the council. As usual, we see various committee senior members going out to recruit people into their comm. I mean, who wouldn't. Disco, as usual had minimal amount of time spent on getting this new people into our comm, mainly because you can't really judge how well they would do in disco just by looking at their capability and also because we are quite ok with everybody except for a "special" group of people...

Anyway, I, as you all probably know by now, am on friendly relationship with the class of 1D. Naturally, I had been popping by their class these last few days to hear what questions they have on the council and also to help them in their selection of their committee. I knew that it would be quite unlikely to get them into disco, cause their character would suit them better if they entered comms. like welfare/social/pubee.

So 1D had three councillors. One of them is wanted by PA. The one of them decided that, after quite a long discussion with me on the pros and cons of joining each of the comms, that he did not want to join pa. It seems like a normal thing, for a person who is selecting his comm for the first time to worry about all these stuff. Don't you agree?

I went to the meeting for the 28th student council even though I did not need to do that. I went there cause I want to take a break from my hectic student life and such. During the meeting, the council was asked to choose their preferred committee. I was wandering around the exco area to chat a bit when I noticed that ck from 1D seems to be waving at me looking for help.

I went there, and spent about the next ten plus minutes trying to help him select his committee. It seems weird, especially at this point. For one thing, he already had his mind set on not joining pa at then, however, he doesn't want to accidentally hurt the pa people. I just tried to pave his way out for him. Pa was rather annoying at this point in time, trying to like coerce people to join their committee. I was on the verge of saying :"Can you leave this poor confused soul alone so that he can select his committee without worrying about anything?!"

Anyway, he got into social but that's not the end of the story...

During the night when the result was released, he showed me a post on a blog. That post was definitely written by a PA member (for obvious reasons) and I'll quote it here:

ohyeshh! before i forget, chikan, alan and jonathan. to hell u guys go and i shall hereby curse u all that u won't be nominated again nxt year. bloody 'traitors'.'

WOW, what a "powerful" post...
1) In case you are blur, the above three people did not want to go to PA even though PA wanted them..
2) "to hell u guys go"?! wow, what a powerful phrase. So anybody that doesn't follow your wishes have to go to hell, as you have said it? Too bad then, you'll have to get yourself out of this unrealistic dream. You could say that the world is too small for you, but that's your problem. I believe all three people mentioned above have their own vaild reason (or doesn'tmakeadarnsense reason, as you might see it) and they did not want to join PA for their own reasons...

Shouldn't we respect their decisions? I mean, would you want people to join your comm. that has no passion, no will to help you guys and probably absent himself so that he can don't spend time with you all?? I mean, its dumb anyway you see it. If they don't want to join, forcing them to join is the most stupid mistake anyone can make.

3)"curse u all that u won't be nominated again nxt year"... that's quite a feat don't you think. Cursing people just because of that?! wow... As I've said only about a few lines ago, the world is too small for you. Not everything that happens can be in your favour can it? If its not in your favour, you want to "curse" the people so that "something" might happen to them...
Everybody, is this logical???

4) Hang on, do you really think that that is written by a councillor? Where is the council heading to with people like this? Ok, we all know that the above post must have been written by a councillor since obviously only a councillor would want to talk about people who never join pa right? Anyway, ever consider where the council will be heading to with people like this? Lets see, I predict we'll have more name-calling, more insulting ceremonies, more "cursing others" to go "to hell" and also more calling of "bloody traitors"...
Wow, what a council.......

5)Oh ya, wanted to point out that, if it just so happens that this year will not be your last year in council... I hope that people out there will know what would happen if they went on the wrong side of you and they probably would "curse" you so that "you won't be nominated again next year"...

Why am I interfering in this? Cause its illogical for you to "curse" them or call them "bloody traitors" simply because they did not join your comm. Feeling angry might be a correct feeling, but there is no need for you to do all these to them. Can you imagine the feelings that run through this people when they read that line? How would you feel if someone said that to you as well? It just shows that the world is way way way way way too small for you, and I urge you to "grow up" and think more "rationally" and also to "put yourself into other's shoes" more often.

Heard of do unto others what other would do unto you?

Ya, I know I'll get a barrage of post from PA and perhaps some unfriendly "insults" thrown around. I got one request, leave disco out of this. If you think disco jobs are "skill-less", think again... And if you're pissed with me, leave disco out of this, disco has played ZERO part in this group of people who did not want to join PA. And I only talked to one of them anyway...

This seems to be a long enough post. I think I'll talk about speech day next time...
And please, to all you people out there, think before you write...understand? Think

Discmon

After the ice-breakers...

I am a bit tired and am a bit un-inspired by what I am about to write...
Thus, in order to save myself from the melancholy of sitting down in front of the computer and stare blankly into it thinking of what to write, I'll be using the Q&A format like last time.

Thus, let us put our hands together to welcome the person whom fainted last time from the excess coke to be our question asker...
[Unenthusiastic clapping can be heard, including several boos from the crowd]

Q: What's their problem?
A: No idea, they probably did that cause we discredited coke thanks to you...

Q: Shouldn't they be attacking you instead of me?
A: Well, you are a much easier target any way you see it, including size, height, weight, character, [add your own],... and so on and so forth. Thus you are a much better target. They also don't need to worry about getting post dedicated to them compared to attacking me since you are a made-up character and thus do not own a blog...

Q: Why you?!!?!?
A: [Ignoring]

Q: Okok, lets continue on with our Q&A. Do you think you were a slacker during the ice-breakers?
A: Yes. I think I am a slacker and I think that next time I should put more responsibility into it. I am sorry for not really doing my duties well and that I am bad. I know I am not committed to it and thus I did not really did my best for it. I deserve to get discredited.

Q: Eh... Anyway, you want to tell me how you feel after the ice-breakers?
A: As I was not exactly playing the ice-breakers this time since I am not going to be part of this council anyway, its been feeling a bit weird and now I actually am revisiting my memories. The memory that stands out the most is my first ice-breakers with sc.

I entered sc in sec 1, in case you all haven't knew yet. At that time, we were still at the west coast campus. I remembered that that ice-breakers were held on a saturday and that it was held in the hall. I remembered I had a lot of fun there though I never really did remember anyone's name until I officially started doing my duties as a councillor. Then, I remembered the two other ice-breakers I went through, they were held at the west coast campus and commonwealth campus respectively. Each time was essentially the introduction of new student councillors.

It is amazing how time flies. After such a short amount of time of 365*3 days, the council life is going to end for me, and I am wondering how life would be like for me when I finally relieve myself of all duties of being a councillor. I mean, its been like almost three years since I last queued up with my class during morning assembly. For the last three years, my morning assembly has been largely spent at the gates and at the blocks where we are doing our duties. But I guess that humans are an adaptive animal...

Anyway, I wonder if this is good news or bad news, but it should be good news until after the selection of committes results come out. To all you seniors out there who read my blog, of which I know of a few, you should be glad to know that the whole of disco made it. In fact, this sentence itself is quite an achievment. Over the last two council, plenty of disco members went out, including Jee Poh, Faith and Seok Hui during the transition to 26th and then the huge loss of members when we transferred into the 27th... This time, and perhaps the first time in recorded history of disco, the whole disco made it.

Why is it a bad news then? It's sort of like a gut feeling deep down in the gut. The rest of the comms. in sc did not really do so well, many losing quite an extrodinary amount of members similar to what disco went through when it moved into the 27th. I hope that not too many members in disco will be transferred out or get thrown into another comm. simply because many of them has been left behind to enter the 27th.

Ok, the above paragraph is highly speculative so I won't talk too much about it. But its just this feeling...

Q: Feelings on disco?
A:... will be reserved for another post... Hey, there is still a disco agm, I want to be able to talk about something without repeating what I am saying here too badly...

Q: So you got anything to tell the new student council?
A: Erm ya. You made it into the student council because of what you are, not because of who you were. Do not leave your old self behind simply because you have became a councillor. Remember that it is your friends who saw what you are and not what you were when they elected you into council. So, in short, don't become something that is different simply because you have entered the council.

Q: Oh ya, you want to say anything to those who did not make it?
A: Don't treat it as the end of a book. For those who were in sc, treat in as the end of a sentence, and that one day you'll probably be able to extend that sentence even longer. Please don't treat it as the end of a book and then return it to a shelf, never to ever take it down again and blow its dust off.

For those who have not been part of sc yet, well, it is an experience. Remember, you do not need to be an sc to be able to be a leader or to help out your classmates. Its all up to you.

You'll be noticing that the next few post on this blog will be sort of like farewell post thanks to the fact that lots of farewell will be coming in over the next few days. To get a general view of it, after this, we'll have the proper scouts R.O.D followed by the 28th sc agm, where we'll finally and perhaps reluctantly hand over what has become a sort of "way of life" for me for the last three years...

Well, everything has to come to an end, don't you agree?
And please, don't irritate the person who fainted to coke...

Discmon